This is an outstandingly fun podcast with Jon Grimmer of Verde CO2; he is a true industry thought leader. Whether you believe in (or not) carbon capture, net zero, or climate change, you need to plan on CO2 capture to get federal and private funding.
Connect with Jon on his LinkedIn HERE.
Verde is leading Carbon Capture Utilization & Storage (CCUS) projects throughout the United States and offers real-world solutions to help meet our carbon reduction goals. Follow us on LinkedIn to see what we’re doing and learn more about CCS. https://www.linkedin.com/company/verde-co2.
Learn about Verde CO2 HERE:
Highlights of the Podcast
00:00 – Intro
01:21 – Tell us about your experience in the Oil and Gas space
02:48 -talk about Verde in your projects
04:42 – Texas General Land Office
05:31 – How do you capture that coal and then get it to storage?
06:30 – How clean is your solutions and what you designed to get the emissions on that?
07:06 – Is this the same process for a natural gas plant?
08:13 – Talks about Project Management Fees in the Business
11:23 – How do you guys go get new business?
12:03 – Carbon Credits
16:00 – Regulations
19:13 – How can you do Business in the Northeast?
20:52 – Talks About Pipelines
23:38 – Talk about Storage
24:56 – Are you using Combo Curve or Enverus in CO2 Sequestration?
27:43 – How do people get a hold of you and how do people get a hold of Verde and what do you see coming around the corner
31:39 – The EIA last year said the biggest reason that we have reduced our carbon footprint in the United States was due to closing down coal and going to natural gas.
32:53 – Refineries Downstream, Can you work with downstream on some of this stuff?
34:20 – Outro
Full Automated Transcript Below – We disavow any mistakes unless they make us smarter or better looking.
Stuart Turley [00:00:05] All right. Hey. Today’s a great day. It’s not only Friday. I got a great guest today. Welcome to the Energy News Beat podcast. My name is Stuart Turley Present CEO of the Sandstone Group. I got a fantastic guest I got the President of Verde, a little bit of CO2 and carbon capture we’re going to get to talk about. John, is the president over there Welcome John and thank you for stopping by the podcast.
Joe Grimmer [00:00:30] Stu Good morning, sir it’s a real pleasure to be with you today got an exciting topic to dive into we’re going to cover a lot of breadth and still a lot of legislation that we need to dive into, a lot of activity, a couple of recent deals getting announced so it’s indeed an exciting day.
Stuart Turley [00:00:48] You know, John, I just love asking questions and learn and love learning about everything. Before the show, you and I were just kind of chit chatting about the importance of getting everybody knows they listen. I love getting the lowest cost kilowatt per hour to all people of the planet and also having the least amount of impact on the environment. That’s exactly where Verde starts fitting into this process. So we’re having a great conversation on this tell us a little bit about you were in the oil and gas space for a bazillion years.
Joe Grimmer [00:01:26] Yeah, I spent a couple of decades in the oil gas industry before this and I will tell you that it was very formative and really essential those skills and experiences in the oil and gas world transferring into the US is required.
Joe Grimmer [00:01:39] We do a lot of well drilling, subsurface characterization, a lot of regulatory permits instead of producing oil and gas out of the ground, we’re now putting fluids into the ground a lot of very detailed technical simulation work. So there’s a lot of transferable skills, a lot of new app map kind of applications as well.
Joe Grimmer [00:01:59] To touch on that last point you made, we believe this Energy Transition is going to be a long, multi-decade transition. And in the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is provide secure energy sources to everyone in the world at the lowest carbon index possible.
Joe Grimmer [00:02:15] And if you want to perform complete CCS on a coal-fired power plant, that’s fine. If you want to install renewable electricity via solar and wind, that’s great as well. We think it’s going to take everything to solve this problem.
Stuart Turley [00:02:30] You know, I just love what you said. It’s going to take everything to solve this problem and the world’s actually increasing coal. I mean, it is bizarre. So will your let’s back up just a hair and talk about Verde in your projects. Do you actually take cradle to grave? Do you project manage? Do you design and then hand? I’ll tell us about Verde where.
Joe Grimmer [00:02:59] CO2 is a full-stop turnkey cradle-to-grave CCUS as a development company the simplest, most desirable format for our business construction will partner with a industrial emitter and we’ll say we’ll take your premier design and install all carbon capture equipment, CO2 transportation lines, permit CO2 sequestration elements met the funding of the capital sources themselves, capital structuring, etc. Management of the 45 CU credits both direct pay and tax equity elements.
Stuart Turley [00:03:29] All right, I’m going to just pick on you here for a sec I noticed your eyes light up as soon as I asked you about your company, your physical. You just changed a little bit. Bam! You turned into this animal of passion that loves your company. I don’t know if you realize that or not, but you dropped into and you love what you’re doing.
Joe Grimmer [00:03:52] It’s an exciting time yeah, we really love what we’re doing. And I believe that CCS is one of the most material and most tangible decarbonization efforts out there were supportive of utilization projects.
Joe Grimmer [00:04:06] You know, we’ve been doing the world’s been doing renewable energy for a while that’s great. We need to keep doing that we’ve already had a lot of the hotspots, the windy spots, the sunny spots. So we think that the next major uplift in the broad decarbonization happens CCS.
Stuart Turley [00:04:23] Now the legislation for they also just had a lease sale, if I remember correctly, in the Gulf. It actually had a lot of good potential for CCS storage.
Joe Grimmer [00:04:39] So what you’re referring to is the Texas Glo, the Texas General Land Office just just finished a offshore lease sale. There were a half dozen blocks off the coast of Texas in state waters. So within three miles of the coast they are open and available for CCUS bidding. And we think that it is going to be very helpful and beneficial. Offshore CCS takes quite a while to develop very CO2 is is more focused on faster projects and we stick to onshore exclusively.
Stuart Turley [00:05:14] Oh, okay. Now on onshore. How do you get this? Let’s say you got a coal plant because I love learning how this goes. And I’ve interviewed some really cool people on the grid and everything else. But when you sit back and go, I got a coal plant and you want to use low cost power. How do you capture that coal and then get it to storage?
Joe Grimmer [00:05:40] Yeah. So basically what we’ll do is take that flue gas. After combusting coal, you’ve got a flue gas which has a bunch of different components. CO2 content is about 15%. And so we’ll put on some very sophisticated need based carbon capture equipment and capture out strip out that CO2.
Joe Grimmer [00:05:58] We then take that CO2, compress it, and you compress it enough such that the CO2 actually becomes more of a liquid phase. They call it supercritical, and then you can put it in a put it in a pipe and take it anywhere you need to. Now, we like to be as close as possible with sequestration side, as close as possible to the emission source for economics. Shorter pipe, shorter the cost shorter the other hurdles.
Stuart Turley [00:06:23] Okay, let’s say we got one of them big O ugly, as we say in Texas, big only, you know, coal plants. How cleaned is your solutions and what you designed get the emissions on that?
Joe Grimmer [00:06:36] In the end of the day, it helps more than just the emissions. So we take out the CO2 there we are also stripping out nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide. So Nox and Sox, we also remove particulates. The amine is the really magic fluid of this carbon capture equipment. It will strip out little bits of this coal particulates. So it’s cleaning up the emission stack in a handful of different ways.
Stuart Turley [00:07:02] Cool! Now. So if we take that, is this the same process for a natural gas plant?
Joe Grimmer [00:07:12] The short answer is yes. There are some tweaks to natural gas and post combustion. Flue gas has a CO2 concentration of 4 to 8%, so much lower than coal, but it’s a slightly cleaner emission so there are some offset benefits that come with that.
Joe Grimmer [00:07:29] So that by and large it’s a similar operation now, as I say that I’ve just described the base carbon capture. There are a whole host of new technologies that are evolving right now, merging from experimental and being tested into the commercial phase that we think are going to really significantly reduce carbon capture CapEx over the next six, eight year or so.
Stuart Turley [00:07:56] Nice! So as Verde CO2 as a business model you’ve got the ability to offer the credit. You know, you clean the scrubber, you clean the the coal, you clean the natural gas, you then ship the CO2 off.
Stuart Turley [00:08:13] So as a business model, you have project management fees that I’m assuming. Again, I don’t know. So, yes, do the project management money operating division coming in. You have the bids, you have all this, then you have the transport where you can make money in the oil and gas space. That would be the midstream and then you have the development area for actually managing the storage or use. Did I get all of those different components right?
Joe Grimmer [00:08:43] That is correct! And the only revenue generator is the carbon capture entity, because per the Treasury guidelines, the 45 Qcredits direct pay or 45 Q is retained by the carbon capture entity. So that’s who will be receiving the credits from the U.S. Treasury and the voluntary offset credits. So that is the revenue generator. Now Invert CO2 owns the captured transport sequestration it is a one holistic projects go and so that’s how it makes money.
Joe Grimmer [00:09:13] There can be a scenario where we deal with a company who wants to do their own carbon capture equipment and they will retain the 40 back. In that case, they’re going to have to pay grid CO2, a fee, a transportation fee, and a sequestration would be to put the seed to the ground.
Stuart Turley [00:09:32] I’m sitting here thinking because my head is sitting here thinking about folks that are making money because we use CO2 in actually trying to do enhancements into drilling. And it is used in other things that you can’t sell that because of the regulations. Is that correct?
Joe Grimmer [00:09:51] Let me think. So. If CO2 is permanently consumed inside of an operation, there is effectively it’s a utilization and that is received at a certain dollar per ton at $65 per ton excuse me, $60 per ton at Verde we don’t do any utilization,.
Joe Grimmer [00:10:09] But basically you can take that CO2 and and train it with just within sunlight with it some other applications. Could we focus exclusively on permanent CO2 sequestration, which receives $85 a ton? So there’s a lot EFC. You can see the economic benefits that are involved with permanent sequestration and you take it out of the system forever, you know.
Joe Grimmer [00:10:32] CO2 used for oil and gas operations, it’s recycled. You put it in the ground, it comes back up, you use more energy to recycle it, etc.. So we’re focused exclusively on the permanent stuff.
Stuart Turley [00:10:43] Okay. Oh, this is making sense from a business perspective and when you talk about the money coming in, we’ve had the infrastructure bill, the Porkulus bill. I mean, the as Dan Bongino called them, you had these all these other bills.
Stuart Turley [00:10:58] And as they come in, we’ve even had free battery out of Norway that is now coming in and creating storage for electrical storage and they’re taking advantage. Everybody’s running in from other countries to speak those funds. Is that your number one source of new business or how do you guys go get new business?
Joe Grimmer [00:11:25] Yeah, we get new business by partnering with any industrial CO2 emitter within We we need to talk about regions that are most affected. Industrial emitter in the United States. It could be an existing project, an existing gas fired power plant, a chemical plant in an ethanol plant. It could be a greenfield project, a new facility that’s going to be built, a will partner with one of them and design and advance the project in one full step from there.
Stuart Turley [00:11:59] Okay. I’m sitting here kind of thinking also on the next thing, and that is carbon credits. Do you guys get into any of those kind of things? It would be back on the original power plant. Are they now eligible?
Stuart Turley [00:12:12] Because one of the reasons you know, my buddy Elon, I don’t know him, he doesn’t know me. He could care less but, you know, I have a Twitter account, so that makes us buddies. But, you know, if you sit back and take a look, one of the reasons Tesla was so is because they’re selling their credits, tax credits out there and their other stuff. Yeah. Are you using anything like that or helping for those things?
Joe Grimmer [00:12:37] We are absolutely so the why of.
Stuart Turley [00:12:40] Stuff that, you know, these.
Joe Grimmer [00:12:42] Are the voluntary offset credits, which you’re referring to is a relatively new market. They’ve been traded for a number of years and they’re going to be increasingly more desirable over the next decade for a few reasons.
Joe Grimmer [00:12:54] So effectively, to earn the voluntary credits, you need to have custody of the CO2, which is typically not a problem. If you own the power plants and own the flu gas, you’ve got custody. So we’ll arrange there’s a custody transfer to bear day in, and then you need to effectively own the carbon capture equipment.
Joe Grimmer [00:13:13] And so with that in place, you now own the voluntary offset credits so a small CCS project might put away a million tonnes a year. And the voluntary offset market right now is paid 8 to $10 a tonne for those offset credits and we think that’s going to go up quite a bit in the future.
Stuart Turley [00:13:38] Okay so I went to Oklahoma State University. I might try to do some math here. So you got $80 and then you add that on top of it as a tax credit. So is it a tax credit that comes in that actually turns it up higher value than the $88? Did I get that?
Joe Grimmer [00:13:57] Yeah. Yeah, it’s 85 super permanent sequestration and then if we elected to sell those voluntary offsets, it could create another 5 to 10 bucks a ton of voluntary offset revenue. it’s really new watts. However, if we sell those credits and there’s not a lot of precedent on this topic, but by and large we believe that if we barely sell those credit, then the emitter themselves will not be able to sell bona fide decarbonized and licensed products. And so many times the emitter wants to do just that. So I’ll tell you this. In our economics, we never assume that the revenue stream associated with voluntary offset credits.
Stuart Turley [00:14:42] You know, I’m I’m sitting here picking on you, on your business model, and you’re flawless on your answers. I just absolutely love everything that you guys got going on for this because you are solving problems as a corporation.
Joe Grimmer [00:14:59] Yeah, it’s an exciting time, and we’ve been helped quite a bit by the recent legislation that’s passed over the past couple of years. Really all started with the bipartisan infrastructure law, the bill almost two years ago, and then that helped put good sideboards on the car industry. And then the Inflation Reduction Act last August was a was a paradigm shift for this sector.
Stuart Turley [00:15:24] Right. As we mentioned and boy, there’s one thing that’s just kicking energy and in the backside. I had to watch my cousin you said this is a family show, you know, and you sit back and kind of look you you take a look at regulations.
Stuart Turley [00:15:44] We have regulations now. We have even though there’s so much money available for wind, solar or any of these things, it takes so much money in time to connect them to the grid and the regulations. And in the oil and gas phase, you have regulations. What was that commercial out the wazoo? We have regulations out the wazoo, and that’s slowing down energy. How do you all handle that?
Joe Grimmer [00:16:16] Well, we’ve got regulations of our own to deal with, and for us, it is mainly around obtaining these class six permits to get a permanent CO2. Sequestration well requires a class six permits to drill and injects and there’s only two active in America.
Joe Grimmer [00:16:33] And we’ve got applications out there to obtain more but we’ve got to work with the EPA on that. And this is a relatively new process. And so there’s not a real standard protocol for how to go about that.
Joe Grimmer [00:16:47] So we actually had a met that had a meeting with one of the state regulators just yesterday talking about our projects in Louisiana so we spent a lot of time with them. And so working through it, we are working through regulations of our own. And I agree, I wish it was a little bit easier to move these projects along quickly.
Stuart Turley [00:17:06] You know, the carbon neutral coalition for Texas those folks, they got some really nice folk. I’ve got I’ve been fortunate enough to interview the chair and some other great leaders in there. I mean, I don’t know if you’re working with them yet, but there are a lot of great leaders in those kinds of organizations. Are you getting to work with those folks?
Joe Grimmer [00:17:29] We do, yeah we spend a lot of time they’ve got a lot of horsepower and one of the one of the biggest elements in Texas, for example, is a couple items. Number one, clarification of land ownership around CCS for space that number one.
Joe Grimmer [00:17:45] Number two is gaining primacy the state of Texas would like to gain what it’s called primary authority. So Texas could grant these classics permits. Right now, it has to be granted by the federal government. It’s the EPA, specifically the underground injection control division. Right the way for Texas as region six. So Texas and Louisiana are trying to obtain primacy so they can control that and hopefully expedite these permits.
Stuart Turley [00:18:14] That’s sweet. That’s huge, John.
Joe Grimmer [00:18:17] Be great.
Stuart Turley [00:18:18] Holy smokes.
Joe Grimmer [00:18:19] Right now, there’s only two states in America that have primacy as Wyoming and North Dakota.
Stuart Turley [00:18:27] Wow.
Joe Grimmer [00:18:30] Yep. The federal government controls all glass experiments aside from that.
Stuart Turley [00:18:36] I’ve done a lot of work with helping folks with their regulations and things like that. We were able to help PDC a couple of years ago with the oil and gas regulations in Colorado, and we built that we were able to get all the data they couldn’t even get the data that was required for them.
Stuart Turley [00:19:00] And so having data folks work on that and get that solution done with the regulations that are coming in. Okay, We got Texas. Texas. Cool. I love being a Texas can. The Northeast in the East Coast and west Coast just get a hammer hit me in the foot before I live there.
Stuart Turley [00:19:26] They don’t. I mean, they get the Marcellus up there in order to do that they won’t even do a pipeline. How are you guys going to have anything to do with projects up there? They even import their natural gas from LNG, from Russia, Trinidad. You know, they import diesel from Russia because it stops off, gets refined, and then comes back into the U.S. It’s a mess. Now.
Joe Grimmer [00:19:54] The Northeast, I’m not going to lie to you is a tricky, tricky place to perform CSS, mainly because of the basically geologic deposition. The storage capacity is pretty low it’s not ideal. What’s really fantastic is the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast in a number of other spots in the country, that that’s where Veritas really focused on the past couple of years in the Gulf Coast of Texas, Louisiana.
Joe Grimmer [00:20:22] You know, each region of America, in each region of the world is going to require a different application to to to do its ideal decarbonization. And in the Gulf Coast, we’ve got a lot of great storage capacity in the U.S. Plains. We’ve got a lot of great wind out west we’ve got sunshine in the Northeast they’re going to have to find their thing maybe it’s hydrogen, maybe it’s other things. But I think CCS will find a way to tap into play a role up there.
Stuart Turley [00:20:51] Wow. Yeah, something like the Colonial Pipeline delivering stuff because the Jones Act is a disaster and needs to go away. You can’t transport it because they have to be American ships. Was this a 1919, 20 Lord or something? Yeah, it just needs to go away.
Joe Grimmer [00:21:13] Yeah, no doubt about it. Well, I believe with this recent debt deal, there’s one more pipeline that that’s going to get pushed through, which is the Mountain Valley Pipeline. It was a little earmarked elements that.
Joe Grimmer [00:21:26] So I haven’t read the final docs. It’s hopefully the the new budget’s sitting on the desk of President Biden right now and hopefully that get signed soon that could break free. One more pipeline to the northeast.
Stuart Turley [00:21:41] Oh, wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah. You know, I know this has nothing to do with carbon capture, but, boy, the Keystone pipeline was a disaster because we could have used those. And since you you talk oil, the heavy oil coming out of the Canadian sands, we could get away from bringing in importing the heavy oil from Venezuela, Russia, you know, any of those. So, yeah, having pipelines matters.
Joe Grimmer [00:22:14] It matters it really does matter and yeah, we sure could have used the Keystone pipeline over the past few years and we could use it going forward, you know, on this on the CO2 transportation pipeline front.
Joe Grimmer [00:22:27] You know, there are 5000 miles of CO2 pipeline in America right now.
Stuart Turley [00:22:34] Wow!
Joe Grimmer [00:22:34] We believe that any new carbon capture project is going to need new CO2 transportation pipeline.
Stuart Turley [00:22:41] Right.
Joe Grimmer [00:22:41] There are some folks that are advocating retrofitting older pipelines that may have used gas or oil in the past a little dangerous that we’ll see how that goes. So we’re installing all new pipelines. We dream of a day when there is a broad uniform CO2 transport pipeline that interconnects the major industrial regions of America, of the Gulf Coast.
Joe Grimmer [00:23:07] So that I could car I can capture carbon in Houston and deposit it in rural Texas. I can capture carbon in Baton Rouge and put it into rural locations in Louisiana and have some interchange ability here to really help spearhead the launch of some of these broader projects in hubs as we defined them.
Stuart Turley [00:23:31] Okay. I’m probably going to ask you a dumb one here, which is typical for an OSU kind of guy. But when you talk about storage in, it’s I’m assuming you’re talking salt domes and you’re talking about putting them in there in the geological formations or in in if you take a look at that. And that’s why I think that Louisiana and all the others are better down in this area because of the formations. Correct.
Joe Grimmer [00:24:01] So when it comes to permanent CO2 sequestration, what we’re looking for is that storage capacity, big, thick sandstone reservoirs, we’re trying to avoid wells we want we need enough basically logs and geologic data to assess the reservoir, but we want to avoid those old wells. We want to avoid salt domes we want to avoid major faults.
Joe Grimmer [00:24:27] So we’re looking for a big, flat, steady uniform sandstone deposition with a very gentle dip. And so in a funny way, we’re looking for the exact opposite of what we looked for in the oil and gas world. It’s not a new oil and gas world. We’re developing salt domes we’re looking for traps we’re drilling wells we’re drilling adjacent to old wells in the in the course world, we’re doing just the opposite.
Stuart Turley [00:24:55] You know, So just think it from oil Gas into the carbon world Armand the CEO of Combo Curve. ZUBER Nicci, are you using that kind of the tool because you’re going to look at the well offsets and looking at the formations. There’s already a ton of data. Is that the kind of data you’re using out there?
Joe Grimmer [00:25:20] Well, I do know Combo Curve well and use them a lot in the oil and gas days. For CO2 sequestration, it’s a little different. So that particular data you’re referring to is oil and gas production information.
Joe Grimmer [00:25:35] What we’re doing is taking this raw information and assessing how the CO2 is going to move it and its impact ability, how the CO2 plume was going to radiate out through space. And in addition to the CO2 plume, there is a pressure wave that’s created that radiates out even further at times. So that that’s the data that we are trying to model.
Stuart Turley [00:26:03] Okay. This?
Joe Grimmer [00:26:05] Yeah. It takes some really sophisticated weed for every site, we create a full geo cellular model with multimillions of cells to describe every reservoir, every fault, every injection zone. We run injection simulation on all of them. We show that it’s a big element of this class experiment we show that data to the EPA and give them the model we let them play around with it.
Stuart Turley [00:26:27] Wow, now, in in Enverus lot of all the folks over it in various and they’re big in the oil and gas, they and the energy and all the processes and everything else just love everything that they have going on.
Stuart Turley [00:26:41] I got to interview Alan Gilmer, the the guy that created it long time ago he’s he is absolutely a hoot, but I’m not sure you wouldn’t use Enverus because their power across the world they would almost be a great lead generation for you because they work with all the power organizations and everything else.
Joe Grimmer [00:27:03] We know them well we like them a lot and we stay close on all of their applications they’re developing some really neat applications that we’ll be using as time goes along.
Stuart Turley [00:27:13] Oh, how cool so that’s an indie that you might have let out of the bag.
Joe Grimmer [00:27:18] That’s right.
Stuart Turley [00:27:19] There’s nobody you know, nobody listened to it. You know, nobody but you heard it here. Second is what somebody else does, right? So. Anyway, I am so excited to get to meet you and. And everything else. Do you? What do you see coming around the corner quickly. We’ve got about five more minutes and I want to give you a second. How do people get a hold of you and how do people get a hold of Verde and what do you see coming around the corner.
Joe Grimmer [00:27:50] Kind of saying, yeah, here’s what I need to get a hold of me. Please look us up on LinkedIn and find us on the very day CO2 websites. You’re it’s easy to find and that’s how you get a hold of me. What I see a lot around the corner. I think we’re on the brink of a step change in CCS activity in terms of the number of projects. You’ve seen, a couple deals announced for every deal that gets announced there’s been more percolating in the background. Folks like us, we don’t need to announce deals.
Joe Grimmer [00:28:19] So a lot of the recent legislation is paves the way for basically six projects to really launch the IRA, the EPA. There’s one thing I want to touch upon last month, the EPA set forth proposed regulations on the power sector and basically requiring all power companies, power generation, stations of a certain size and a certain in certain regions to decarbonize in the very near future and if this passes through, effectively, they’re all going to need to either convert to renewables or they’re going to need to install CCS.
Joe Grimmer [00:28:57] And so it’s going to be an exciting step change I think it’s going to be very good for the sector. And so we’ll see how that goes. Is going to get litigated, no doubt about it but I think there’s a lot of really neat projects I can speak for Verde and others we know about that are advancing right now and remember, it could take a year or two to get these Class six permits.
Stuart Turley [00:29:21] Oh, yeah.
Joe Grimmer [00:29:21] Yeah. So there’s going to be there’s going to come a time whenever Verdi and others like us say, we’ve got the permit we’re building, we’re constructing, here’s our project. And when that happens, it’s going to be very large material volumes that we’re decarbonizing. So it’s great for everyone.
Stuart Turley [00:29:39] Well, this is cool for the environment and if you take a look, I don’t I don’t like tax credits. I mean, I don’t like subsidies, but this makes sense. And I hope I don’t get this you know, I don’t want to use this in one of our shorts, you know, that we put out there. Stu says this makes sense finally on that but it does.
Stuart Turley [00:30:00] I mean, if it gets the money in, it gets clean energy out there because I don’t know. I’ve been doing a lot of research on wind and solar. The wind farms I’m seeing, meantime, between failures eight years and when you start taking a look at those things failing and how much money we’re putting in the break even for those things for CO2 is ten years in and the financial difference makes more sense for carbon capture to go on coal and natural gas to me.
Joe Grimmer [00:30:34] We’re we’re with you. Look, as an American taxpayer, I’m inherently opposed to a lot of these kind of tax credits. However, we viewed 45 Q as the primer. It’s the catalyst to move the sector, we believe, and I expect there will be a time whenever so a decarbonized electron will sell for much more than a non decarbonized electron.
Joe Grimmer [00:31:01] When a decarbonized ammonia sells for more than a grain or dirty ammonia. And so that becomes the replacement revenue in time because remember 45 Q When a project launches and goes into operations, it is active for 12 years and 45 credits are available for 12 years, and then you’re in the free market thereafter.
Stuart Turley [00:31:22] Okay, I know we’re running over here, time here, but this is important because one of the biggest things to change the energy space in education, this is important from an aspect that if we can change natural gas because the EIA last year said the biggest reason that we have reduced our carbon footprint in the United States was due to closing down coal and going to natural gas.
Stuart Turley [00:31:53] From an education’s perspective, what is Verde CO2 doing? Because this education process, I could see you guys taking this to the next level in showing people that fossil fuels can be around as a bridge longer if this stuff is used.
Joe Grimmer [00:32:13] Absolutely. In the end of the day, we’re here to sustain the life of these heavy industries that are essential for America. We we’re going to need power, ammonia, cement, steel for decades to come and only more and more of it. But we can decarbonize that in the process and in the end of the day, put out a net zero industrial products and allow those jobs to continue, allow those tax dollars to continue to thrive for states and communities.
Stuart Turley [00:32:44] One last question, and I know I’m sorry, because I keep get as you can tell, I get excited about what we’re talking about, but also refineries downstream. Can you work with downstream on some of this stuff? Because that’s not okay cool/Because the last big refinery was 1977 and then we’ve only had updates since then, but new technology would mean downstream would be less bad but we can’t get anything permitted except small. I mean, so my head explodes every time I think about downstream.
Joe Grimmer [00:33:14] Yeah, we can definitely decarbonize refineries the there are a couple tricks. They’re big, very expensive, and they’re owned by just a handful of companies. And so in those companies tend to like to control everything.
Joe Grimmer [00:33:29] So and you know, there’s one thing I got to just say there’s at the moment, there’s no penalty for emitting any amount of CO2 volumes in the ground. So a lot of big companies are worried about it, especially when times are good like they are for a lot of companies right now. So we’re but we think a proactive stance will be will pay many dividends in the decades to come by starting on these projects now.
Stuart Turley [00:33:53] Wow. How Cool as all this. Well, John, thank you so much for stopping by the podcast. I’m just really thrilled to get to meet you and look forward to connecting with you and love to be a resource for you guys to get stuff out because your message is important.
Joe Grimmer [00:34:13] Thanks so much, Stu. well the pleasure was mine and I’d love to come back soon
Stuart Turley [00:34:17] Okay, thanks.
Joe Grimmer [00:34:18] Thanks Take Care.