The Cool Corporation - CDR Innovator Interview

‍What is Cool Corporation?‍

Josie Tyler - At the heart of it, we operate at the intersection of carbon utilisation and storage in transforming CO2 into high-value carbon nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene. It’s exciting because ‘A’ is permanent carbon storage, and ‘B’ is one of the most profitable things you could do with CO2. 

These materials are extremely valuable, and they have a very long list of market applications. The theory is that we can permanently store CO2 in a useful product with a large market to sequester vast quantities of CO2.

Origins

What was the inspiration that led to your carbon removal startup?

Josie Tyler - I was researching carbon nanotubes at Cambridge with my co-founder, and working on these materials and feeling they had so much untapped potential, I was incredibly inspired by their properties. They're the strongest material ever, the most conductive material ever, extremely lightweight, and highly inert, and we were confident in their potential to become the raw material of tomorrow. 

We thought, if nanotubes are made out of carbon, there has to be a way from A to B, and what an elegant and amazing solution that would be if we could transform our biggest waste product into a very advanced raw material that could not only abate large quantities of CO2 emissions but also innovate in so many different areas of industry. It was a very sci-fi solution, and that was exciting to us.

The 'Aha' Moment

Can you share that 'aha' breakthrough in your startup's journey that left you especially excited about its potential?

Josie Tyler - I don't know if I could pinpoint a moment. It occurred in several stages; number one was falling in love with these materials, everything they could do, and being excited about their potential. Then, I made the connection between CO2 and pure carbon materials, delved into the chemistry, and realised this is possible. And then, conducting feasibility and feed studies and be like, oh yeah, no, it definitely is possible. 

There was no single ‘aha’ moment; it was an accumulation of a lot of hard work and a lot of small incremental breakthroughs. The most exciting thing was achieving those more significant commercial contracts. You only have a business once you have a customer; you can have all the investors and viral LinkedIn posts you want, but it doesn’t mean anything. The truth is to be a business, and you have to have customers. A lot of people might say, “Interesting technology,” “It sounds great,” or “It's cool.” But until they're paying for it, it doesn’t matter, so that was the most exciting moment as a founder.

Investor Attention

What have you found the best way of garnering investor or buyer attention?

Josie Tyler - Good press, particularly having customers who are just as excited as you are, willing to put skin in the game, invest money, maybe join the cap table, and undertake some risks. That's the most exciting thing. 

When it’s the people having the problems themselves, big emitters, governments and industries reliant on fossil fuels, when they're actually excited about your solution, that's the best proof you can have. So, joint announcements, letters of intent (LOIs), and memorandums of understanding (MOUs) are the best ways to get investors' attention.

Scalability

How are you approaching scalability, and what tools or strategies have proven most effective in levelling up your solution?

Josie Tyler -  With all chemical processes, there's a maximum scale at which it will just stop working efficiently, the fluid dynamics don't work the way you want them to, the heat transfer doesn't work the way you want it to, the catalyst isn't being used selectively. There's a maximum module size, and you have to figure out what that is and then figure out how to finance decarbonising a power plant that produces two megatons of CO2 per year with modules of half a million each. What does the financing around that look like? So that's the technical and commercial risk or problem put into one. 

There is a maximum module size at which your technology works economically and efficiently. You have to figure out what that is and then work out how you could finance decarbonising a huge point source with modules of that size because the finance is different if your module size is 10,000 tons or 100,000 tons or 500,000 tons, so figuring out ways to make it work. The good news is there are point source emitters of every size, so wherever you hit your ceiling, small point sources are doing a thousand tons a year, and cement plants do a couple hundred thousand tons per year. Petrochemical refineries are more like tens of thousands. So wherever you are, there's a market for you. 

So it's not too stressful, but it's a crucial number for all Carbon Capture Usage and Storage (CCUS) companies. 

Cool Corporation is looking at cement companies primarily because they have a big CO2 problem, but they're also one of the biggest markets for carbon nanotubes. So, this choice is “two birds with one stone.” If we were working with pure power plants or pure CO2 emitters, we would have to find a separate off-taker for the carbon nanotubes. Many industries, like car manufacturing, could use carbon nanotubes, but they don't have a point source of emissions from which we can get that CO2. 

Cement is the sweet spot. Luckily, this is where we have seen the best traction by far. It's like an all-in-house circular solution for them. We take the CO2 from cement production, funnel it through our process, create carbon nanotubes, and put it back in the cement, making it stronger and higher performance and being zero carbon.

Challenges

What's the biggest challenge your business is facing, and what do you think is required to solve it?

Josie Tyler - To get the funding we need to build more extensive manufacturing facilities, our next challenge, and the biggest problem, has been to prove the off-takes for the materials we're going to be producing to get the funding to build the plant because you can't build a manufacturing plant if you're not sure people are going to buy the stuff you're going to be making. We’re launching pilot testing programs and R&D regimes with the potential off-takers to secure those LOIs; MOUs for the offtake that will be produced from this plant are what we're focusing on the most.

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