04.30.24-Startup-Ecosystem-Conference-Startups-Noya

JOHN GREENFIELD: Good afternoon, everyone. As Irina said, my name is John Greenfield. I lead the commercial team at noya. I'm delighted to be here with you this afternoon. Came in from San Francisco yesterday.

So in addition to me, Josh Santos, our founder and CEO also an MIT chemical engineer, we lead noya. This is the majority, though not all of our 25 person team in our Oakland, California headquarters. You can see one of the prototypes of our devices just to the right there.

So the problem that we're working on is a pretty large one and it's probably one that many of you are familiar with. At its root, we're focused on climate change and mitigating the worst effects of climate change. Today, the science is very clear. We need to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions drastically, that we put out into our atmosphere over the next 10 to 20 years.

That's that dotted gray line. In addition, the science is very clear now that we also need to remove. We need to remove historical emissions and help draw down the high levels of atmospheric CO2 that we have. Down to something that looks like pre-industrial levels.

That's where CDR or carbon dioxide removal comes in and the technology that we're working on at noya. Just to give you a sense of the scale of this challenge, we need to grow that new industry, our new industry, by about 50% year over year for the next 20 to 30 years. To put that in perspective, that means building a new industry on the size of-- on the order of scale of oil and gas today, in about half the time it took oil and gas to get there.

So from our perspective, it is all about scale. The problem is all about scale. And we also believe that good solutions take scale as the first order problem to solve. And that's what we're working on at noya.

So we have developed a novel approach to direct air capture or DAC, if you've been in the industry for long enough. And that is focused on only using electricity, using extremely abundant materials that are low cost and available and in existing supply chain today. Today, we can get both of the key material inputs that we have for our process in the millions of tons all over the world and very inexpensively. And our design is extremely modular.

These three components add up to something that allows us to scale very quickly. Back to the problem. The problem is that we need to scale very quickly to address this challenge.

And then finally and very importantly, alongside the CO2 that we capture, we capture a significant amount of water. Water is becoming more expensive and more scarce in more places around the world. We capture, alongside every ton of CO2 that we remove, we capture three gallons of water. What that means is that we can help communities that we operate in to address water scarcity issues, rather than adding to that problem.

So in terms of the actual technology, I like to joke a little bit that it's quite simple. For about 45 minutes, we run fans across our capture material. That's on the left side here. And think of those like sponges. Over the 45 minutes, they attract the CO2 and catch or capture it, at which point we close the doors on those devices and then directly electrify, so run current directly through our material, which is electrically conductive, over the course of about 15 to 30 minutes, which releases or regenerates the CO2.

We pipe it out, compress it, and store it underground. So another way to think of us is an oil and gas company working in reverse. We're taking it out of the sky and putting it back underground where, in our opinion, it belongs. Primarily today, we're working with geologic sequestration, so finding the right geology in the US and around the world where that CO2 can be stored and stored permanently.

We're very, very proud and honored to be trusted by some of the pioneers within this industry-- shopify. Stacy Mitch and their team were one of the first buyers of carbon removal credits from us and are very vocal advocates for the industry today. In addition and more recently, we've been working with some advisors and marketplaces like Watershed and Patch in the industry, who are-- who are helping to advise corporations on how to build portfolios of carbon removal and carbon offsets to meet their goals.

Final thing I'll say here, we do also have a number of partnerships with folks who are not yet public on the slide, but who have been great partners to us. So where are there opportunities to work together? Of course, long term contracts focused on atmospheric CO2 removals help you meet your goals and help us to grow an industry that's necessary and needs this kind of support at this early stage.

Second, we're thinking about co-location, both in terms of renewable energy, our key input, and in terms of existing infrastructure. And then very finally, at their root, these look like really large infrastructure projects. So if your team has experience building and operating those kinds of projects, we're interested in building relationships with you to help scale this industry.

Thank you very much for your time. And please come find me this afternoon, if you'd like to continue the conversation.