How China Won the Battery Race, The $1 Trillion Future of Carbon Cleanup, Space-based Solar Power becomes a Reality, the Wild West of Carbon Offsets

Fellow Agents of change:

We hope this email finds you well given all things considered. This week marks the 73rd edition of Decarbon Weekly and it has been a busy week. Exciting things happening across the board so let’s get started!

8090 Industries portfolio company Circ? partners with Mara Hoffman to unveil “The Dress That Changes Everything”

The historic moment was covered by New York Times and Fast Company A gown that is as beautiful inside as it is out - made from textile waste, but looks and feels like it is made from top-notch silk. At the end of its life, the brand will take back the dress and recycle it back into another dress again, and again, and again. This makes Mara Hoffman, the forerunner in creating luxury clothing with lyocell, the first designer to use Circ? Lyocell (a recycled fiber) in the luxury market and, most importantly, she is using this moment to announce her commitment to transition from virgin lyocell to Circ? Lyocell in her collections over the next three years - igniting a domino effect in the larger fashion market.

8090 Industries portfolio company REGENT officially partners with the US Marine Corp to bring all-electric seagliders to coastal defense missions and logistics

Catch this bad*ss video that brings the collaboration to life - as Regent,?led by?Billy Thalheimer?and?Michael Klinker?sign a $4.75 million agreement with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab (MCWL) to demonstrate?#seaglider?technology for defense logistics operations that can help save lives, accomplish critical missions and play a role in deterring conflict altogether.

? ?? ?? BREAKING: China curbs graphite exports sending shockwaves on battery supply chains.

At 8090 Industries, we saw this coming years ago and decided to do something about it in stealth. What has been obvious to us and will now become obvious to the world - we are on our way to being America's largest AND the world's cheapest producer of graphite. Feel free to reach out to learn more. As it stands today, China refines more than 90% of the world's graphite into material used in all EV battery anodes. How critical? It makes up ~ 30% of the weight of the battery and it's not going away anytime soon. Years ago, we along with former senior leadership team members from Tesla saw the writing on the wall, hatched a plan and got to work with a solution that addressed the 3 major problems in anodes: 1 - Decouple American dependency of Chinese graphite and onshore capacity 2 - Deliver high-performance battery graphite that is MULTIPLE times cheaper than what China can produce today 3 - Produce it carbon negatively using carbon emissions instead of fossil fuels as feedstock We did it. It is working. We are in production and in partnership with leading players. Stay tuned, plenty more to come soon.

?? ???? 8090 Industries portfolio company Liberation Labs pours the foundation of the next industrial revolution in the United States – #biomanufacturing.

The 600,000 liter purpose-built precision fermentation facility will enable innovative companies to produce the ingredients and materials of tomorrow, leveraging the people, raw materials and infrastructure of today. Stay tuned, more to come soon.

On the personal front:

The family got together, grabbed our cowboy hats and showcased our Texas spirit with our kiddos at the Texas State Fair. These are our little ones, both under the age of two and they are big fans of Big Tex behind us. With all that is going on in the world right now, especially in Israel and Palestine, we’re reminded of what is truly important in life. Hugging my kids extra this weekend while we pray for all the families and children who are struggling and striving to survive amidst the chaos they endure every day.

With that said, let’s get back to Decarbon Weekly.

WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:

- How China Left the World Far Behind in the Battery Race ???? \

- How to Make Space-based Solar Power a Reality

- Hustlers, Outlaws and the Wild West World of Carbon Offsets ??

- A Startup Battles Big Oil for the $1 Trillion Future of Carbon Cleanup

- A.I. Could Soon Need as Much Electricity as an Entire Country

- Meet the Team Building Climate-Friendly Skyscrapers

- A Colorado City Has Been Battling for Decades to Use Its Own Water

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WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:

How China Left the World Far Behind in the Battery Race: Penned by none other than Akshat Rathi from Bloomberg as an excerpt from his latest book Climate Capitalism, Rathi explains the origins of China’s dominance in the battery market through the lens of CATL, now the world’s largest battery company.?This is a must read. On a partially cloudy summer morning in Berlin in July 2018, both leaders made small talk in between posing for the cameras. ”The agreement was an acknowledgement that the industry, which had been the country’s economic backbone, had finally failed. Not because it couldn’t make cars that people wanted, but because it hadn’t developed a crucial technology – lithium-ion batteries – that would power them in the 21st century. While countries are finally seriously trying to catch up, China has taken a commanding lead. By 2025, China’s battery production capacity will be three times as much as the rest of the world combined, according to BloombergNEF estimates.”

How to Make Space-based Solar Power a Reality: On a warm summer evening in Pasadena, young scientists and researchers gathered on the rooftop of Caltech’s engineering laboratory. Little did they know they were about to make history. After a long day setting up equipment to test a solar power satellite, their project lead told them to grab something to eat and come back. “It was close to 10pm and we said, ‘Let’s have a go. Let’s do a dry run,’” says Ali Hajimiri, professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. “At first we thought we weren’t detecting a signal. Then it started coming in and getting stronger.”? The team was elated. For the first time EVER, a detectable amount of solar power had been beamed wirelessly from space back to Earth. It was proof to a growing community of space solar power advocates that it was technically possible to supply a power-hungry planet with energy from space.??

“The sun is the closest thing we have to an infinite energy source,” says Paul Jaffe, an electronics engineer at the US Naval Research Laboratory who has studied space-based solar power for 16 years. “You [could] create a global energy network that could provide energy potentially anywhere on Earth. Space solar could do for energy what GPS did for navigation.”

Hustlers, Outlaws and the Wild West World of Carbon Offsets: Offsetting has been hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change—but the market's largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren't real. Amidst of a global scramble by F500 companies for inexpensive ways to reduce emissions, carbon offsetting became widely hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change. As a consequence, at the turn of the decade, the market for offsets surged, quadrupling in 2021 alone. And in that same year, the market’s largest firm, South Pole, was approaching a billion-dollar valuation, which would make it the world’s first “carbon unicorn.” The company sold millions of credits for carbon reductions. Suddenly, however, alarming news had reached the company’s headquarters, in Zurich. Those credit sales weren’t real and it was at risk of losing its most lucrative project. Incredibly written by Heidi Blake from the New Yorker, this is the behind the scenes story on the wild west of carbon offsets through the eyes of its biggest player.

“I was, like, Yeah, whatever. As long as I get my end of the deal.” Still, he had no intention of disclosing his financial practices. “You have your ways and means, and they’re not all traceable, put it that way,” he said. “No one actually has a damn clue about what’s going on. Not even South Pole. I hold the key to Pandora’s box.” Do you know what happens with the money?’ And then someone told me, ‘Dirk, you should look at the carbon side of this project—not just at the finances—to understand how bad it is.’?”

A Startup Battles Big Oil for the $1 Trillion Future of Carbon Cleanup: Christoph Gebald grew up in the Bavarian mountain region of Germany, and he’s spent two decades in Switzerland, a country synonymous with jagged peaks cloaked in snow and ice stretching to the horizon. He pursued research that’s now the basis for Climeworks’ mission: removing 1 billion tons of carbon pollution from the atmosphere every year by midcentury using, essentially, vacuum cleaners for the sky. That ambition is in part why Gebald was named to the TIME100 Next list last year. But those big numbers highlight the massive challenge: If 1 billion tons is the summit, the company has barely taken its first steps out of base camp: It’s at 4,000 tons a year, and experts estimate that the world will need to remove up to 10 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually by midcentury to limit global warming to 1.5C. In mountaineering terms, the route ahead is a Class 5 ascent: There’s exposure on both sides and little room for error. This is the story of

Climeworks raised $650 million in an equity round last year and has sold millions of dollars in CO2 removal services. But those big numbers belie the massive challenge. If 1 billion tons is the summit, the company has barely taken its first steps out of base camp: It’s at 4,000 tons a year, and experts estimate that the world will need to remove up to 10 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually by midcentury to limit global warming to 1.5C. In mountaineering terms, the route ahead is a Class 5 ascent: There’s exposure on both sides and little room for error. Plus, nobody has ever attempted it before.

A.I. Could Soon Need as Much Electricity as an Entire Country: OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploded onto the scene nearly a year ago, reaching an estimated 100 million users in two months and setting off an A.I. boom. Behind the scenes, the technology relies on thousands of specialized computer chips. And in the coming years, they could consume immense amounts of electricity. How much? A peer-reviewed analysis published Tuesday lays out some early estimates. In a middle-ground scenario, by 2027 A.I. servers could use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours (Twh) annually. That’s similar to what Argentina, the Netherlands and Sweden each use in a year, and is about 0.5 percent of the world's current electricity use. As the energy requirements for chips and data centers explode, we anticipate this will eclipse a major catalyst for nuclear energy adoption across large technology players. Some of which one can observe with the efforts Microsoft is leading which is well documented. “We don’t have to completely blow this out of proportion,” said Alex de Vries, the data scientist who did the analysis. “But at the same time, the numbers we’re talking about — they are not small.” The electricity needed to run A.I. could boost the world’s carbon emissions, depending on whether the data centers get their power from fossil fuels or renewable resources.

Meet the Team Building Climate-Friendly Skyscrapers: Humanity loves concrete. We use it everywhere — skyscrapers, data centers, roofs, sidewalks, homes. The problem is, concrete doesn’t love us. Its key ingredient, cement, is the source of 8% of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that’s catastrophically warming the planet. But how do we replace a material that’s so inexpensive, so durable and so popular?

Prometheus Materials has an intriguing answer. The University of Colorado spinout is turning algae into cement using a process that’s similar to how coral and seashells naturally form. “Climate change is potentially an existential problem, and we’re finding that nature may have provided us with the keys to a solution,” says Loren Burnett, the company’s cofounder and CEO.

A Colorado City Has Been Battling for Decades to Use Its Own Water: Jack Ethredge could see the future. It was 1985, and Mr. Ethredge, then the city manager of Thornton, Colo., understood that sooner or later, the Denver suburb would need more water. The population was booming, businesses were flocking to the Mountain West, and Thornton had no major lakes or rivers of its own, nor any meaningful amount of groundwater to draw upon, a fluke of geology and geography. The city had drilled a dozen or so wells over the years, but the groundwater’s limited supply and high mineral content meant it wasn’t fit for drinking. So at Mr. Ethredge’s behest, Thornton went shopping. The City Council bought about 17,000 acres of farmland 60 miles to the north, near Fort Collins, along with the associated water rights. When the time was right, Thornton would divert the water from the Cache la Poudre River that irrigated that farmland, put it in a pipeline and send it downstate. That time never came and eclipsing a water crisis in his city and inevitably, his state.

“In the water business you have to be years and years ahead of the game,” Mr. Ethredge, now retired, said in an interview. In theory, Thornton’s water woes were solved. In practice, the problems were just beginning. Today, almost 40 years later, the water Mr. Ethredge secured for his city remains out of reach.

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.