An interview with Garrett Boudinot, Founder of Vycarb
Vycarb was started in 2022 by Garrett Boudinot and is on a mission to enable fully measured, integrated CO2 removal and storage in water. With multiple pilots already live on the US East Coast, Vycarb's modular system uses accelerated alkalinity dissolution to optimize distributed carbon dioxide removal across high-CO2 waters. A member of the Activate Fellowship’s 2022 cohort, Vycarb recently received $100k from Frontier to remove 58 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Climate change has been the sole focus of Boudinot’s career, from carbon chemistry and ecosystem impacts to social adaptation and wildlife conservation. Boudinot earned his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado, holds dual bachelor's degrees in humanities and environmental geosciences from the College of Charleston, and served as a research associate at Cornell University. Boudinot also serves on the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment and the ClimateMusic Project.
Key takeaways
There is a move towards carbon removal techniques that do not carry the risk of carbon returning to the atmosphere, such as in the form of forest fires or consumption by organisms. This requires converting it into inorganic carbon forms.
Environments are dynamic and heterogeneous, and so the modeled impacts of carbon removal often don’t play out in the real world.
Traditional techniques for measuring carbon in water are time and labor-intensive. Vycarb is trying to develop a solution that is cost-effective and does not change the chemistry of the water, meaning it can be deployed onsite for real-time measurements at scale.
The carbon removal industry has plenty of opportunities for business students with expertise in supply chains, distribution, and sales
What we learned
[Interview responses condensed/paraphrased]
At The Gigaton, we help aspiring climate leaders narrow their career focus. Can you share how you found your niche in climate and how you decided to focus on this area?
My whole career has been driven by climate. My undergrad was in geosciences, and from day one, I felt personally motivated to focus on climate change. My PhD was all about quantifying carbon cycle changes, particularly in the oceans but also in forests and soils, and how those changes impacted the ecosystem.
At the end of my PhD, I worked in conservation for a while. I loved it, but the impacts were very small. It was boots on the ground. And I recognized that we were still putting 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. While I was doing that work, I was asked to start a research program at Cornell University on carbon removal and soils.
The carbon removal market had started to develop this idea of permanence and quality. There were tons of forest fires in Colorado and California, and there was news about how carbon offsets were turning back into carbon dioxide. How can we convert CO2 into something that's not organic and that's not going to go back into the atmosphere? There was a paper that came out around 2018 that popularized urban removal called enhanced weathering, where CO2, rather than going into organic carbon, was converted into an inorganic carbon molecule.
We deployed this in the field and then used analytical chemistry experience to measure if it worked. At that time, New York State funded the Activate New York Fellowship in New York City to stimulate commercialization and innovation in the carbon removal space. I started that in June of 2022, and with funding from that fellowship, I had proven at a very early stage this novel measurement technology that could perform the necessary quantification of carbon removal with low enough cost and high enough speed to be able to support this emerging carbon removal industry.
Could you tell us a little bit more about Vycarb’s measurement technology and how that works? What is the value proposition over competing approaches?
We've been able to measure carbon in water for a long time using many different analytical chemistry techniques. But pretty much all of them require taking a sample from the field, bringing it into a lab, and running a time and labor-intensive analytical process, and that can take up to 20 minutes per sample with someone who's trained. If we're going to be intervening in the carbon cycle on a global gigatons scale, that kind of costly analysis won't provide the amount of measurement that that industry needs. And so what some folks have done is try to miniaturize those traditional laboratory analytical techniques into what's called a lab-on-chip sensor. But all of these and all the traditional lab techniques actually changed the chemistry of the water.
What we've developed is a way to measure CO2 (bicarbonate and carbonate) in water without changing the chemistry of the water. We combine a series of electrochemical and spectroscopic sensors into a unique water housing, read off the raw signals, and feed them into a series of calibration algorithms that spit out our dissolved CO2 bicarbonate and carbonate values.
What is the business model at this point and going forward?
Everyone in the carbon market says they want better measurement, and we developed a better measurement. Our current system takes about 10 minutes for an individual measurement. But right now the carbon removal market is undersupplied, and so purchasers just need people to remove carbon and will take their word for it on the measurement. It's cheaper to say they need better measurement than actually to pay for better measurement. Not only can we remove carbon better with this real-time measurement, but that also raises the bar across the industry to show that carbon removal in the natural environment can be fully measured. Our goal is that purchasers will require suppliers to better measure. So all of that is to say the kind of measurement-as-a-service is a potential business model for us that we hope can support a wide range of carbon removal approaches and storage approaches.
But in addition, we've developed a system that can deploy carbon removal to be measured. Our business model is really to be a picks-and-shovel and enabling technology for carbon removal to be deployed safely and effectively.
There's a huge market need that very few have thought of about how we can create an enabling technology for other communities, people, companies, and organizations to generate revenue through carbon removal themselves. Part of why that's been difficult is A) it typically requires a lot of energy and infrastructure to capture CO2 and store it, and B) It requires a lot of energy, infrastructure, and resources to measure, report, and verify it for the buyers. Our technology does the removal and storage in one reaction, and it's fully measured and autonomous.
We’re now starting to develop partnerships and contracts with customers for them to use our technology to do it themselves. Stripe Climate, the Frontier fund’s advanced market commitment for carbon removal, purchased 58 tons of carbon from us. The big value for us in this is to show that this fully measured carbon removal can work on a commercial scale and do that as quickly as possible.
What does your near-term go-to-market strategy look like? Who are some target customers?
We are currently working with some aquaculture farms that are very interested in deploying our technology for reducing CO2 and acidification. That's our beachhead: selling a system that can do both. The carbon removal is a co-benefit of what they want to do: reduce acidification. We can do it more effectively, such that it removes CO2 quantifiably. We are already working with some project developers who want to use our technology. A lot of them are also working in the aquaculture fishery coastal management space. And then, as we scale up, the goal is for anyone who's operating coastal infrastructure, whether that's energy, conservation, or ecosystem management practices. Those are all clear customers.
What kind of business talent are you looking to bring on board?
I love this question because we spent our first year in existence with only technical people, and I was very proud of that. “We're people who know the carbon chemistry, we know the engineering, that's what we need to, to solve the climate crisis.” We had our heads down and developed incredible tech. It was easy for me to see commercial or business chops as an afterthought.
Now that we've proven our core tech, we're playing catch up in doing some of the customer discovery and commercial partnership building that we should have done. Currently, we just have a commercialization advisor and our head of the business - I call him our token MBA!
There's a lot more that we need to do. It's a wild west in terms of how these commercial agreements and partnerships work and having folks that can close sales and structure actual contracts is going to be ever more important. Carbon removal is not just a technology problem, it's a distribution and supply chain problem. And so we need to be thinking about the upstream supply chain and distribution chain optimization from a life cycle analysis perspective but also the unit economics. Once we move out of pre-seed as we actually really solidify our go-to-market and initial customers, we're really gonna need to fill out those capabilities.
How do you quantify your impact in carbon terms?
Quantifying the reduction in baseline CO2 and the increase in stable bicarbonate and carbonates. That's our main focus.
We use existing emissions factors for all of our life cycle analysis, which we certainly want to improve. And we're working with and excited about all the companies that are improving measurement and reducing emissions of different supply chain components.
What gives you hope in the climate crisis?
I was at an event for high schoolers thinking about the blue economy and carbon up in Massachusetts last week. When I was in high school, it was all doom and gloom. I was having to just convince the older generation that climate change was real and was upset about that. Everyone in carbon removal now just wound up here by happenstance, and only some of us had relevant experience.
Now, there are students going to college who are thinking about structuring their majors and their courses around getting a job in carbon removal. That has never happened before. And that is really exciting.
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