American Family Oil Dynasty Ends, Blackrock Goes All-in on CCUS, Electric Aviation Takes Off, $2M Mine May Hold $37B Treasure, A Publicly Owned Grid?
Rayyan Islam
Co-Founder and General Partner at 8090 Industries. Merchant of Decarbonization. Neo-Industrialist
Fellow Agents of change,
We’re now heading into the middle of November. Temperatures are dropping, fall foliage is in full swing and not too long for now we’ll be amidst loved ones for Thanksgiving. Crazy to think sometimes of how fast time flies. This week marks the 76th edition of Decarbon Weekly and we wanted to thank you for sticking with us all this time. If you’ve enjoyed our work, please share with your friends and those you think would get excited about the areas and topics we cover. Let’s get to it.
🛫⚡️🛩️ It’s Boom Times for Startups Trying to Electrify Aviation - I share some thoughts with Bloomberg’s Coco Liu. Link below published this week:
Kicking things off, I had a chance to sync up with Bloomberg’s Coco Liu and share some of my thoughts on electric aviation, which today is looking brighter than ever. Here at 8090 Industries, we put our money where our mouth is when it comes to decarbonizing every major industrial sector. This is especially true as it pertains to aviation, we do so in partnership with the world’s leading industrial giants to drive meaningful scale and impact.
“Powering a plane with rechargeable batteries doesn't require massive infrastructure upgrades, says Rayyan Islam, co-founder at 8090 Industries, a venture capital firm that bankrolls low-carbon aviation projects. That makes it an appealing option for airline operators. Electric aircraft are also quieter than their combustion-engine cousins. But the weight and energy capacity of the current generation of batteries mean that electric aircraft are only “low-hanging fruit” for short-haul trips, Islam says. Existing battery technology can, at a reasonable price, “compete with the status quo” in flight routes under 300 miles (483 kilometers), he says.”
8090 Industries portfolio company Circ, featured on CBS, highlighting is leading work in addressing the waste and emissions problem in the fashion/textile industry. View video below:
🌎 Incredibly proud to see CBS spotlight 8090 Industries portfolio company Circ®, the leading company driving massive, meaningful impact in addressing the waste and emissions problem in the fashion industry led by Peter Majeranowski, Conor Hartman and Luke Henning. The fashion industry is responsible for ~10% of global greenhouse gas emissions (which is more than aviation and maritime combined). On top of that, it produces an ungodly amount of waste - most of which end up in landfill. To put in perspective: That's a garbage truck of fashion waste that is dumped every second, of every day. Yet, today, less than 1% of textile waste is recycled back into textiles.
🤔 Why?
Most of our clothing, especially fast fashion, is a blend of cotton and polyester. Because of this, it’s been virtually impossible to recycle... until now. Circ®’s hydrothermal process seamlessly separates fibers from polyester blends, recycling the underlying materials and produces textiles cheaper than where brands get virgin material today (alot cheaper). Which is why groups like ZARA SA and Mara Hoffman have gone all in - and covered widely by Vogue Business and Fast Company.
Circ® is pioneering a new dawn for a complete circular economy for textiles. Perhaps best captured by Conor Hartman here:
"We have all the clothes we need to produce the clothes we would ever need."
WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:
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WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:
How China’s Richest Person Made Billions Bottling Pristine Water: The misty, forest-carpeted Wuyi Mountains have stood almost untouched for millenniums in southern China. Ancient Taoist temples are one of the few signs of human settlement at the Unesco World Heritage Site, which is surrounded by dramatic river gorges and rainforests that are home to pangolins and clouded leopards. On the edge of the trees, a bright yellow rectangular factory sits amid the lush greenery, like a stray Lego left behind on a lawn. Emblazoned outside is the name Nongfu Spring, China’s most recognizable bottled water brand. More than 1 million tons of fresh water pumped from Wuyi’s primeval forests arrive each year at the facility, where it’s bottled, topped with the company’s signature red caps and trucked to convenience stores and supermarkets in the region. Every plastic container that leaves this site, and Nongfu Spring Co.’s 11 other extraction points in China, goes to building a bottled water empire owned by the country’s richest man. Zhong Shanshan, a former journalist who began amassing his fortune three decades ago selling health supplements, has a net worth of about $63 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, outpacing even the founders of TikTok and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Most of his wealth comes from drawing water from some of China’s most ecologically sensitive lakes, mountains, springs and waterfalls and selling it to the nation’s burgeoning middle class. Penned by Coco Liu, Luz Ding and Martin Ritchie of Bloomberg, this is the story of how China’s richest person made billions by bottling pristine water.
“Qiang Huanrong, who lives close to Nongfu’s water extraction site by the Wuyi Mountains, has spent years fighting against the company’s operations. “This is a monopoly of water,” Qiang says. “How come water resources have become their tool for getting rich?”
It's finally official. Super excited and a massive congrats to our friends at Oxy and 1PointFive who've been hard at work on this for months. Oxy is America's leading player in carbon capture and management and this investment from BlackRock is a nod to the larger hub ecosystem they're developing out in West Texas for CCUS. Let's just say a few 8090 Industries companies and partners will be involved here. This investment is one of the biggest-ever investments in Direct Air Capture technology and a boon for Occidental, whose largest shareholder is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway . Hats off to Anthony Cottone Wade Alleman Robert Zeller and many many more. Stratos — which is designed to capture up to 500,000 tonnes of carbon a year — is about 30 per cent complete, according to Occidental, with commercial operations expected to begin in 2025.
This joint venture demonstrates that direct air capture is becoming an investable technology and BlackRock’s commitment in Stratos underscores its importance and potential for the world,” said Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental, one of the biggest US oil companies.
"Occidental’s technical expertise brings unprecedented scale to this cutting-edge decarbonisation technology,” Larry Fink, BlackRock chief executive, said in a statement. “Stratos represents an incredible investment opportunity for BlackRock’s clients . . . [and] underscores the critical role of American energy companies in climate technology innovation.”
An American Family Oil Dynasty Ends as Hess Sells to Chevron: For anyone that knows me, I'm a sucker for history - particularly on industrial titans of the past that helped drive where we are today. This story by Benoît Morenne from WSJ is one of those must shares encapsulating the legend that was Hess Oil. One of the first things you notice when entering the Hess Tower in downtown Houston is the original forest-green truck that legendary oil titan and founder Leon Hess drove in New Jersey nearly a century ago to deliver fuel. It’s this same forest-green truck that I had as one of my favorite toy cars as a kid - I still remember the holiday ads for them back in grade school. Now today, the Hess name is set to disappear from the ranks of the world’s prominent oil companies. Chevron on Monday said it would acquire the family company for $53 billion, concluding a 90-year saga bookended by the gruff founding father and his gregarious son, current Chief Executive John Hess. The organization was a throwback to the great family dynasties that propelled American industry, including the Rockefellers and the Gettys, and the luxury and glamour that accompanied them. The Hesses transcended plebeian roots to ensconce themselves in Manhattan and the Hamptons. Their oil empire afforded them the perks of outrageous wealth: private jets, Bahamian vacations, luxury real estate and, for a time, owning the New York Jets. The dynasty has loomed large over the oil patch since 1933, when Leon Hess got tired of lugging bags of coal and started distributing heating oil. Walking in the footsteps of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, he built a fuel-marketing business that covered the East Coast with Hess-branded gas stations. He also ran what was once the world’s largest refinery. In the following decades, the company dotted North Dakota with rigs during the shale boom, drilled in the Gulf of Mexico and helped uncover one of the biggest oil fields in South America. This is their story and if this piques your interest, I’d highly recommend the book, Hess the Last Baron you can purchase on Amazon.
The $2 Million Coal Mine That Might Hold a $37 Billion Treasure Twelve years ago, former Wall Street banker Randall Atkins bought an old coal mine outside Sheridan, Wyo., sight unseen, for about $2 million. He thought the mine might eke out a profit. Instead, Atkins recently learned it could bring a windfall. Several years after Atkins bought the Brook Mine, government researchers came around asking if they could run some tests to see if the ground contained something called “rare-earth elements.” When Atkins acquired the mine, he says he “didn’t know the difference between rare earths and rare coins.” When he got the test results, including some as recently as September, he says he was surprised and humbled: His sleepy mine contains what might be the largest so-called unconventional rare-earth deposit in the U.S., according to government researchers. At current market prices, it could be worth around $37 billion. While EV batteries dominate the media, this story by Julie Steinberg of the WSJ, peels back the curtain on the market for rare-earths, how to find it and how this industry works.
“Guys in New York thought I was a hillbilly, guys in West Virginia and Kentucky thought I was a New Yorker,” he says. “What we’re doing here is neat to younger people,” he said. “It’s novel, cutting-edge science and tech. Rare-earth deposits open up completely different horizons for this community.”
This Startup’s Nanomaterial Could Jumpstart The Hydrogen Revolution: Hydrogen is a promising form of carbon-free energy, but moving and storing the superlight element is costly and energy-intensive. So a California startup cofounded in 2022 by two leading chemists, including a Nobel laureate, is designing a new type of tank made with nanomaterials that aims to be cheaper and safer than any currently in use — and hold more hydrogen, too. Irvine, California-based H2MOF hopes to sell its next-generation hydrogen tanks sometime after 2024 to heavy-duty vehicle makers with plans to offer zero-emission fuel cell vehicles. It argues that in addition to holding fuel inside the vehicles, these tanks will also provide a better way to ship the fuel by truck or train as truckmakers transition toward using hydrogen to power carbon-free fleets. Rather than pumping highly compressed or liquified hydrogen into a conventional tank, H2MOF is designing one that holds the energy-rich fuel in a solid state, adsorbing it into specially engineered nanomaterials. The approach is based on research by two of its cofounders and scientific advisors: Omar Yaghi, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and professor Sir Fraser Stoddart, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2016. “We haven't had breakthroughs in hydrogen storage because of the extremely challenging properties of the hydrogen molecule,” CEO and cofounder Samer Taha told Forbes from Dubai. “Professors Stoddart and Yaghi believe it requires us to go deep into the problem and design new materials with atomic precision to come up with the right solution because traditional techniques are not going to work. Think of it as a novel combination of organic materials with some metal atoms,” Taha said. “A crystal structure at the nanoscale — at extremely small scale.”
Breakthrough: 700C Degree Heat & Electricity From Hydrogen – Without Burning It: New Mexico is a rich oil state, second only to Texas. So why does New Mexico want a radical new hydrogen-to-heat energy from Australia? Like many others, the state wants to make clean energy and has set its sights on hydrogen. But what caught their eye is rather interesting. New Mexico wants hydrogen-to-heat energy from Australia because the country has a new method to convert hydrogen into heat, without combustion. The system can be used directly in heavy industry or converted into electricity for just about any electrical application. The company is called Star Scientific - and it’s announced it’s started building a factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2024. The technology discovery originates from studying nuclear fusion - finding a catalyst that encourages hydrogen gas to combine with oxygen gas to form water, and the reaction releases a large amount of heat. It’s really chemistry, not physics, but it does remind us of two hydrogen atoms fusing to helium and releasing enormous amounts of nuclear energy, which is the basis of the hydrogen bomb.
“In a demonstration, with inflow pipes for hydrogen and oxygen, within just a few minutes the catalyst became hot and orange in color as its temperature shot up to 713 C degrees. Such a temperature will be sufficient to provide heat for some industrial manufacturing processes - all without combustion - and simplifying and decarbonizing the process. The catalyst is a secret, and the process patented HERO which stands for Hydrogen Energy Release Optimiser. Any desired temperature up to 700C degrees can be used to heat homes and offices. But it can also heat water into steam to drive turbines that produce electricity. The process is similar to what happens in a coal-fired power plant, except there the coal is combusted and releases heavy carbon emissions. In this case, swapping a coal-fired boiler within an existing power plant by a HERO process could meaningfully cut emissions.”
Kauai Became a Clean Energy Leader. Its Secret? A Publicly Owned Grid It’s hard to find anywhere in the United States that has greened its electricity supply as quickly as verdant Kauai. And the people of Kauai achieved that on their own, through collective ownership of the electricity grid, not by hoping profit-maximizing utilities find a way to balance the urgency of human-caused climate change with quarterly dividends for shareholders.
Kauai used to have a Wall Street–owned, for-profit utility, much like roughly 70% of U.S. electricity customers. But the island’s grid infrastructure took a beating from Hurricane Iniki in 1992, and the utility, Citizens Utilities Company of Connecticut, eventually wanted to sell. Kauai residents raised financing and acquired the utility in 2002, turning it into a locally owned cooperative that pledged to lower rates, which were the highest in the state at the time. ”KIUC doesn’t have a parent company with a hefty balance sheet to help finance projects — it’s structurally required to be scrappy.”
America’s First Commercial Direct Air Capture Plant Just Got Going For the first time in the United States, a commercial plant is capturing carbon dioxide directly from the sky and locking away the planet-warming gas. On Thursday, the startup Heirloom unveiled its “direct air capture” facility in Tracy, California, which the company says has so far clocked nearly 1,000 hours of operations. Heirloom’s technology uses limestone to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Through a novel process, the captured carbon is then injected into concrete, where it ostensibly stays trapped forever. To be clear, Heirloom’s plant is hardly capable of reversing the damage caused by decades of rampant fossil fuel consumption. The open-air warehouse, located some 70 miles east of San Francisco, can absorb a maximum of 1,000 metric tons of CO2 per year — less than 0.1 percent of the annual emissions from a single gas-fired power plant. While this marks a positive step forward, there’s much to be done.
The DAC facility “is the closest thing on Earth that we have to a time machine, because it can turn back the clock on climate change,” Shashank Samala, Heirloom’s CEO and co-founder, said in a statement ahead of Thursday’s launch event. A slew of federal and state officials, including U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis (D), attended the ceremony.
Reality Check and Roll-Call on the Multibillion-dollar Race for Nuclear Fusion The nuclear fusion sector is hot. Maybe not 100 million degrees Celsius — which is the sort of mind-blowing temperature needed to make this futuristic power source possible — but the industry is sizzling. Fusion energy could provide a nearly infinite source of carbon-free power and help save the planet from climate change. Companies in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere are raking in billions to pursue the dream with investments from tech heavyweights such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Despite the financial momentum, and headline-grabbing scientific breakthroughs, huge hurdles remain. In fact, no fusion company has yet hit the essential target of getting more energy from fusion reactions than it puts into them.
“You could say certain concepts are overhyped because they don’t have the scientific basis that would merit the amount of capital that’s going into it,” said Phil Larochelle, a fusion investor and partner with Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures. “But I think that there’s a whole bunch of really legitimate fusion concepts out there that do merit a lot more attention. Or as Sibylle Günter, scientific director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, said in a Bloomberg broadcast last year: “There is a lot of money going into these companies and it’s very interesting and exciting. There are some I really love — and some I would rather laugh about.”
About Rayyan Islam Rayyan Islam is the co-founder and General Partner of 8090 Industries, the leading partner and investor for industrial breakthrough technologies focused on decarbonization and national security. The companies Rayyan’s invested in, sourced and advised have grown to over $8B in private market value. Rayyan has led investments in groundbreaking companies like EquipmentShare, Astranis, Cemvita, Circ, Oklo, Infinium, Orbit Fab, Quaise, Addionics, Living Carbon, Liberation Labs, and more. Rayyan is also the co-founder of Gold Hydrogen, which produces abundant clean hydrogen from microbes and old oil wells for less than $1/kg. Rayyan was recognized by Business Insider’s SEED 100, as one of the top 100 early-stage investors of 2023, alongside Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla and amongst the most powerful seed stage climate tech VCs by Fortune Magazine. As a frequent speaker on venture capital and climate technologies, Rayyan has spoken at NYU, Stanford, UT Austin and the United Nations and his work has been featured on CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired, Yahoo Finance and more.
Influenced by his family upbringing in Bangladesh, he personally witnessed the ramifications of energy insecurity and climate change at a young age and its impact on communities around the world. Determined to make a serious dent on the issue, Rayyan has supported a cadre of climate technology solutions, drafted policy recommendations to President Joe Biden’s climate transition team and founded the decarbonization focused newsletter Decarbon Weekly, which counts C-suite executives, leading climate scientists, members of state and local governments, founders, investors and foundations amongst its thousands of subscribers.
Rayyan lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife, son and daughter.
Chief Technology Officer at Crunch
8moRayyan Islam: Interesting developments in decarbonization economy.