Turning CO2 into Graphite: Climate Innovation with Homeostasis from French Fest Fireside Chat

Have you heard about turning carbon dioxide turning into graphite? In this lively fireside chat, Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek sits down with CEO and co-founder Makoto Eyre to explore why new ideas in climate tech matter more than ever—especially when it comes to tackling carbon dioxide’s impact on our planet. 

 Homeostasis turns CO2 into industrial graphite. What can we do with industrial graphite? Learn more in this episode.

Hear from people at the event ask questions in this live recording from the French Fest in Seattle recorded March 23, 2025.

Sound Bites:

💡 “Who would like to make it past 2060 on this planet?” – Joan
🌱 “We have 25 years to change course on this boat.” – Makoto
🔥 “We need to build an industry that, by weight, is processing more material than oil and gas combined in 25 years.” – Makoto

Homeostasis: https://www.homeostasis.earth

Makoto Eyre on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/makotoeyre

Takeaways

🔥 CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming.

🌱 Climate tech innovation is crucial if we want to be on this planet by 2060.

♻️ Homeostasis focuses on carbon utilization to create valuable materials.

🔋 Graphite is essential for lithium-ion batteries and clean energy.

🏠 Domestic sourcing of graphite is vital for energy independence.

🔌 Batteries are embedded in many products like phones, computers, and EVs.

💪 Humans can effectively tackle climate challenges with the right incentives.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Climate Tech and Innovation
• 3:25 Understanding Carbon Dioxide and Its Impact
• 8:06 Decarbonization Pathways and Homeostasis' Role
• 10:54 The Importance of Graphite in Clean Energy
• 16:07 Domestic vs. International Supply of Graphite
• 19:22 Applications of Graphite Beyond Batteries
• 22:40 Audience Q&A and Engaging with the Community
• 37:53 Closing Thoughts and Call to Action

Transcript

0:00

Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of Your AI Roadmap. Today we have a special bonus episode of a recording where I spoke at the French Fest, a fireside chat with my friend Makoto Air. You're gonna hear some different audio quality, but the startup that Makoto has co-founded is super cool and I think you'll love this episode. So excuse the not perfect quality audio and enjoy this content. Thank you for coming today and not being at the fancy baguette thing. So I appreciate each and every one of you. I am your moderator today. Has anyone been in the armory in the past three years? Okay, okay, more than me, congratulations. Well, I'm really grateful that you all came. I'm really grateful you found this tiny room in the middle of the second floor, so good for you. My personal intro, I was just, I'm gonna read you my actual bio and just. But I'm here specifically to support this amazing startup and founder. We met at the Seattle Angel Conference where I was on the investor side and he was on the startup side. You made it to the semi-finals? Yeah. You got to put... I mean, yes. But I was really, really impressed by the idea of... Well, we'll talk about more of today, what's going on. One of the parts of my thesis as an investor is to care about climate tech and innovation going on in that sector. I would like to ask, who would like to make it past 2060 on this planet? Ah, okay, me too. Great. So we need some innovation in this sector. Love it. Okay, well, I'm gonna make the assumption that you know neither of us. And so I'm gonna read our professional bios. Let's do it. Which is hardcore and then we'll get into some questions. Okay. I don't know if I pronounced your name correctly or not correctly. hello everyone. My name is Makoto Eyre. E-Y-R-E, if you imagine air being pronounced with an Irish accent, this don't make sense. The irony of your work and your name I did not get until just now. Yeah, we should have called it the Air Company, right? This is great. would be very on the nose. OK, fantastic. Is the CEO and co-founder of Homeostasis, a Seattle-based startup developing battery-grade graphite out of atmospheric CO2? This means decarbonization from pulling graphite out of the sky. Previously, he worked as a space architect at Blue Origin, contributed to NASA's Artemis mission, vehicle designs, and led carbon sequestration technology at BioArcos. He brings his interdisciplinary experience in systems engineering and design to his ventures, originally an architect at RISD, y'all know that wonderful school, and SkyB Architects. SKB. SKB. Makoto developed... A strong foundation in design thinking and since applied to complex technical and business development challenges. He also just closed which round of capital? I should stop turning this off. Pre-C. Just closed a pre-C round in this economy. Can we get a clap for that? Pretty impressive. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm pretty happy about it. I'm going to quick say that if you don't know me, hi, my name is Joan. I'm an entrepreneur, investor, influencer, podcast host, and best-selling author. You can buy my book later if you would like to. I build custom and AI solutions these days for different scaling companies, not related to this talk whatsoever. My book, Your AI Roadmap, Expand Your Career Money and Joy was just published by Wiley in 2025 and featured in Forbes. I had 10 years of technical expertise building data and AI infrastructures, blah, blah, blah. I've worked at different companies you may or may not have heard of, blah, blah, blah. I'm an advisor to Clean AI, which is the gardener at the intersection of climate tech and AI, which is co-founded by Nicholas Parker. If you don't know him. OK, so we are going to jump in some questions about this amazing founder. I'd like to start with bare bones, bare basics. We're starting on the ground floor. Carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide. What is the problem with having a lot of carbon dioxide in the air, and how is it contributing potentially to the climate crisis? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. at one point I heard CO2 described as basically a blanket that's draping the planet, which is relatively accurate. CO2 is one of several greenhouse gases. What greenhouse gases basically do is prevent the energy from coming in from sunlight from escaping the Earth. And that energy dissipates as heat. And so the net result is a heating planet. Global warming is probably a term that we're all familiar with. We now like to the term the climate crisis because it's becoming so urgent and we're seeing the downstream effects of this rising temperature. The storms that we hear the climate scientists talking about, the rising sea levels, etc. These are all going to have some pretty negative effects on our standard of living, not to mention all of the other wonderful living creatures on this planet that we share this place with. CO2 is a problem because of all the things that it's going to do as a result of warming up this planet. Woohoo! Such a fun topic. Destruction of the world. This is going to be the tone of this talk. But the cool thing, especially related to this conference where we're talking about the future and climate, decarbonization. We're talking about there's too much carbon dioxide. How can we get it out of the air? Yeah. This is a pretty big one. So Joan warned me about not... getting into jargon, so I'm do my best, forgive me if I get into it. I would say that there are generally three columns for decarbonization and carbon removal. Nature, nature assisted by human activities, and then purely human activities. So to start with nature, there's of course photosynthesis, that's probably the one that we're all super familiar with, plants consume CO2 to make sugars, that's great. There's also a thing called mineralization that's kind of. So there are these types of rocks that will basically absorb CO2 to form a slightly different type of rock. And there are a bunch of these, and this just kind of happens naturally. And then the third is actually through our oceans. So if you leave a glass of water exposed to your living room air, given the amount of CO2 that's in that air, there's a certain amount that's going to dissolve in that water. You've probably had a sip of water after it's been sitting on it. It tastes a little bit different. It's partially driven by CO2. Now, one of the issues with that is when CO2 dissolves in water, forms an acid. So if you're familiar with the acidification of the ocean, it's largely a result of the increasing levels of CO2. So this is a CO2 buffer, but it's something that we need to keep an eye on. Now going into nature assisted by humans, it's really taking those three natural processes and looking at engineered solutions using that. So algae farms, reforestation, there's a thing called enhanced rock weathering, which is basically taking that mineralization pathway and crushing those rocks. So there's more surface areas so the reaction happens faster. And then with oceans, there people who are pulling that acid out of water, basically, out of the oceans, putting it somewhere else, and then as a result, the ocean has more capacity for more CO2, and they just, they keep doing that. The last category, human-driven, that's a whole bunch of technologies, and for the sake of time, we could describe it as basically the use of materials that absorb CO2 in one state and release CO2 in So that state being a change of temperature or change of pressure. The cool thing about that is you can use a relatively small amount of material to absorb a lot of CO2 because you just keep shifting between these states. Absorb, release, absorb, release. The trick is releasing in a controlled environment into bottles that you could then bury in the ground later or do something else with. Yeah, so I would say that those are the three primary pathways. One thing that I actually glanced over, forgot to mention, one of the reasons why it's good to emphasize that nature has this method of removing CO2 is decarbonization by itself is doing a lot. Right now we're releasing something like 40 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year, and nature has the capacity of, don't quote me on this, I think it's around 18 billion, so we are in excess of what nature is able to accommodate. So if we were to bring that down, then nature would begin to correct the issue. Now the problem is it's not doing it fast enough, so we need to also assist it. But a key step is just decarbonizing our economy. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Most of you seen that graph, right? The nasty graph that goes to the right, right? And we're like, uh-oh, uh-oh. And then you just go back on Instagram or something. So now we've heard this problem. And we've heard, I mean, the word decarbonization sounds fancy, but the way you're describing it is how do we get carbon dioxide out of the air? Mostly. And water and so forth. What is your company, Homeostasis, doing to tackle this problem? Yeah. So there are those three columns and we kind of exist as a row that underlies those three columns, We do what's referred to as carbon utilization. So we look at the fact that there are these different ways of taking CO2 out of the air. And then we say, okay, well, what do we do with the stuff afterwards? So I don't know if you guys are familiar with the term geologic storage, but... Mostly right now, people are looking at effectively pumping the CO2 into these underground aquifers where it could theoretically be kept for centuries because it reacts with the rock in these aquifers. There are some issues, technical issues that people are working to resolve. That's going to be a key part of the solution. I should also mention of all the different methods of doing carbon removal and carbon capture. Like they all need to happen. We need every single one to occur. And this includes geologic storage. Homeostasis approaches the climate crisis with the take that there is a business case problem. We need to find a way of really building value with this waste that we're removing from the atmosphere. So I still haven't answered what we do. We take the CO2 and we crack it into carbon and oxygen. The oxygen we put back into the air. And the carbon we make in the form of materials. So think charcoal, think graphite powder. I actually left that over there. didn't forget. Do you want to grab it? I'll grab it in a sec. So the reason that we make these materials is if you look at the economy right now, there are already a lot of uses for carbon materials. The one that we like to emphasize, as Joan mentioned at the top of this, is graphite, which is a critical material for lithium ion batteries. So if you take a battery that's like in an EV or even in the back of an electronic device and you hold it, 25 % of that mass, that weight is actually graphite. There's a lot of graphite in these batteries. And right now we're taking it by strip mining or by synthesizing it from fossil fuels. So it's an energy intensive, environmentally harmful, health harmful process. And we're replacing that by making it out of this waste product that is causing all of these climate problems. That's kind of in a nutshell what we're doing. There are a bunch of other things I could dive into in terms of why we think it's a strong value proposition, but we are working to help resolve the climate crisis by creating a material that's critical for clean energy storage using this waste product. That's awesome. thank you. One of the things when we were prepping this, and a lot of people I've talked to were like, wow, graphite, carbon out of the air into graphite. They're like, are they making pencils? Like, had they collaborated with a pencil company? I like, I don't think so. He told me it was industrial graphite. And I asked him what it actually looks like. And voila, we have... There it is. There it is. Can we... Okay, this is not to take home. This is just to pass around. Pass it around, check it out. Does it have a smell? if I touched it. No, I'm serious. Like, how fine... I would not sniff it. Yeah, it's probably not good. Okay. But can you tell me, like, the texture? Like, if I were to put my hands in this? Yeah. Has anyone worked with charcoal for drawing? Artists, philanthropists, wonderful. feels like that. Or graphite powder. Maybe I should mention what graphite is. Graphite is just crystalline carbon. And charcoal is a little bit more chaotically organized carbon. And then people maybe know that diamond is very, very crystalline carbon. So it just kind of comes down to how the molecular bonds are formed. ends up creating these different substances that have all these different material properties. it's carbon powder, basically. But not food grade, as I just mentioned with the sniffing. Well, I don't. It's not like dangerous, right? it's, you don't want to. we hand this out to the general public. Yeah, right. Please don't open this. It's fine. You can rub it on your face if you want. That's totally fine. It's just generally inadvisable to inhale powders. I appreciate that. It's good stuff. It's a good warning. That's why I make the jokes. Okay, well I'm really grateful you brought some because when I thought about it in my brain I legit thought like large rock Like that's like industrial graphite. That's the first thought that came to my head. That's a fair assumption I mean there are there are graphite like billets graphite parts Ours comes out as a powder. Yeah, and for those of us listening to the podcast we are passing around the small vial of like black dust That's right. Okay. Cool One thing that I will... maybe this is a thing to point out at the end, but while we're not making pencils or have any pencil partnerships and we're purely looking at deploying this material or mainly looking at deploying this material into the clean energy space, one thing that we are having a fun idea with is potentially making ink out of this stuff because that would be a way of engaging directly with consumers. Right now we're working with all these massive companies to try to get this graphite powdering. So we're playing with the idea of CO2 ink. So if that interests you, let me know. Well, and so what are these big companies that, or if you're allowed to say, I don't mean to get you in trouble, but like who are the buyers of this material? Yes, I'll start with the asterisks that we could speak in hypotheticals. So the companies that I'm speaking with, we may or may not be working with. Potential partners. Potential partners. there are going to be, the main types of companies are going to be folks like Panasonic. Right? People that manufacture battery cells and deploy that into a range of applications for electronics, maybe most famously their partnership with Tesla. electric vehicles. But that's like the baseline case, right? It's deploying it to folks like Panasonic who are making these batteries for the economy. Another case that we're finding to have quite a bit of traction are other material companies. Not just like their battery material companies, there are people who are making things like graphite, this hand-owed material for batteries, but there are a range of carbon products that are out there. Companies like BASF making materials for industrial uses. These material companies have CO2 emissions and they want to get rid of them. There are some companies who have even implemented carbon capture mechanisms in their facilities to see whether or not they could do it, but they don't have a place to put the CO2, so they vent it back into atmosphere. That's a really energy-expensive thing to do. They want to prove out the concept, but they're looking for a place to put it. We have four geologic storage sites in the United States right now, and two of them are leaking. So there's just this problem of, all right, where do we put the CO2? And the solution that we're able to provide to these material companies is, if you integrate our technology into your stream, you can then turn this waste product that you're trying to get rid of into more revenue. And again, thinking about how do we really get impacts to stick, it's make people more money or save them money. And we're trying to do both while making an impact here. So those are the primary cases that we're looking at. Totally. And what this reminds me of, is kind of recycling or trash. Once you get the recycling, where does it go? who takes care of the trash. There's this life cycle of products and materials. And you're talking about it specifically for carbon. I also realized that I neglected to advance the slides. Sorry, folks. And here's the lovely founders. Here's my beautiful co-founder, Julian McBarty. Absolutely. Well, one of the things I wanted to mention as well as you mentioned kind of, we were talking about this before this, kind of where this goes. Gosh, we're getting so small and like minute what it looks like. And then on the macro scale. which companies might use it, but at even broader scale, we're talking about kind of domestic exports, imports. Today, especially here in March 2025, domestic versus international exports is a different meaning than it did just a few months ago. Can you talk to us a little bit about what this means for domestic sovereignty? Like, why would this matter domestically? Yeah, yeah, so if you think about the... range of things that you use throughout the day that uses a battery and try to imagine not having those things. I mean, we could get by, but it'd be pretty difficult, right? In this modern economy. That's going to be the case for defense, certainly. That's going to be the case for large corporates. We need this modern power infrastructure. And when we look at the supply of critical materials that we're facing today, graphite being one of them, again making 25 % of the mass of batteries. We're finding that we're largely sourcing these materials from nations that are in precarious geopolitical states with us, right? We're in some kind of tension. With graphite in particular, we're sourcing northern 90 % of global battery graphite is coming from China. and that is becoming a growing concern given the increasing trade tensions that exist between our country and theirs. And so one of the key value propositions that we're bringing to the table here is saying, okay, look, we're able to create not just a sustainable source of graphite, we're also able to create a domestic source of graphite. Now there are others who are pushing to make graphite here. There are mines that are opening up in Alaska and Canada. There are synthetic graphite, so the stuff that's made from fossil fuels. A couple of plants, one's opening up in Georgia and I think another in Tennessee. These are all taking a pretty long time to get online and we've spoken with folks at the battery cell production level and even at the EV manufacturing level and they're all getting pretty impatient with how long it's taking for these critical materials to come online. The other thing that they don't like is how expensive this material is going to be. They're coming in at nine, 10. maybe up to $12 per kilogram, which doesn't sound super expensive, but keep in mind, Panasonic requires something like 20,000 tons per year, right? So that's what, 20 million kilograms? that's a lot of dollars. And so what we're finding is, so we're domestic, we're sustainable, we're also finding that we could bring this in at $5 a kilogram, so we're undercutting the market by as much as 50%. That's incredible. Congratulations. Thank you. Well, one of the things I want to make sure, because my brain, still very general, we've got kids in front of me. When people think about batteries, I think they're thinking still about AAA batteries, like something that have to be mechanically put into a fire alarm, for example. But there are batteries somewhat hiding in almost every product we use these days. I'm literally holding a microphone, it has a battery inside. What other products are people using daily that they may not even realize have embedded batteries? I just want nuts and bolts. Phones? I'm serious. yeah. mean, what does it... Yes, phones. Maybe thinking at a larger scale at this point, the grid has a bunch of batteries, a lot of buildings. I want it like small. Let's go like super small and bigger. You talk about the grid. Aw, man. I don't know if I'm prepared for You just mentioned EVs. It's like batteries, your phone, your laptop, your tablets, your electric vehicle all have different batteries. Yeah, you're great at this. Yeah. And beyond EVs, you're talking about more like businesses that have, can you talk about more of the industrial? Can you help? I didn't give him this question ahead of time. It's not fair. No, that's all good. And for the most part, the reason that we keep going back to the grid and all that and electric vehicles is the customers that we sell to are definitely these kind of larger deployment customers. So one of the more notable cases that's maybe like a hot topic right now. are all these data centers that are coming online. The United States power infrastructure is not robust enough to put up with the influx of power required to really feed these data centers at the rate that a lot of these tech companies want to build them. And so tech companies are now investing in alternative solutions to delivering that energy, delivering that power to these data centers. And that includes... large banks of batteries. mean, you know, imagine a parking lot filled with a bunch of white boxes and that's just all holding power. And that could be great for holding power from things like solar or wind. But then there are also companies that are looking at modular nuclear reactors. And the interesting thing about that is there you're going to have a smaller footprint requirement than using a bunch of solar power and wind power. So again, looking at decarbonization. nuclear power does not emit CO2 into the atmosphere. And the technology today is actually incredibly sick. There's a fuel called triso fuel. It's basically a pit of uranium that's coated in a bunch of carbon and graphite, there it is again. And that basically generates some heat and you leave that heat exposed to water that generates steam and that turns into turbine. I'm making that way too simple, it's more complicated than that, but that's roughly what these guys are doing. And so, lo and behold, it looks like this whole category also needs graphite. Not as much as the battery space, but this is another industrial scale process that requires this stuff. I'm not quite answering the question on consumer electronics, my apologies. That's a domain that I haven't thought as much about, but certainly at the infrastructure scale, there is a lot of need for this critical material and for these new energy solutions. Absolutely, and as a founder you want to focus on the contracts at hand, large scale, big dollar signs, I totally get it. I want to make sure it's available to the general public. thank you. Okay, well I definitely went over time because I thought that was very, very fascinating. I would like to open the floor to a few questions if I'm allowed to go a little over time. If we already have a question in front row, is that a hand up? Maybe. Maybe. So what I'm going to do is I'm going hand my mic over. to other folks, or I can summarize the questions. think handing a mic over would probably be the best fit. We only have a few minutes here, and yeah, I'm excited to hear your question. You ready for this? was just going to ask the problem with too much carbon and the things that you're trying to turn into something else, What if the black dust becomes too popular? Like, you know, that's one of the big problems. If there's too much of it, you have to get rid that, right? So what stops Yeah, right. How do we make it not run away as a... We end up with just piles of black dust all over the place. That's great question. That's fantastic question. That's how we find ourselves in so many of the issues that we are in today. Well, fortunately, we're not going to make more than what our customers need. And so that's one safety valve. Another fun thing. Just in terms of like the carbon potentially going back into the air I don't know if that was a flavor of the question that that you had there, but that's certainly a good point of concern Carbon as a material is extremely difficult to oxidize By itself you need to basically burn it in order for it to become co2 again And so there are EVs that of course catch on fire and those are really unfortunate cases But in terms of the total mass of material that's being produced that are relatively the amount of material that would be going back into the era relative to the amount that we're producing should be slim. But we promise that we're not going to just cover the world in a bunch of black dust. So much black dust. Great question. Thank you so much. So many hands and so many questions. I'm going to head over here. So you mentioned that you were using CO2 sources from industrial applications that are more pure, is that exclusively what you're looking at or are also looking at atmospheric CO2? Yeah, both. So the kind of go-to-market that we're finding right now that's building a lot of traction is that industrial source to material, simply because there people who could use that technology right now. Granted, Panasonic could also use 20,000 times of graphite right now, but it's kind difficult for us to deploy at that scale. And we would need to do a whole lot to really prove to Panasonic. Again, these are hypotheticals. Everybody knows Panasonic, that's why I'm saying that. There's a lot that we would need to prove to companies like Panasonic. So that's gonna take a little while. That being said, in the long run, having a plant that's able to locate itself wherever power is the cheapest is really going to be driven by the fact that we can plug this stuff out of the air. Thank you so much. I saw a hand over here. Thanks. How much carbon do we need? How much carbon do you count? Oh, okay. Yeah, fantastic. yeah, Joan, thanks for bringing up this image of Block 3. This is our latest prototype. We will force us to take photos that shows none of the fun stuff. So there's a bunch of cool things happening inside, and we tried to make the lighting look really cool to compensate. So Block 3 is capable of producing 50 grams of graphite per hour that we're operating. Now it's batch operation, which means that we have to run it and then stop it and open it up, take the material out, pack it back up and run it again. So that's a little inefficient, which is why it's a prototype as opposed to really a production process. Wait, just real quick. So we're showing this slide of this large blocky thing. Yes. If there were a human on here, what is the scale of this? Yeah, so it's about three feet by... So the kind of square side of it is about two feet by two feet and it's about three feet long. So it's like a side table. Yeah. Just like a table. literally, I was like, is this a warehouse? I couldn't, maybe, no one else had that We wanted to make the photo look pretty It looked pretty epic, honestly. Thank you. What's that? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Does that answer your question about how much it's making? The number is still at, you know, grams. Yeah, 50 grams. for perspective, that little container that you saw, that has about three grams. So imagine... roughly 20 times the amount, and that's the amount that this produces per hour. In terms of how much CO2 that is consuming as a result of that, it's on the order of 200 grams of CO2 per hour, a little bit less than that. I'll be working on it with some algebra to help for the next version of this. We've got just about maybe few more questions. I'll hand over Thanks, this is super interesting. Is there a trade-off like... does it matter where the electricity comes from? Are you still actually resulting in net carbon drawdown out of the atmosphere if you're powering this off a diesel generator in Alaska versus some hydro plant in Washington versus solar panels in the Mojave Desert? Yeah. The short answer, and this is a fun trivial answer, is we're as clean as the ground that we operate on. Now, we're a fully electric process, which is part of the good news. There is nothing inherent in our process that requires fossil fuels for delivering energy to the system. But it is fully electric, right? So if we're operating in Washington state, then for every ton of graphite that we produce, we're moving somewhat between 1.5 to 2 tons of graphite, of CO2, excuse me. If we were operating in Louisiana, every ton of graphite that we make would result in about similarly 1.5 to 2 tons of CO2 emitted. So we want to be on a cleaner grid. Now the good news is places like Louisiana and Texas are actually becoming full of really clean power because of the low permitting requirements. There's a lot of clean energy being developed out there. So there's a lot of opportunity to build this stuff off of a cleaner grid. Okay, oh my gosh, so many hands. I love an engaged audience. I'm gonna come over here to the middle. And if we run out of time, I'm happy to chat afterwards as well. Thank you for your time. I have question on the implementation of your technology. Are you looking to build large homeostasis plants in several locations of the country? Are you looking to scale this down so that you can put a homeostasis machine for companies that collect their CO2? Yeah, that's fantastic question. mean, this is like the go-to-market and scaling strategy, right? And so our go-to-market is deploying the technology, deploying the systems into people's facilities so that we can consume their CO2 and turn it into material that they can use or sell. And so there we're generating revenue through licensing that technology to that basically. And that's gonna be kind of at a smaller scale, at the device scale. as we build up that traction and demonstrate the value to some of the battery cell manufacturers, again, going through some of the tests that are required to really qualify this material, that's where we'll begin developing our own sites. The kind of threshold there, the line is roughly five to 10,000 tons per year of production. Once we start crossing over that line, that really starts to look like facilities of our own and where it makes sense for us to partner with direct air capture companies so that we can just source the carbon from wherever we want as opposed to having to be next to a source. But I love that question also because there's a localization aspect to being next to sites. And when you see a picture like this, you are like, wouldn't you put this next to a data center, for example, of many applications. I can easily see that. There still were several hands. Yeah, I just want to give other people a chance. Are there any other questions from further back? I know I'm walking the mic back and forth, but a lot of things to think about. I think as we think about the scale of this company, and I'm going to just plug for both, I have a few calls to action for you. One of them I'm going be asking about what you might need or want from people in this room. I know you've got a lot of closing a seat, pre-Z round is no joke. So if you could just take a minute and think in your head about connections you might have or companies might be interested in connecting later on in the day. But as you think about scaling this company from an investor perspective. I care about climate tech. I want lots of different innovation in the sector. When we think about different startups, I don't mean to be rude, but we think about them as little horses running and some will become unicorns. I want to see lots of different types of innovation. You've got to throw spaghetti at the wall. Sometimes you use throw spaghetti at the wall. know, how much capital is allocated to these things. If you could, as an investor, you're not pitching me for investment, but when you share that big uniform vision for this company. about the opportunities as the question happened about, do we see this around the world? Is this a thing that we see next to different industrial sectors? Can you pitch us that huge vision of what could be? Yeah, yeah, so this is a really fun question. all right, and this gets into the question that was risky of getting really into jargon. So if you give me a second on this. Our process is what you call electrochemical. there are chemical reactions that are happening as a result of running electricity through some material. And the cool thing about electrochemical processes is that there are a lot of parameters to play with. That's also the kind of negative thing. So there are a lot of parameters, which means that there are a lot of potential outcomes. But then there are a lot of experiments that we need to run in order to understand the full train space. Now looking at the outcomes, we're able to make graphite for lithium ion batteries. We're also able to make a thing called hard carbon, which is similarly critical for a new technology referred to as sodium ion batteries. These are kind of cheaper, lighter weight batteries that are being produced more and more lately. We've made carbon nanotubes, which have a range of interesting applications. They're all relatively nascent still, but a lot of interesting stuff happening on that front, and we're ready to jump on that market as it builds traction. And we're also looking at graphene, which has some pretty clear implications in the semiconductor space. So we're viewing all of these really critical markets, And also in that group is nuclear power with graphite. I mean, we're talking about some pretty key technologies that are all reliant on these carbon materials that we're able to generate with pretty much the same technology, just adjusting the parameters. plenty of black dust, hopefully useful. not in the streets, but in a bunch of critical core technologies out there. I guess a way of thinking about it is right now those carbon materials are made from hydrocarbons. They're made from fossil fuels, they're made from things that are mined out of the earth. We instead are making it out of oxidized carbons, CO2 that's in the air. Well, and when I think about this, I'm like, gosh, hardware, dust. I love living in software. I love living in data. It's a different pace of things. As you think about, and I love that question about, is there a net positive? Because you do have to think about the positives and negatives of different carbon. I've seen sad things where you think it's going to be a positive, but actually the amount it's using makes it a negative equation. As you think about kind of the future, and you mentioned how many different parameters, all these different factors that play into these things. And you talk about the output literally being in grams? in kilograms, we're talking about weight here. That's right, and weight. So if I were to say, is the data centers, what is the data play when we think about everything's being AI-ified, right? How do we put AI on that? When you think about the data you are creating of the yield performance metrics, for example, what do you think about in the future as potential software partners with what you're currently building? Yeah, that comes down to navigating all those parameters that I mentioned earlier, right? know the optimal space for generating things like graphite and hard carbon, but to continue to explore the range of parameters for running our system efficiently, as efficiently as possible, and identifying the different products that we can make. mean, so this is getting a little bit like, really far down the product roadmap here, but if we add metals to our system, we found that we could make these different metal carbides, which have a range of industrial applications as well. There are just a bunch of things that can be done. And we're looking at a trade space that has seven to eight dimensions, there's a lot to sift through, and it's difficult to tease out all the patterns just as a human when you're looking at something that's that complex. And so using AI is going to be really helpful sifting through all this data and identifying some of the additional parameters that we can explore creating useful products. And I actually realized there was one portion of an answer that I didn't provide in the question about our impact that I should have mentioned, which is the graphite that's made today has a really high CO2 emission profile. So we're looking at somewhere between 10 to 20 tons of CO2 emitted per ton of graphite produced. And so even if we're operating in Louisiana, emitting one to two tons of CO2, we're still netting at least as much as 18 tons of CO2 avoided as a result of shifting to our process. Again, we want to source our energy from clean sources, but we're cutting the amount of emissions either way. Awesome. Thank you so much. Well, I am here to wrap it up, wake you up. And if you would like to connect with either of us, these are our LinkedIns on QR code. Our names are also extremely unique, so easy to find. Easy to find. I love that for us. Last question, one of the potential last question. If people in the crowd could support you with something, I know you've got a pending grant. We just raised this round. If someone in the audience had the connect to the right person for things upcoming, what asks might you make of the crowd? The main thing that we're looking for, always, always, always, and if you ever start a company, this is like the North Star to always maintain, we're always looking for really interesting customers. If you know people who are using a carbon material, it doesn't necessarily have to be graphite, using a carbon material and they want to find a local, sustainable source, we'd love to connect with them. The other ask that I would make, this is more a larger ask. The climate crisis is super real guys. We have 25 years. 25 years. They thought my joke earlier was not real. We have 25 years to change course on this boat. And it's a massive ship. It's going to take a long time to adjust the course of this ship. It's an all hands on deck problem. We need to remove 10 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year by 2050. And for context, if you take all of oil and gas that the world accesses each year, you put that in a single bucket, that bucket is eight billion tons. So we need to build an industry that by weight is processing more material than oil and gas combined in 25 years. It's a crazy thing to pull off. We can do it. Humans are really good at getting a thing done once we've determined It's our economic best interest to do so. So if you have an idea, jump into this climate space. There is so much that needs to happen. So that's the bigger ask. That's wonderful. And I would agree. I have a friend who is a postdoc in climate tech. And she said, we'll make it through. She's very confident we'll make it through, because the dollar signs would be so impactful that everyone would be running into this problem and try to start a company to be in this sector. Great. Well, thank you so much. I know we're right next to the food place, which is a very dangerous and fabulous place for this. I would not, I will hand the mic off in just one more second before, so definitely connect with us online if you'd like to. Both of us are recently active online too. I'm to make a shameless plug for my book signing later today. I transitioning from topics about hardware. I work in AI and software and I have been laid off twice. Has anyone in this room been laid off before? Woo! All right, join the club. Here in Seattle, it's so common. But my career trajectory continues, and people keep asking me, how did I do it? This book is an answer to future-proofing your career and income in this volatile time. The first whole half of the book is about future-proofing modern careers. We're entrepreneurs, so it's a different bucket. The second part is we'll talk about money and finances that I wish I'd gotten as a kid. I went to public and private school for how many years? I actually have a PhD. I went to school for a lot of years and did not get this education there. So if you're interested in talking about, I share my 22 income streams. I share all kinds of really big nuts and bolts. 22. 22 income streams. That's a of income streams. Some are passive, some are active. It keeps me in a very good trajectory, especially in economy. If you'd like real talk, the book retails for 25, I'm selling them, they're right over there in that bag behind him. Yep, those, 25 bucks and you can get a signed copy with your name on it. So I'll be doing that here afterwards as well as at 2.30, somewhere down in the booths. I'll be that loud white woman speaking down there. Great. Thank you so much for your time, everybody. Thanks, all. This was great.