Barclay Rogers: 0:00

We also need to think about what I call the time value of carbon. And that is that, a tonne of CO2 emitted today is basically adding to the overall insulating effect around the planet that's effectively trapping more heat that heat's largely getting stored in the ocean. So, either abating or removing a tonne of CO2 today versus 25 or 50 years from now, there's much more value in doing it today.

Tom Raftery: 0:35

That turns carbon removal from a distant end game into a practical question of what we can credibly deploy now and at what cost. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, where everywhere in the world, this is Climate confident Stories and Strategies that Cut Emissions. Episode 295, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. My guest today is Barclay Rogers, founder and CEO of Graphyte. He argues that durable removal has to be measurable, financeable, and scalable, while confronting the harder question of where removal belongs alongside emissions cuts. First, the model itself.

Barclay Rogers: 1:23

Just to give a little bit of context about what Graphyte is and what we do. So we're a durable carbon removal company. That means we're taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in a way that is directly measurable and keeping that carbon dioxide from returning, to the atmosphere for very long, periods of time. So that's sort of what is known as durable carbon removal. In Graphyte's case, we are basically letting plants, so think vegetation naturally captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Unfortunately, most of that carbon dioxide captured by those plants returns back to the atmosphere when those plants simply die or decompose. And so what we're doing is working with the industries that grow plants for a living, think agriculture and timber industries, taking their byproducts. Again, that material contains roughly 50% carbon and effectively introducing a series of engineering steps to to ensure that the carbon captured by plants does not return to the atmosphere.

Tom Raftery: 2:23

And what problem did you see in the carbon removal space that made you think that Graphyte was necessary?

Barclay Rogers: 2:31

Yeah, it's a great question. So in the carbon removal space as you may know, you basically got two ends of the spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have what are called nature-based solutions. This is often planting of a plant of some variety, right? So think in the agriculture context of, growing a cover crop, for example. That's one end of the spectrum. The nature-based end of the spectrum. The benefit of that end of the spectrum is that, you're letting sunlight power, your carbon capture device, i.e. a plant. The challenge of that end of the spectrum, again, nature-based solutions is you never are quite certain how much carbon has been captured or for what duration. So think of that just for a moment as the nature-based end of the, carbon removal spectrum. Now go to the other end of the spectrum, what is often called engineered, carbon removal. And kind of the classic example here is direct air capture. And in that case, you've built a machine. That machine requires a lot of energy input to separate carbon dioxide from atmospheric air. Once that CO2 is separated from atmospheric air, you store it generally in a geologic reservoir. And so in that case, you've got good permanence, it's going into a geologic reservoir. You have good measurability, but it's very significant, very expensive, right? And also very energy intensive. So those are the two ends of the spectrum. And what Graphyte is looking to do is effectively be a hybrid solution, getting the best of both worlds. So in our case, we're letting plants capture CO2 naturally through photosynthesis. Again, we're taking the byproducts of agriculture and timber, and we're using engineering to effectively ensure that that carbon captured by those plants does not, return to the atmosphere. So that's the reason is you could see, the two ends of the spectrum. They have, positives, right? Different positives and different ends of the spectrum, but they also have drawbacks. And so what Graphyte, basically, what we set out to do is, to take the best of both of those worlds and effectively create a low cost, highly durable carbon removal solution. And a process that we now call Carbon Casting.

Tom Raftery: 4:34

Okay. You didn't mention enhanced weatherization as one of the carbon capture methods.

Barclay Rogers: 4:39

Yeah, it's, there's a number of different, types of, carbon capture measures, you know, enhanced rock weathering, it is a little bit of a hybrid itself. Right. And sort of the, positives there are that it most likely is storing carbon dioxide for very long periods of time. The challenge around enhanced rock weathering is really around the, modelling side. So when I was talking about nature-based solutions, right, there was two questions around nature-based solutions. One is, how much have I captured? And two, for how long? In the case of enhanced rock weathering, you're able to answer the how long question quite confidently, the how much question. It's a model. I'm not suggesting that it's, not, capturing CO2 because I, I firmly believe it is, but it's, a difficult technology to directly measure. You have to rely on a model and if you're modelling, you introduce some degree of uncertainty.

Tom Raftery: 5:35

Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Let's get straight to the tension.'cause carbon removal is exciting, but it's also controversial. You, you know, a lot of people hear carbon credits and think that it's a licence to pollute. Where is that criticism right?

Barclay Rogers: 5:51

Well, I think there's a, couple of, ways of thinking about this and talking about this, and I'm just going to, speak from my own perspective here. So I've been in the carbon management business for more than 15 years at this point in time and have been working climate change arena more broadly, more than 20, maybe even close to 25 years at this point in time. And so what that's taught me, those last, couple of decades of experience is the need for pragmatism. Okay. I think the more ideologically pure or however you want to, characterise it, can often stand in the, in the way of just, practical progress, right? And so, if we get into an argument about like, okay, should we abate everything and then only remove, once we're, we have abated everything, then we've kind of just let ideology, come before practical considerations. And so my own view of this is, of course we need to abate, we need to abate as much as possible, but we also need to remove, okay, so that's the broad setup. Now. Let's go a little bit deeper into that question. And so, because there two things become really important. One is the cost per tonne of CO2. I very much believe that, all of carbon, you know, management abatement and removal needs to be investigated on a dollar per tonne of CO2 how much does it cost to do it? And also just technological pragmatism question, like how hard is it to do it? What is the natural replacement cycle of a particular you know, emitting facility? There's a lot of considerations around the feasibility of, taking a tonne of CO2, either, not emitting it or removing it from the atmosphere. So I would just characterise that broadly as cost and, technological feasibility. I think that's a very important consideration. And then I think we also need to think about what I call the time value of carbon. Right. And that is that, a tonne of CO2 emitted today is basically adding to the overall insulating effect around the planet that's effectively trapping more heat that heat's largely getting stored in the ocean. So, either abating or removing a tonne of CO2 today versus 25 or 50 years from now, there's much more value in doing it today. So that's kind of what I would characterise as kind of like a, techno economic analysis meets a climate change, scientific perspective. And then, so to bring those two together, yes, I do think we need to abate. I also think we need to remove, and I think the curve that we should be building for ourselves is effectively a supply curve of blended abatement and removal. That is looking at how much does it cost, how soon can you do it? Do those first things, lowest cost things first.

Tom Raftery: 8:47

And should removals only be used for residual emissions after deep cuts or, how do you.

Barclay Rogers: 8:53

I don't really see it like that. I mean, it's not to, kind of challenge the orthodoxy you know, should we abate first or should we remove first? I just think that's an ideological perspective, and I have a practical perspective on this, and I think the, practical perspective is we need to address climate change. The way you address climate change is you lower the atmospheric concentrations of CO2. The way you do that, in the fastest and most economically efficient manner is do what I was just describing. And that is essentially take the technologies that are lowest cost today, that are feasible today, and do those. And then, take the technologies next step on the, the supply curve, if you will, and do those technologies tomorrow or next year, right? The idea is like you're building, a abatement slash removal curve that is based upon technical feasibility and cost and not on ideology.

Tom Raftery: 9:47

There's a real fault line in that answer. Barclay isn't saying removal should wait until every feasible emissions cut has been exhausted. He's arguing that abatement and removal should compete on cost, feasibility, and timing. That's a contested framing and it leads to the next question. Even if you accept it, can removals scale to something that matters? You announced recently a deal with JP Morgan removing 60,000 tonnes over 10 years. That's obviously commercially very important, but climatically, it's insignificant, I would think. What has to be true for this to scale to something that matters?

Barclay Rogers: 10:36

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think, there's a lot of ways of looking at this. Okay. But I think the, the way that, I look at it is really from that kind of practical perspective, right? And the practical pieces are number one, does your technology work? So you need to build a, either removal or abatement technology for that, for what it's worth, right? That works, right? That actually keeps, CO2 from entering the atmosphere or is able to remove that tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere. And then second is you need paying customers. You need someone who is willing, to pay you to provide that service, right? And so, you know, I think any, certainly any startup executive, any kind of practical minded business person is going to say, that's how you build a company is you build a technology that works and you find people that are willing to pay for it.

Tom Raftery: 11:22

And what would you think, what will break first at scale? Would it be feedstock? Land? Capital? Policy? Monitoring? Community trust? Something else? All of the above?

Barclay Rogers: 11:36

Yeah. So, you know, I think, again, I'll come back to the Carbon Casting process and let me just describe it in a couple of practical steps.'cause then I can answer your question much more directly. So the, process is using byproducts of agriculture and timber. So again, think of things like rice hulls from the agricultural context. Think of things like sawdust and bark and things like that from the timber context. So that, material in the United States, there's about 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents every year that's effectively lost. That is in the kind of the biomass residual category. We have a billion tonnes CO2 of material sitting around. It is unutilised and in it returns to the atmosphere. It's either burned or simply decomposes. So that gives you some sense of the, the scale with that's in the United States alone. You scale that up globally and you're into the, the many billions of tonnes of CO2 equivalents, per year. So that's on the side of the feed stocks, right? And the amount of carbon captured, naturally in these sort of timber and agriculture industries. Now, just to walk through what we do and, and how we do it. So that material, that causes biomass to break down, that causes the CO2 and or the carbon within biomass to be released back into the atmosphere is effectively microbial decomposition. Little bugs essentially go in and eat the carbon, and excrete it. And that's how the carbon returns back to the atmosphere. So our technology, what we call Carbon Casting, essentially rests on the basic idea that microbes, like all living organisms need water to live. If you're able to dry the biomass below a certain moisture content, you halt microbial decomposition. Once that is stopped, you've effectively permanently captured that carbon and kept it from reentering the atmosphere. So that's the kind of the, principles. Lots of, carbon dioxide equivalents and biomass residuals. Relatively straightforward scientific principle of how to keep that from returning to the atmosphere. Now how do we do it? Right? So what we do is we take, essentially waste streams, from agriculture, and timber. I'll use our project in Arkansas as a practical example. They're growing rice, they're milling the rice for human consumption. The husk around the rice grain you can't eat that. So they remove that husk. That becomes a byproduct. We take that as a feedstock. We dry that material down, we grind it up, we compress it essentially to allow for greater density. Then we encase it in a waterproof barrier. At that point, we have dry encased biomass. You've essentially captured the carbon at that point in time. Now we go to the permanent storage side of the equation. And so what we do there is we go to the again, this is all about making use of underutilised assets within the natural resource economy. So in this case, we're going to the mining industry now, so going to former essentially exhausted surface mines. Things like limestone quarries, gravel pits, things along those lines is what I, like to call existing holes in the ground. So we go to those existing holes in the ground, essentially abandoned lands, and we effectively refill them, right? And we do so in a very controlled way. So we're taking lessons effectively from the waste management industry, you know, reversing that process. So we go to that existing hole, we line it with a waterproof barrier on the bottom. We place the dry encased biomass on top of that liner. We place another liner on top of that, sealing it, effectively creating what I call a layer cake as we refill that hole and permanently storing, that carbon. And just for what it's worth, when we're done with the essentially what we would call the sequestration site, so the former mine that we have refilled, we create a park, right? So we u reutilise the surface of that either for a park or, a solar facility or some other public benefit asset. Could be wildlife habitat. It depends a lot on, the particulars of the project. Okay? So that's the process that we would call Carbon Casting. Now, let's go to your questions of what are the key impediments to scale. Okay? Number one, I'm gonna just answer them. The ones that are not okay, I will ultimately answer the one that is right, but the ones that are not, the technology is proven. Okay? So we're currently issuing credits today. We've issued, approaching 20,000 credits thus far. So in the durable carbon removal space, that's among the larger you know, we are among the larger issuers of carbon credits. So the technology works. So that's not an impediment to scaling. The biomass material is not the constraining resource either. Jump over to the land. The, the sequestration site. Number one, we're taking, you know, these former, mining assets, right? And turning them into public benefit assets and of doing carbon removal along the way. And two is the amount of, carbon that we can store per unit, area of land is very high. Okay? So we're able to store, depends a little bit on the specifics of, a given site, but somewhere to 25 to 50,000 tonnes of CO2 per acre of land, okay? And so you're able to store significant amounts of carbon in relatively small areas. So you're also not land constrained. So, so it's not technology, it's not biomass, it's not land. What it is is it's demand constraint. How much are people willing to buy? The types of, prices that durable carbon removal commands.

Tom Raftery: 17:03

After all that process detail, the important claim is simple. Barclay says the bottleneck isn't biomass, land, or the core technology. It's demand. That's Graphyte's view and some of the numbers behind it deserve verification. But even if the inputs are available on paper, what happens when you actually build the thing? What gets difficult in the real world?

Barclay Rogers: 17:32

A few things, right? Is, every business is going to have its challenges. And I think every manufacturing process is going to have unanticipated challenges. Okay? You, you lay it all out on paper, it looks great, this thing's gonna work perfectly. Then you turn it on and you realise, oh, this machine doesn't connect to that machine, so smoothly. And so I think that is, true in any technology, certainly in any carbon removal technology. Now, that said, I'm gonna talk about how that's a little bit of an asset for, Graphyte and our Carbon Casting process. And the reason is, is I, spent a long time in the startup world, and one of the edicts from the startup world in the software space is just always ship, product, right? As like, get your code out there and it's not meant to be proud of, but you can fix it later, right? It's like get, you know, deploy and then, debug, right? And that, you know, has been a dominating sort of thesis around the, certainly the startup space in the software world for a very long time. Now, what's challenging with that in most carbon removal is the CapEx for the, the capital expenses for the facilities is often, hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's very hard to, ship and, and debug, right? If you, have a hundred million or 200 or $500 million facility. Now, in our case, and this is why again, I think it's somewhat of an attribute for us, is our CapEx for our facilities is relatively small. It's 10 to $15 million per 50,000 tonne CO2 per year line, okay? Kind of All in. You could build a 50,000 tonne per year CO2 removal, project for on the order of 10 to $15 million. And so what that means is we can build it and then we can realise, oh wait, that machine doesn't connect with that machine quite so well, it's not a $10 million mistake. It's not a million dollar mistake, it's a 50 or a hundred thousand dollars mistake that you can fix. Okay? And so I really like that. I like the fact that we were able to deploy, ship, ship, ship, if you will, and then we can fix our problems along the way. I think that, is a real attribute for us. And honestly, something that has, you know, stood in the way of many decarbonisation activities is you spend all of your time planning and you never actually build anything, right? In our case, we're able to build, improve, innovate, build the next one.

Tom Raftery: 20:01

There's a point here that's easy to miss if Barclay's CapEx numbers are right, lower cost isn't just an economics advantage, it's a learning speed advantage. You can build, find the weak points, fix them, and build again without every mistake becoming existential. But fast iteration only matters if the underlying removal can be measured and trusted. I read a bit about Project Loblolly, which is giving you monitoring data. Obviously, for people who are listening, they won't know about this, so can you talk to us a little bit about that? How you're getting real monitoring data and what it taught you?

Barclay Rogers: 20:43

Yeah. So, measurement, reporting and verification. The acronym is, MRV. Now come back to Graphyte and our Carbon Casting process. Our MRV system is as good as I will, in fact argue better, but as good as geologic sequestration of CO2. And the reason is, is we're able to directly measure the amount of carbon in the biomass material. So you know, for certain how much carbon is in the material, you have the direct weight of that material. So it's very simple arithmetic to go from mass times carbon content to get to CO2 equivalent. So very high degree of certainty with respect to the amount of carbon that has been captured. Now, just go to the call that the M you know, in, MRV, now go to the V the verification. In our case, I described our sequestration site before the former mine that we've effectively engineered a layer cake by sort of storing that encased carbon encased biomass. In these, zones, one on top of the other. Each one of those zones is a hermetically sealed chamber. It's effectively, you've at a bottom liner, you've placed a biomass, you've placed a top liner, you've welded those two closed. I jokingly refer to this as the world's largest Ziploc bag. But the idea is that you've, created a, a sealed chamber, and within that chamber we have gas collection pipes. So within that zone where we have stored that biomass, we are collecting you know, entombed gases, if you will, right? So we're measuring the amount of CO2, we're measuring the amount of methane, we're measuring the temperature and pressure and other sort of indicators of any activities. And we were able to conclusively show that that carbon that is in that biomass that was stored in that chamber is not off gassing, it is not releasing CO2 or methane providing conclusive evidence that the carbon that was captured by the plant is not returning to the atmosphere.

Tom Raftery: 22:36

And what have you learned from coming up with this process?

Barclay Rogers: 22:40

There's many things that I, I have learned, I'll take this in a somewhat, maybe interesting direction. And so I think many people focused in the carbon space, many, climate change oriented you know, we think a lot about science. We think a lot about technology. We might even think a lot about, finance and economics. But what we often don't think enough about is project development. That is, if you're going to decarbonise the economy, you have to build things, okay? And if you're going to build things, you need to build things in places where people want you to build them, right? And you see this time and time again, that new technologies, crop up. People don't invest enough in understanding, getting to know, showing some real benefits to the local communities. And guess what? The local communities fight back, right? And that slows your progress. And so, you know, one of the things that we have done at Graphyte, I have spent, as I mentioned earlier, roughly 20 years in the decarbonisation space, is we focus a lot on getting to know the local community, communicating with them what we're doing, so that when it comes time to build a project, to, get a permit, they know who we are, they know what we do. And it doesn't engender a lot of, public opposition to our projects. I think that's very important for the industry, certainly something that we take very seriously here at Graphyte.

Tom Raftery: 24:30

And let's connect all this now to the JP Morgan deal and the wildfire angle, 'cause we haven't discussed that just yet. So can you explain what the wildfire mitigation angle is and why that matters commercially?

Barclay Rogers: 24:43

Yeah. So, as you'll recall, our process relies on biomass, biomass, residuals that aren't used in another process already. That material has carbon. Now, how does that relate to wildfires? Just bear with me for a minute. Let's talk about wildfire science, right? And forest management. And so, I'm really talking about here is mostly the western United States. That's the area that I'm most knowledgeable about. But what we've had is a hundred years or more of certain forest management practises, particularly about fire suppression that has resulted in what is now called overstocked forest. So if you just think about the number of, trees per acre of land, right? We've effectively allowed for too many trees, particularly too many small diameter trees to kind of crowd the forest out that has a couple of negative impacts. Number one is it results in effectively a tinder box waiting to catch fire. Okay? So you've got a lot of biomass closely packed together, and strangely enough, it actually limits the overall forest growth, right? If you had fewer of those small diameter trees competing for water, competing for sunlight, competing for nutrients, actually you're bigger, more established trees will actually in fact get bigger, but they're further apart, so they're less of a, of kind of a fire contagion risk. Okay? So that's a hundred years or so of forest management has resulted in this over dense or overstocked western forest, dynamic. So the foresters of the world have learned this, and they are trying to correct that. And the way they're correcting that is these thinning projects, right? So leaving the big, diameter trees and essentially removing the small diameter trees and brush and the, what is called non merchantable timber. Now the non merchantable is the key word there, right? So that's how Graphyte enters the story is because this small diameter tree, again, think of a two inch diameter tree or a four inch diameter tree. You can't make a, anything from that, right? It's not big enough to make a board or so forth, or not worth, hauling far away. And so we are effectively able to create commercial demand for that material. And allowing it to come off the forest, not just be cut down and burned in the forest, which is what happens today. So we effectively pay for that material to be removed. We turn it into carbon removal. That's how we get paid. JP Morgan is the, prime example there. But importantly is that's providing a financial incentive to further do the forest cleaning the forest, thinning. And so there's really a, many pronged benefit here, but just to keep it very focused on the forest for a moment is we all understand we need to remove those trees. We need to do so, particularly in proximity to urban areas, places where people live. No one wants their homes to catch on fire, okay? So we are engaging in that, but there is no commercial market for that material. If there is, it's a very limited commercial market. So we then step in, take that material, we get paid in the form of carbon durable carbon removals, providing an economic incentive for the, next acre of forest to be thinned and, and further reducing the wildfire risk.

Tom Raftery: 27:52

Very nice. And where does biomass based carbon removal not make sense?

Barclay Rogers: 28:00

I'm not sure I know the answer to that question, so I just, I, I paused for a long time there.'cause I will go back to, you know, the way that when I started Graphyte, and certainly the way that I see the carbon removal landscape is in a supply curve sense. And that is, let's figure out how the different carbon removal technologies, how much they cost, how feasible are they today? And I think you see that in the data today, right? You see it in, CDR.FYI does a, a fantastic job of tracking both sales and deliveries within the durable carbon removal space. And what you see is the quote BCR category. The biomass carbon removal category is dominant and it is dominant for the reason that I just described. It is feasible. It is relatively lower cost. It is the thing that we should be doing and we are doing first.

Tom Raftery: 28:49

That answer leaves one thing unresolved Barclay has made the case for biomass removal as a relatively lower cost deployable option, but he hasn't really defined where it stops making sense. Every technology has boundary conditions, so rather than pretend that question is settled, let me ask a different one. What has the real world forced Graphyte itself to rethink?

Barclay Rogers: 29:16

I think the thing that has been somewhat of a surprise to me is, I started out again very much like I just have a techno economic mindset, right? I was like, of course this is, you know, makes sense, right? We can, directly measure it. It cost a fraction of, competing technologies. It's deployable today. And, I would say I in founding Graphyte and kind of entering the market, you know, I really kind of led with that techno economic story. What I learned along the way is techno economics are important, but is not the only thing that is important. People need a broader narrative around the technology as well. Not just that it makes sense, you know, because you can, build it and, and it's, it's relatively low cost, but fits into a broader, narrative.

Tom Raftery: 30:03

Very good. And over the next five to 10 years, what has to happen for durable carbon removal to become material?

Barclay Rogers: 30:11

Yeah, scale, scale, scale. Right. So I think the last, couple of years, Graphyte was founded in, 2023. So just over three years old. And what I would say, you know, we'll just kind of put a general lens of, you know, the last five years, I think it's been a real technology proving ground period of time, what works, what doesn't, what's, can be done within reasonable cost realms. What can't. I think as we start to start wind down that technology exploratory phase, or at least this, this phase of that, technology exploration, then it really is about taking those technologies that have proven themself, capable of working at reasonable price points and getting those to scale. Getting those to scale through, commercial demand, through government policies, getting out of the lab, if you will, and getting into the real world, you know, and building these projects and getting them to scale. At the same time, we'll be needing to incubate those technologies. It'll be the next on the supply curve, but again, I think, right now the name of the game is taking the technologies that work, let's get them to a reasonable scale as we incubate the next wave of technologies.

Tom Raftery: 31:22

Okay, superb. time now, Barclay for the lightning round of questions, short questions and one sentence answers. Okay. So cut emissions or buy removals first?

Barclay Rogers: 31:36

Both.

Tom Raftery: 31:38

Okay. Biggest bottleneck money, land, trust, policy, something else?

Barclay Rogers: 31:44

Demand. Demand slash policy

Tom Raftery: 31:47

Okay. What should buyers stop doing tomorrow?

Barclay Rogers: 31:51

They should start to think of getting carbon removals to more of a commodity like product, less treating it like a bespoke suit, more treating it like mass manufactured blue jeans.

Tom Raftery: 32:07

Okay, fast tonnes or perfect tonnes?

Barclay Rogers: 32:12

Fast.

Tom Raftery: 32:13

Okay. One phrase, buyers should remember?

Barclay Rogers: 32:17

Buy now.

Tom Raftery: 32:19

Okay. That's the end of the lightning round, now a left field question for you. So if you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a champion for durable carbon removal, who would it be and why?

Barclay Rogers: 32:40

I'll answer this one in a funny way. It'll be John Gault. And so, I don't know if you remember Atlas Shrugged, the Ayn Rand novel, right? But the idea is that, John Gault was a builder, right? He was a builder. But the, point is, is that we need more builders and we need more enthusiasm for building, decarbonisation. And so, it's just what I, would really cheer for and, and encourage is like, let's get more builders in this space. Let's get people who can articulate the vision of building, how it helps community, how it creates jobs, creates jobs in rural places. So strangely, my answer is John Gault.

Tom Raftery: 33:20

Interesting. Great. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Barclay. Is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I had, or any aspect of this we haven't covered that you feel is important for people to be aware of?

Barclay Rogers: 33:34

So I think one of the things that we need to think about, with respect to how the, durable car removal space is maturing. And so as we enter scaling, I think we need to start thinking about finance, right? So finance is a critical element to getting the durable carbon removal industry to a meaningful size, right? You need to do that with project level investing. Venture capital only take you so far, it's expensive capital, it's limited, you know, in the overall capital pool deployed in, venture capital. And so we need to get to project scaling. And so as I, would encourage all of us is, let's think about the technologies that work, particularly those that are capable of getting project level finance. Let's get behind those, get those finance, get them working at meaningful scales that will provide a template for the next round of technologies as they mature.

Tom Raftery: 34:25

Excellent, great. Super Barclay. That's been fascinating. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Barclay Rogers: 34:34

So for those of you who are interested in learning more about Graphyte, the best resource is www.Graphyte.com. That's G-R-A-P-H-Y-T-E.com.

Tom Raftery: 34:45

Superb. Barclay, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Barclay Rogers: 34:49

Thanks so much, Tom. Really appreciate it.