Episode 81: This carbon removal tech is literally rocket science

COLD OPEN:

Molly Wood

People must use this platform to go live, that countdown is just so over the top. I'm always like, all right, I get it.

Brad Hartwig

It reminds me of a rocket launch too, like five, four, three, two, and it's a fun fact.

Molly Wood

I like that you're, I really love that you're just immediately like, this reminds me of a rocket launch. I'm like, I love this already. What's the fun fact?

Brad Hartwig

my, well, fun fact, actually learned this while I was at SpaceX is that the rocket launch countdown actually came from, from cinema. And it was, I think it was in the 1920s and it was part of a rocket launch for a movie about going to the moon. And it was basically a, a creative liberty taken by the director that thought the countdown created a more dramatic effect because the rocket launch was like the climax of the movie and people started to realize, that's actually like a really good way to go through sequencing and check all the systems and make sure that that were like actually a good idea. It's not actually just for dramatic effect.

Molly Wood

Really good idea.

That is such a good fun fact. I hope you don't mind. I'm 100 % leaving that in the show. That's amazing.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

This week I almost just cannot even, you guys, this is such a cool episode. So, very often when I’m interviewing a founder with a cool new climate-related technology, I ask them you know why hasn’t anyone done this before? 

And the answers range from like the economics weren’t right the tech didn’t exist no one WANTED to do things differently and it’s not unusual for someone to say oh we just used an existing technology on a NEW problem 

Like how Coca Cola was supposed to be a medicine but it became a soft drink. 

Today’s example is a lot more awesome though because it’s how rocket propulsion technology became baseload carbon-free energy and also sequestration simultaneously 

And it’s from a guy who was supposed to be an astronaut but became a climate tech founder instead. 

God I love this job so much. Let’s go 

Brad Hartwig 

My name is Brad Hartwig. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Arbor Energy. And we are working on scaling carbon negative power to deliver both 24-7 carbon-free energy, as well as durable carbon removal at gigatons scale. It's conventionally known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. And we are taking a clean sheet approach, leveraging a lot of our backgrounds in aerospace engineering.

and taking a lot of technology and know how from that world and importing the end of this space to deliver a solution that can be cost effectively scaled to really address the climate problem.

Molly Wood 

So I want to, not surprisingly because I'm a giant nerd, but also it's super interesting, start with the aerospace background. Kim Stanley Robinson is, think, the first person who, at least I heard, just say, there's not a plan B. This is the planet that we need to focus our attention on as opposed to Operation Get Off This Rock, which I think is a tendency in that kind of other world. You came from SpaceX.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah.

Molly Wood

and tested piloting at Kitty Hawk. Like what made you decide on plan A?

Brad Hartwig

Yeah, no, it's funny bringing up Kim Stanley Robinson, because I love his book, Ministry for the Future, as well, which was one of the first climate books that I actually read when I was kind of transitioning into this space. But yeah, to your point, I started out as an aerospace engineer, went to undergrad at USC, working, leading the propulsion team at the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab. And so even

Back as a student, we were trying to be the first student group in the world to send a rocket to space, which they actually eventually did achieve in 2019, which is really awesome. There are very few organizations in the world that have sent something to space. So it's pretty cool that this student group was able to. I went and worked at SpaceX right out of college, working on the Draco rocket engines for the Crew Dragon vehicle.

basically the in-space propulsion system for the vehicle that is responsible for ferrying NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station and worked on getting that engine through NASA qualification as well as leading production for the first flight sets of engines for operational crew missions. And it was very interesting. actually, when I left SpaceX, I was still very excited about

exploration and about going to space, I actually wanted to go try and become an astronaut myself. so that was when I left SpaceX, my goal was I was excited to really try to furnish a resume that would maybe be competitive for NASA astronaut candidacy. And knowing the chances of being selected are very low, but really was just excited to try and

Molly Wood 

Wow.

Brad Hartwig 

you know, test my luck there. So I ended up joining the Air Force, joined the 129th Rescue Wing as a search and rescue specialist. And also looked at a whole host of other things, was a test pilot at Kitty Hawk in the Bay Area, doing experimental test pilot work for novel electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

And I was enamored by the idea of going to space, exploring other planets. It's quite interesting though, because when I was doing work with the 129th Rescue Wing, so I was with Marin County Search and Rescue, we had a lot of domestic mission sets, which included in Northern California responding to wildfires and

especially in the kind of 2019, 2020 fire seasons. Our job was in part to evacuate communities, get folks to take evacuation warnings seriously. And then on the back end, unfortunately more cleanup crew. It's not really rescue. It's more body recovery or looking for folks that didn't make it out in time, trying to bring that closure to families that lost communication with folks in the affected areas.

And seeing the effects of climate change upfront like that and being part of the response team to those incidents, it made it increasingly difficult to not see the urgency of the problem. And it really dawned on me that going to space,

That's great and all. We'd love to get to a place again where humanity is a sustainable civilization and we're a space-faring civilization. But when you really take a step back and look at the bigger picture, Earth is by far the best planet that we will ever have. And we like to say the best place on Mars is worse than the worst place on Earth. And it's...

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm. It's a good line.

Brad Hartwig 

there's just no comparison. we have, you know, really Spaceship Earth is our home and I very much felt compelled to shift my attention, my career to doing everything in my power to help mitigate the climate crisis. And that was, it was very interesting because thereally wildfires were sort of the catalyst for my transition into the climate and energy space, looking at ways to decarbonize the global economy and draw down legacy emissions so that we can make humanity truly a sustainable civilization.

Molly Wood

I would imagine, what an awesome story in realization by the way. Like, congratulations, right? I I think a lot of people see things like that and they have their set of personal dreams and they don't want to change them. And that's a pretty big dream to give up on. Or not give up, you know what I mean. It's a big dream to shift away from. Replace with another bigger dream.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, and I think, you know, I do very much support space exploration. I think there is a lot of good that comes out of it, even lessons that can be imported back to Earth. I don't necessarily think I need to go. think my resources and efforts would be better spent working on the climate problem here at home.

Molly Wood 

So I would imagine then that after that realization, you must have sorted through options, right? Like the right way to apply your skills and the right technologies. how did you land on this set of solutions, which we will get more into in a minute.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, I mean, the climate problem is so big and it's an energy problem, it's a resources problem, it really affects everything that we know as civilization. There's so many ways that you can get involved. I was looking really at how are we going to decarbonize the global economy and how are we going to draw down the legacy emissions that we've spent the last couple hundred of years emitting and

I really kind of boiled it down to there are plenty of technologies that exist today that we really need to be scaling and deploying a lot more of. And that is an area that is going to continue to require huge amounts of attention and capital investment. It's just continuing to scale things like solar and wind and battery storage and decarbonization of transportation.

still need more tools in our toolkit though. There are technologies that we need to advance and mature, get them down the cost curve and then deploy them at scale. And I started to look more at that second bucket with really kind of a background in technology development thinking what are the missing tools that we still need to really address this problem at a planetary scale.

And so I did take what I thought of as a first principles approach, building just techno economic models for a whole host of emerging technologies to assess what are kind of the highest impact tools that we need to develop and then deploy in order to really get a handle on the climate problem. And I really was looking at it from, again, both the lens of thermodynamics and economics.

And I saw the solution that really rose to the top from that exercise was this idea of carbon negative bioenergy. And part of that is because it really is a two-pronged solution where it can help us decarbonize the grid as well as draw down legacy emissions all in one. And what we're seeing is

Brad Hartwig 

There are huge amounts of waste biomass produced in the US, produced globally. Plants do an incredible job of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. They actually photosynthesize roughly 400 gigatons of CO2 per year. It's an order of magnitude more than humanity's contribution to atmospheric emissions every year. The problem though is that plants don't hang onto that carbon for long.

So on a short carbon cycle, it's almost like the planet breathing where plants are drawing down huge amounts of CO2 from essentially April to September. And then that's really the growing season during the Northern Hemisphere, is kind of where landmass is highly concentrated. And then you have from October to March, that CO2 basically returns to the atmosphere.

Molly Wood 

Right, they exhale.

Brad Hartwig 

It exhales, it ends up being carbon neutral. But what we see is plants do really two things. They're scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. They're also storing solar energy in the hydrocarbon bonds of the plant, in the lignin, cellulose, hemicellulose. And so they are scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere, storing that carbon. They're also storing that solar energy. And so when you run it through an engine, through a machine, there is the potential to

produce the power, produce clean electricity, but hang on to the CO2. Basically hang on to the exhale and sequester that in geologic formation permanently so that the CO2 does not go back to the atmosphere. And it's kind of like the inverse of fossil fuels where you're carbon out of the ground, burning it to produce power and releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere.

This, what we're developing is really a carbon negative cycle where we're letting plants do the hard work of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. We are running that through our engine to produce 24 seven carbon free energy. And then we're sequestering the biogenic CO2 that would otherwise be exhaled again. And that is an incredibly useful tool because what we see is it's, it is happening at the scale that.

we need it to happen. just need that engine. need a better engine, a better tool to deliver carbon negative power to permanently sequester that CO2 to get long-term benefit from the work that plants are already doing. We're essentially turbocharging Earth's natural rhythm and making it a long-term storage solution for basically atmospheric scrubbing or cleanup, making our air cleaner, healthier.

and having a lower greenhouse gas effect.

Molly Wood 

Right. And then I feel like I should jump in here and remind listeners if it went by quickly that you're talking about waste biomass. Like you are not talking about harvesting plants at scale, turning them into energy. Like talk about the feedstock part of that.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah. Yes.

Correct.

Yeah, so it's, it's, this is a huge focus for us is using waste biomass that comes from things like agricultural activities that comes from forestry activities. And there is, there are huge amounts. So in globally, we look at five to 10 billion tons of, of waste feedstock that come from these primary economic activities of growing food, of

growing timber, of pulp and paper, of even municipal solid waste streams that are biogenic in origin. And in the US, we see potential to bring online just from these waste streams, upwards of 60 gigawatts of 24-7 carbon-free energy, and could be...

Molly Wood 

Put that in some context if you would compared to the electricity grid we know and think of today or solar in the US.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, so you could fundamentally replace the fleet of coal and natural gas plants in the US with carbon negative power. With 60 gigawatts. We see the potential for, we are going to continue to need, it's really kind of a, we need as many shots on goal. We're going to need a lot more solar, a lot more wind. But what we see is those are more intermittent energy sources.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, with 60 gigawatts,

Molly Wood 

Right.

Brad Hartwig

We have the ability to operate 8,000 hours a year, 24-7, operate as base load power. We can operate behind the meter or put power on the grid. And we see that as being a very needed supplement to more intermittent renewables and be able to deliver cost-effective power that is actively restoring the atmosphere, drawing down legacy emissions.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, awesome. And that's just with, like you said, existing waste biomass produced by us every day. It sounds like you're alluding to the fact that there are other sources of waste biomass as well. Like, should you run out?

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, there is, and we see this as an opportunity to be much more than just an energy company. It's often referred to as good stewardship biomass, which is what are the other societal and environmental benefits that you can impart by actually being an outlet for these waste streams? And that includes things like the

the waste that comes off of land treatment for wildfire mitigation, doing the fuel treatments for everything from the wild, wildland urban interface to reduce fire risk to reducing risk of fire on federal and private lands.

Molly Wood 

So you're talking about removing scrub brush or, right, like chopping down some stuff to prevent fires and then you could turn that chopped down stuff into energy. Yeah. It's my job to be the five-year-old translator in this conversation. Sometimes you have to cut down plants, but they can go to a good use.

Brad Hartwig

Exactly.

Brad Hartwig 

Yes, yeah, you can basically create.

Yes. Basically...

Yeah. And that's, think we're, as we continue to evolve our understanding of, of conservation, we are seeing that we are going to have to have a more active role in land conservation. And this it's expensive. This is a key way that we can actually support those activities by monetizing the power and the carbon removal to actually support healthier ecosystems.

Molly Wood 

Right, that seems like a big deal in addition to all of the other big deals that you're doing is to create that economic incentive for that wise land management.

Brad Hartwig

Right, we really see what we're developing as a tool that has the potential to help in a whole host of ways. Everything from land management, wildfire mitigation, even think of management of invasive species, having a way to economically get rid of those as is helpful. There's so many ways beyond energy to actually have an impact with.

with this engine at the center of it.

Molly Wood 

And then before I get into more specifics about how it generates energy, our landfill, is landfill waste a part of this conversation? Certainly the food waste problem doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Although I got my mill. Get your mill, everyone.

Brad Hartwig

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

Hey, Love Mill. Yes, are, the way we see it is we're kind of stair stepping into those more and more heterogeneous feed stocks. So starting out with forestry waste and then agricultural waste. And then the goal is increasing amounts of food waste and even mixed wastes to include things like plastics. There's additional cleanup and things that you need to do.

before you sequester the CO2 products and do the water cleanup. But it is, to your point, it's going to just continue to be a growing problem and the ability to put that waste to work by producing power and sequestering those emissions, it can actually be part of the solution in a way that we think people would be really excited about.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to get to the part where the rocket propulsion technology turns the biomass into energy. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Brad Hartwig of Arbor Energy and now we’re going to get into the HOW of it all. And rockets. 

Molly Wood 

So staying on this kind of first side of the equation, the power generation, what is that process? Have you invented a whole new process for turning this biomass into energy?

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, are not creating any new science. is very understood technologies or a cycle. It's a recuperated Brayton cycle. What we're essentially doing is we are combusting the material. We're doing it in two stages.

Molly Wood 

Like, no big deal. You're like, we're just gonna do this and this and then this and then... you know.

Brad Hartwig 

And we're using a process called oxy combustion, which is very familiar to the rocket engine world, where you basically in a rocket engine, are combusting your fuel, be it rocket grade kerosene, methane, hydrogen. You burn that with, with pure oxygen. And that works for rocket propulsion. You're basically not having to carry all of the

the rest of what would be air or nitrogen with you. And in space, you don't have air. So when you are looking to burn something in space, you have to bring oxygen with you. What we're doing here is when we combust the biomass in stages with pure oxygen, biomass really kind of regardless of flavor is primarily carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. There are ash constituents, there's other trace species.

And that's part of the reason we do this staged combustion is to separate out some of those non-volatile constituents. But when we do oxy combustion, all of the carbon gets converted into CO2, all of the hydrogen gets converted into water. We send that at really high pressures and temperatures through, through turbo machinery that turns a generator to create power, just like you'd see in a traditional power plant.

develop our own turbo machinery because of the way that we do this reaction. But what is interesting is when you do this oxy combustion process, after you've produced power, your exhaust is just CO2 and water. And it then becomes, it's very easy to condense the water out and you can just clean that water up and actually have the system produces fresh water as a byproduct. And then you have a stream of

of mostly pure high pressure CO2 that is ready for durable sequestration, durable storage underground. And we don't need to scrub CO2 from a flue gas, which is how carbon capture is traditionally done. You're using amines, you're throwing chemicals at the flue gas to grab onto the CO2 and then you have to...

Brad Hartwig 

regenerate that amine or sorbent to separate the CO2. It's very energy intensive. We have a cycle that gives you a pure high pressure stream of CO2 that's ready for permanent storage as the default.

Molly Wood 

Wow. How long did it take to kind of div... So, all right, one of those things at a time. So oxycombustion existed, but for this pretty different use, right? Fueling rockets, for example, as a primary. it sounds like one of the primary innovations is to say, hey, we can treat biomass like a rocket and produce energy that way. Okay, so how hard is that? It's like, I'm gonna take all these hard things.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, yeah. So it's funny, it's actually easier to burn biomass in pure oxygen just because it has more oxygen available. It's easier for a fuel particle to find an oxygen molecule. there's less of nitrogen and traditional air combustion doesn't participate in the reaction. it's actually easier. They're just.

Molly Wood 

one at a time.

Brad Hartwig 

historically hasn't been a whole lot of reason to do it if you didn't care about sequestering the CO2. So really what we're seeing is this is a

Molly Wood

If you were just gonna burn stuff and you don't care what happens to that exhaust, like, just burn it. Kinda, yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

Right, exactly. And it's interesting because biomass is actually, it's traditionally looked at as a dirtier renewable energy because you are burning something. And even if it's mostly neutral emissions, the biomass pulled the CO2 out of the atmosphere when it was growing, it's going to release it back when it's combusted. But you still have all of these particulates, all of these other emissions that are being emitted at a point source.

And so if you have a power plant that's burning biomass, do have a smokestack in a traditional bioenergy plant. What's interesting is our system in a steady state does not produce emissions. There is no need for a smokestack. You essentially are producing fresh water and then a stream of CO2 that is plugged deep underground that's putting the CO2 basically back where it...

came from, back where we extract, originally humans extract fossil fuels. And so it's really just a new application of a technology that is well understood. We have a lot of kind of secret sauce and innovation around how we control temperatures inside the engine, how we make sure that it's producing the most amount of power, but is not putting the hardware at risk.

because of hotspots or because we're running the reaction too hot. So there's a lot in the engineering of it that takes folks that have experience doing this for, in some cases, decades. And so we're able to pull a lot on that skill set and apply it to this problem. And really, it's just, we see as the...

interest in doing something about emissions, about the climate problem is really kind of the catalyst for this being exciting. And that's what we've seen on the engineering side too, people excited to work on this.

Molly Wood 

So are you saying you have a bunch of rocket scientists on staff? Sweet, awesome. Which part of this, which part of this tail was wagging the dog? when you think about, like you've designed an end-to-end system, but I wonder which end you were starting on. Like were you initially thinking, okay, I wanna decarbonize power generation, or were you thinking I wanna sequester carbon? Which grew out of the other as you were kind of iterating?

Brad Hartwig 

We have a lot of rocket scientists on staff. Yeah.

Brad Hartwig

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah.

Yeah, very, very good question. So this, was actually first and foremost trying to figure out how are we going to remove humanity's legacy carbon emissions.

Molly Wood 

Okay, so was the carbon sequestration that drove the conversation initially. Yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

Right. It was basically, we have a lot of cleanup work to do. That cleanup work is not going to be cheap. And so what are other vehicles for having that cleanup work essentially be paid for? what I'm really excited about is the ability to, you know, all other carbon removal solutions require energy and in many cases, a lot of energy. This is the only

Molly Wood 

Yep.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Brad Hartwig 

solution that can sequester carbon while producing power and do so actually in a large and meaningful way and around the clock. So kind of addressing a key gap in renewables is there's a lot of interest, especially what we're seeing with growing demand for power from data centers that want to run 24 seven from electrification, transportation industry.

is the need for baseload power is a very in demand commodity. And if that can help us pay for carbon removal in a way where I think that is the fundamental economics problem that we are trying to solve for. There's a lot of exciting and fancy engineering that's happening in the background, but it's really at the end of the day, it's an economic problem.

and it's how do we incentivize drawdown of carbon removal, cleanup of our environment. And I think this may be, this is the best tool that I've been able to see as something that's actually thermodynamically and economically viable and at scale.

Molly Wood 

I'm gonna just, as a side note, start referring to things in my life as thermodynamically viable. I don't care what those things are. Like, for example, is this coffee thermodynamically viable for me today? Okay, so let's talk deployment because clearly what you have described is not a bolt-on solution for existing infrastructure. Like, you are gonna have to build some new power plants. So how do we get that done and how big a deal is that?

Brad Hartwig 

Yes.

Brad Hartwig 

correct.

Yes.

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, it's a big deal. It is not for the faint of heart. I'll say that upfront. This is technology development and project development. We actually see a growing amount of interest in Greenfield projects because of the additionality requirement when groups are looking to procure power. So if we were just going to retrofit existing assets, that is something that we can

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

It's more of a repowering, it's more of a knockdown and leveraging some of the existing infrastructure, but for groups that are looking to procure power and care about their emissions targets, if they're bringing a new data center online, they need to work with utility partners and energy providers that are going to bring new power assets online. Because they can't, if they just...

have a solar farm divert their power to their operations and then the grid loses that power, they haven't actually done anything because they did not finance or support the growth of the renewable industry. And so we actually see this as a requirement in terms of expanding really the decarbonization of the grid.

as well as alignment with our commercial partners. This is necessary actually that we're building new things and we're building a lot of them to address growing demand as well as decarbonize what exists today. So it is harder and I think everyone that has come to Arbor so far understands this is not easy and it's not going to be easy for

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig

really the foreseeable future. But what we see is we can produce engines very quickly. We could get to a point where we can produce 1,500 megawatts of systems per day. And then it's just a matter of finding project partners to help us get them on the ground, deployed into operational.

utilities, power plants. We will have to, what we see is we'll have to deploy the first couple of projects so that we get that demonstrated operating history so that we can show to the world.

Molly Wood

That's what I was wondering as like how important is that first of a kind to de-risk this?

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, we see this is like the classic valley of death for any climate technology or any, any technology startup that is doing infrastructure is getting through that first deployment, even second deployment and finding good financial partners and commercial partners that understand these are higher risk, you know, higher risk profile projects. But at the same time, the.

investors and partners that are coming in are being most catalytic as well. So finding the right partners, everything from impact investors to groups that see the long-term potential of the technology and the ability to scale a new asset class of carbon negative power have a lot to gain both from

kind of the impact that they can catalyze as well as a new market that they can catalyze. And really the goal is that we can help our stakeholders, that we do have a path to making a strong return for our stakeholders in a way that is the more we deploy, the more good we do for the environment.

Molly Wood 

Certainly you have some big names behind you already in climate investing. are you on, would you say your timeline to first or second of a kind?

Brad Hartwig

Yeah, our goal, so we have a pilot right now that we are testing in phases. It's a one megawatt pilot, but our first commercial deployment we expect to be in 2027. it's, yeah, getting sooner and sooner with each passing day.

Molly Wood

That's soon.

Molly Wood

Like you can't see that everybody but a little flash of panic happened. Just like yeah I know that's soon.

Brad Hartwig 

It's yeah, we think it's aggressive but worth trying and that's at the end of the day, is the climate problem is only becoming more and more real. And so we need to really be working with haste as you know, as we would a true emergency. And that's

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

I would rather be aggressive on our timelines and miss that than taking our time in a way that is not supporting the actual level of action required.

Molly Wood

It is the time to be aggressive. What would help you the most? What would be the biggest, if you could spin up a tailwind for yourselves, what would it be?

Brad Hartwig 

Yeah, think we, do think we actually have potentially a lot of tailwinds in the markets right now, which is incredible to see. I think the biggest thing we're

Molly Wood

Like, when you say that, just to put a fine point on it, because this is coming up in every conversation, I mean, you know, I've done a whole series on it, like, are you talking about AI? Like, is AI and data center demand weirdly a tailwind for you?

Brad Hartwig

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig

Yeah.

Brad Hartwig 

It is weirdly catalytic. And I think in part, I see this in a handful of ways. One, think the demand from these groups that, know, kind of the hyperscalers are better capitalized than many countries. And they can use their power demand to actually be catalytic for new technologies like

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Brad Hartwig

hours to mature through the early phases to widespread commercial viability. And I think these groups are, they're in enough of a pinch that they're willing and excited to try a lot of things that they might have deemed too risky even a couple of years ago. And I do believe with our commercial partners, they see

both the need for 24 seven carbon free energy and carbon removal. And these are really, they're almost empires. The leaders of these organizations are going to be leading their organizations much longer than any administration. And I think they do offer some almost weird stability in what can otherwise be seen as a very chaotic time.

But it's, yeah, we are excited to have some really good partners to that end. And I think now it's just continuing to be well-capitalized, continuing to get the right talent so that we can scale and execute on the first couple of projects. That is really what I see is those are our immediate challenges in front of us. There will, then it'll be scaling up.

manufacturing and production and trying to be repeatable in execution. But right now, we're still in this period of going from zero to one. And so it's continuing to find the right partners that believe in the vision and the long-term potential of this and are excited to be a part of it.

Molly Wood 

Hartwig is the co-founder and CEO of Arbor Energy. If you are one of those people and you're listening, hit him up. To the moon everybody. Thank you so much for the time. ~~Alright so since then have you read the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson?~~

Brad Hartwig 

Thank you, Molly. Great.

**MW VO:** 

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