Mark Herz: This is GBH’s Morning Edition. The amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is increasing faster than ever. One global monitor showed that peak to peak from 2022 to 2024, we saw the largest two-year jump on record. As carbon dioxide builds up, it traps heat and warms the planet. Many are trying to fight against that buildup. Among them is Laura Lammers, CEO of the carbon capture company Travertine.
GBH Meteorologist Dave Epstein spoke with Laura about the importance of her work, and the road ahead when it comes to carbon and our warming planet.
Dave Epstein: I’d like to start this morning with a little bit maybe about your background and how you decided to start the company. And then I’d like to get into a little bit about what is carbon capture, because I think a lot of our audience is probably not really familiar with exactly what you do.
Laura Lammers: Yeah, absolutely. So I founded Travertine in early 2022 to scale what we see as a practical approach to decarbonization, and one that benefits the environment in more than one way. So my background is in environmental geochemistry, which is the study of natural chemical processes. And before starting Travertine, I was an assistant professor in the environmental Science Department at UC Berkeley and also a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. And my group there for many years studied carbon mineralization, which is the process that the Earth uses to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere over hundreds of millions of year timescales. And so our technology is inspired by these natural processes, but basically couple them with chemical recycling to accelerate the process of carbon mineralization.
Epstein Why is taking carbon out of the atmosphere important? Why do this?
Lammers: So carbon capture — either abatement, which means avoiding the release of CO2 in the atmosphere — or removal, which means directly removing molecules of CO2 from the air, are both extremely important because carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere leads to climate warming, which eventually leads to sea level rise and eventually in places on the earth, perhaps uninhabitable conditions. And so if we were to wave a magic wand and stop emitting CO2 today, we would still have emitted 3 trillion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And it will take thousands of years for the earth to take that back out again. And so we need to combine all kinds of carbon capture technologies to help us control the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Epstein: When you take the CO2 out of the atmosphere, where does it go? And what are you doing with it? Are you making new products with it? How safe is it? Is it going to get back out again? What happens to it?
Lammers: Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. Each technology has a little bit of a different flavor. So on the abatement side, there are technologies that avoid CO2 being produced in the first place. So pointing to some examples in green cement production like sublime systems, where they’re making cement without any CO2 emissions at all so you don’t have to put anything away. Then there are carbon removal technologies that are pulling CO2 out of the air and permanently storing them. Some of them are storing them in organic compounds that can be permanently sequestered, either on Earth’s surface like bio char or underground like bio oil. But there are also technologies that put carbon dioxide directly into minerals, which is what our company does. And then technologies that inject the CO2 underground into geologic reservoirs where it can safely be sequestered for many thousands and perhaps millions of years.
Epstein: Obviously, we’ve just had a change at the federal government in terms of administrations, and the current administration has been very clear that they don’t think that global climate change is a problem. How is that going to impact your company? And if we say that this goes on for the next four years, what happens after that? What happens you think beyond 2028?
Lammers: So, I mean, I can tell you, I was listening to the inaugural address with great interest. And, you know, I’m facing this change probably like many executives in this industry, with a bit of trepidation, but also perhaps a bit of optimism. So on the one hand, we expect that a lot of the federal policies put in place by the Biden Administration, like funding for novel decarbonization technologies, to be rolled back. But on the other hand, this new administration has made it clear that they’re focused on American made [products] and promoting manufacturing and upstream extractive industries here in America. I’m part of what’s called the Carbon Removal Alliance, which is a coalition of companies that are focused on durable carbon removal. And they’ve just released a report that says about 130,000 new good American jobs are expected to be made by the carbon removal industry alone. And so it’s very clear that Americans actually do, in fact, believe in climate change and believe it to be a risk. If you look at polls, Americans, we believe in it. Question is, how much are we willing to pay to fix the problem? But I can tell you this is not the first time folks in our industry have seen swings in political sentiment. We’re in it for the long haul. And right now, there are so many new, exciting technologies ready to scale that I am fully believing that we’re going to be able to build this carbon abatement and removal industry over the next four years through the Trump Administration and beyond.
Epstein: So, Laura, what is the risk of not doing anything — of not doing this type of technology?
Lammers: If if we do nothing and we focus really on fossil fueled development, then we can expect warming to increase at a rate that’s unprecedented in Earth history, meaning there’s no precedent in the geologic record for that kind of warming. And if you look at the scientific literature over the last couple of years, it’s clear that the impacts of warming are worse than any of our best models could have anticipated. And so as these tragedies accumulate, these costs accumulate. We need to take action. So I think the question is, what’s the cost of doing nothing compared to the cost of doing something? And I feel a deep conviction that the cost of doing something is is a much better, much better investment.
Mark Herz That was Travertine CEO Laura Lammers, speaking with GBH's Dave Epstein. This is GBH.
The amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is increasing faster than ever.
A June 2024 report from NOAA found that peak to peak from 2022 to 2024, we saw the largest two-year jump on record.
As carbon dioxide builds up, it traps heat and warms the planet. But many are trying to fight against that buildup, including Laura Lammers, CEO of the carbon capture company Travertine.
Lammers said before creating Travertine, she worked as a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she studied carbon mineralization, or the process that the Earth uses to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere over hundreds of millions of years.
“I founded Travertine in early 2022 to scale what we see as a practical approach to decarbonization, and one that benefits the environment in more than one way,” she said. “And so our technology is inspired by these natural processes, but basically couples them with chemical recycling to accelerate the process of carbon mineralization.”
Lammers added that carbon capture — by avoiding new releases of CO2, or removing CO2 molecules from the air — is “extremely important” to fighting the effects of climate change.
“If we were to wave a magic wand and stop emitting CO2 today, we would still have emitted 3 trillion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” she said. “And it will take thousands of years for the Earth to take that back out again.”
Travertine uses technology that is able to pull CO2 out of the air, and permanently store it by putting it directly into minerals.
“If we do nothing and we focus really on fossil fueled development, then we can expect warming to increase at a rate that’s unprecedented in Earth history,” Lammers said. “And if you look at the scientific literature over the last couple of years, it’s clear that the impacts of warming are worse than any of our best models could have anticipated. And so as these tragedies accumulate, these costs accumulate.”
She added that she is entering the next four years under the Trump administration with both “trepidation” and “optimism.”
“So on the one hand, we expect that a lot of the federal policies put in place by the Biden administration, like funding for novel decarbonization technologies, to be rolled back,” she said. “But on the other hand, this new administration has made it clear that they’re focused on American made [products] and promoting manufacturing and upstream extractive industries here in America.”
A recent report from the Carbon Removal Alliance found that the carbon removal industry could provide around 130,000 American jobs in the coming decade.
“I can tell you this is not the first time folks in our industry have seen swings in political sentiment. We’re in it for the long haul,” she said. “And right now, there are so many new, exciting technologies ready to scale that I am fully believing that we’re going to be able to build this carbon abatement and removal industry over the next four years through the Trump Administration and beyond.”
