We move faster to scale Direct Air Capture. https://xitter.cf/t.co/ksKV86CSr8
Joined June 2009
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New podcast: Hard tech startups die because they don't iterate quickly enough. They are left building big plants with technology that isn't there yet.
I sat down with @HugoRauch_Tech on the New Wave podcast to discuss why DAC is an industrial certainty and how we're building for this massive market.
Coming from @tesla, I saw that the only real moat is your speed of iteration. At @SironaTechCDR, we apply software speed to Direct Air Capture. We're just under three years old and we're already building our 7th iteration. If you aren't shipping, you aren't learning.
A few of the tactical points we covered:
Massive market: Even if we reduce emissions by 75%, we'll need to compensate for a massive 10 billion tons of residual emissions. To get to net-zero, there is no way around it. It is inevitable.
Modular Execution: Most DAC companies build huge monolithic plants. We ship containers. By building modular units, we can iterate every six months instead of every six years.
Sorbent Agnostic: The best filter material for DAC hasn't been invented yet. We build hardware that is solid-sorbent-agnostic so we can improve our sorbent over time and even swap the filters without rebuilding the infrastructure.
Electron Arbitrage: We don’t fight data centers for power. Since CO2 is everywhere, we just go and find places where the energy is the cleanest and the cheapest.
Full conversation links in the replies.
The market demand is there and you'll see more big announcements coming from us here 👀
We’re done with DAC science experiments. We’ve already deployed our first commercial site. Now it’s just a game of industrial execution.
Super proud to have earned the @EU_Commission's trust. We will work relentlessly to show that Europe can build Direct Air Capture at industrial scale, and bring the cost down faster than anyone expects.
Huge news 🚀 Project Furu has been selected by the EU Innovation Fund! 🇪🇺🇳🇴
The @EU_Commission has selected Project Furu, our Direct Air Capture and storage plant in Norway, for a grant of up to €9.1 million from the EU Innovation Fund. Out of 77 projects selected across Europe, Project Furu is the first Direct Air Capture project the Fund has ever backed. We designed it as Europe’s reference case for modular DACCS.
▪️ Machines built on our production line in Brussels and deployed in CCB Energy’s Energy Park in Øygarden, Norway, with first capture in 2027
▪️ Powered by Norwegian hydropower, with the CO₂ to be stored permanently under the North Sea
▪️ A site designed to grow to more than 100,000 tonnes of removals per year, by adding the same standard containers as demand grows
▪️ Built for two markets: companies buying permanent removals today, and the EU’s proposed purchase of 250 million tonnes from 2031
Carbon removal credits from Project Furu are available now → offtakes@sirona.tech
Press release: sirona.tech/updates/eu-innov…
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
The new XPRIZE on Interspecies Communication, with a $10M purse will launch next month.
It will challenge teams to demonstrate ethical, verified two-way communication with wild animals, advancing coexistence and cooperation.
Dr. Irene Pepperberg spoke to us today about her pioneering work with grey parrots, training them in English to perform many tasks at 6-year old human skill level.
“Clearly, animals know more than we think and think a great deal more than we know.”
It wasn’t easy when she started. The feedback to her first grant review: “what are you smoking?”
And now, her parrots ask questions and learn from the answers. They ask for what they want.
She has taught her parrots 100 English labels for objects and materials, exact quantities up to 8 (and addition and subtraction), colors, shapes, materials, concepts like same/different, absence, a zero-like concept (absence of a set, on his own, with no training), relative size comparisons, optical illusions, and they make new word combinations (calling the banana chip “banacker” for a banana cracker). They have a visual working memory (tracking moving cups) that beats adults with 4 swaps. They do inference by exclusion (when you show where food is not located, they figure out where it is).
Bird brains look very different at first, a smooth unfolded organ with no cerebral cortex, but further research found a relatively large cortical area similar to non-human primates in relative size and connectivity. They have a dense processor, doing same thing as human children.
“Bird brain should be a complement,” she concluded.
We can imagine the marvel of first contact, whether alien or AI, and it starts with communication.
We can practice with the isolated animal intelligences all around us. We hosted a gathering for the leadership of the Earth Species Project, with an ambitious plan to do just that, using multimodal AI models.
“Everything that can be translated will be, by 2030.”— @Aza Raskin of ESP, and:
“It’s impossible without scale and inevitable with scale.” (of data and compute)
“We will face the unusual situation where our AI will communicate with animals before we understand what they are saying.”
“Human languages have evolved over a couple hundred thousand years. Whale and dolphin language has evolved over 34 million years. And some are multilingual, using a third language when hunting together off the coast of Norway.”
“Beluga whales announce themselves with their unique name and clan ID. Parrots teach each of their chicks their name in the nest—a lifelong signature that connects them to their family and community.”
“And there are different cultures. The is a fascinating community of crows in Spain that operate unlike other crows. They raise their young as a group, like a kibbutz. They have a unique dialect for collaborative parenting. When an outside crow joins the group, it learns the dialect and participates in the unique culture. The crows have different personalities and there is a lot of drama. There is one adult that none of the other mothers like. She has to zip in and out quickly to feed the young before being chased off by the others.”
“Humpback whale songs go viral. There is group of whales off Australia that are like the K-pop singers. Their songs propagate globally over a couple years."
"An orca once wore a salmon hat, and it became a fashion trend among orcas.”
“80% of animal communication is relatively quiet one-to-one communication, and we need to capture that. It’s a perception problem. Of the animal recordings made, only 3% of the data have been analyzed. There has been little progress in orca communications in the past 20 years.”
“Many indigenous myths start with communication with the animals and nature. And then we forget how. We became disconnected.”
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
I often see people argue that clean energy is not reducing emissions, because it just adds to rather than replaces fossil fuels. This argument is deeply misguided – clean energy built since 2005 has displaced 23 billion tons.
I dive in over at The Climate Brink (link below)
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
I think if we get to actually understand whales, it could be another “whole earth” moment that leads to a profound shift in how we see our place in nature, and how deeply we care about protecting it... cc @stewartbrand
One of the most awe-inspiring moments I've ever had was putting my head underwater in Hawaii during whale season. You hear this symphony of songs...
It's like going through a portal into a parallel universe with another species, and they are obviously talking! What are they saying??
We focus so much on the search for extraterrestrial life, but we have this thing on earth already, right under our nose, and it's obviously as interesting to study
In a break from the current VC world drama, I pose the question everyone actually cares about. Can we use AI to talk to whales?
@ProjectCETI’s David Gruber is building the infrastructure to enable the first human-whale conversation and initiate an interspecies dialogue.
We discuss:
- David’s journey to sperm whales
- How AI can translate a language no human has ever spoken
- Sperm whale culture & the whale economy
- The seismic societal implications of human-animal communication
- The future is going to be much stranger than we can imagine.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:48 David's Journey
12:30 An Interspecies Dialogue
17:14 Sperm Whale Language & Culture
23:48 The Breakthroughs Yet to Come
27:49 The Whales Are Yappers
31:03 Sperm Whales Have Accents
39:47 Verifying a Whale Translation
42:13 What Success Looks Like
47:32 Saving the Whales
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
They used Maker Hooks to ride Shai Hulud.
This is how they towed Starship.
Instead of a traditional steel cable, the Normand Ranger tugboat deployed Amsteel Blue. This is a heavy-duty, ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene synthetic rope. It is incredibly lightweight but possesses a breaking strength that matches or exceeds steel wire of the same thickness. It was chosen to safely pull the massive spacecraft through rough ocean swells without snapping or adding dead weight
#spacex #starship #starshiptowed #starshiprecovery
EA taught me a lot back in 2016 about how to do good, but I always thought the reasoning to focus on AI safety was odd and couldn't really explain why. Perhaps too much variance (very big numbers in far future x small probability) while I wanted to focus on problems that were more certain and that were already impacting people today, i.e. climate change.
Great post from @VitalikButerin that helps put the finger on what was going on, i.e. what he calls low Galaxy Brain Resistance.
I dislike the recent trend of people who clearly continue to believe >80% of the core effective altruist beliefs disavow EA and say "oh we're definitely not that, we're [rebrand]" purely strategically, purely because they sense that dunking on EA is "cool" now.
It's much more honorable to just come out and say "yes, that was our intellectual upbringing and those continue to be our core values, and also here are specific points where we disagree, and here's our argument for why we think for those specific points are the subset of EA that causes what you perceive to be the problem with the whole thing".
And so with that I will say:
Yes, effective altruism was a significant part of my intellectual upbringing and its core values of care for others, cosmopolitanism and rigor around effective resource allocation continue to be very important to me. And also here are specific points where I disagree with what I think is the subset of that style of thought that has backfired in the largest ways: vitalik.eth.limo/general/202…
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
⚡️Just finished a data story I had a lot of fun building: 25 years of Europe’s electricity mix, country by country.
The number that kicked it off: in 2025, wind + solar ☀️💨 generated more electricity in the EU than all fossil fuels combined ⛽️
stories.strata.electricity-m…
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
I was on teams at Shopify subject to this—it was tough, but more often than not, @tobi ended up being correct.
Now, as a founder, I get why Tobi did this more than I ever understood at the time. It is not the easy path.
I have the luxury of our company still being smaller (40-50 headcount), so it's easier for me to intervene early.
I am continually learning to find the best place during a project to insert myself, but sometimes, it ends up being late and painful; that just plain sucks.
But, long-term it is much worse to ship things that are sub-par. The job of a leader is to pull pain forward.
Yep. Except:
1. This was about important internal tools. The team was stuck in some architecture nightmare of their own doing (writing it in rails but headless, with graphql api, and a SPA react app, constantly needing frontend engineers for changes). I call this kind of thing 'cosplaying an enterprise production app'. All that complexity was in the way and using straight rails was perfect in that case.
2. I make calls like this all the time. Usually someone on the team asks me to. They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc. Sometimes this is jokingly referred to as Founder-mode-as-a-service here.
3. For ten years I’ve also run an internal podcast called Context, where I revisit decisions like these and explain the reasoning so everyone can learn from them. This is helpful to give people all the variables that were considered and why this was the choice made given the information available at the time. I want to teach how to make such decisions effectively without needing me. Sunk cost fallacy is a problem.
4. Any notions that Shopify is succcessful despite of me doing this, instead of because of it, will have a hard time making their argument come together I think 😄
the part of 'two weeks later tobi learns about...' is nonsese and the pivot of that project up there happens one of the more successful examples of interventions. But getting the company to work effectively with great architecture and low technical debt baggage into the right direction is literally the job, so guilty as charged I suppose.
But there are always cope stories floating around like this because they are more fun, than saying 'somehow we needed tobi to stop doing silly architecture astronautics'. I can totally see that.
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
After a nearly 3-year conflict, @Tesla has officially won against Swedish union IF Metall.
The union says it is ending all strike actions against Tesla because there are no strikers remaining. IF Metall announced it is ending all strike actions against Tesla in Sweden, effective August 19.
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
The most alarming thing about this graph is not just the amount of change, but the smooth consistency of the curve. If this were a startup I'd be really confident about their future growth. Unfortunately it is instead the planet we live on.
It’s crazy how often people have to clarify whether they said 14 or 40 ("one-four" or "four-zero") over bad audio or a rough accent. The English protocol needs a patch.
Who’s working on this?
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
Massive inflection point for our industry 🚀🚀 The EU just proposed to include Direct Air Capture in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), and to make the EU the largest buyer of carbon removals in history.
Here's some context and what that means.
The ETS caps the CO2 emissions of Europe's heaviest-emitting industries. The cap shrinks every year, on a path to cutting net emissions by 90% in 2040 and then carbon neutrality by 2050. Companies that cut emissions faster than required can sell their allowances to companies moving slower.
Until now, companies in the ETS could only reduce. Today's proposal lets them also compensate, starting in 2031. This matters because these industries can't realistically get to zero: there will always be a long tail of residual emissions, and removing CO2 from the air is the only way to close that gap to net-zero. The EU is being selective about what counts. Only two methods qualify: Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS, what we build at Sirona Technologies) and Biogenic Carbon Capture and Storage (BioCCS). And the carbon must be captured in Europe. Our project in Norway qualifies.
The proposal also tackles the two hard problems.
🔷 The price gap. ETS allowances trade at ~80€/ton today. DACCS is expected to cost 300-600€/ton in 2030. The two will converge, but until then, who buys the more expensive credit? No early demand, no supply, no cost reduction. They addressed this by making the EU the buyer: the Commission will auction 250M new allowances to buy 250M tonnes of certified removals between 2031 and 2040, with the option to sell up to 10M more allowances on top to bridge the price gap. They would also likely buy a portfolio blending cheaper BioCCS with more expensive DACCS, like voluntary buyers already do today.
🔷 The supply gap. Very little eligible DACCS capacity is being built in Europe today. Our Norway project is one of the only public ones. The bottleneck to more supply is demand from the voluntary carbon market that can look fragile to infrastructure investors. They addressed this with early auctioning, so the Commission can build its budget and start contracting removals well before 2031.
What happens next: the proposal goes through the Council and Parliament, aiming for a deal in early 2027. Integration is proposed to start in 2031, but the demand will be felt much sooner. And this is only step one: the Commission will assess by 2034 whether emitters can buy removals directly. The 250 million tonnes is the floor, not the ceiling.
Why this matters so much for us: it changes the nature of DAC demand from voluntary to compliance, backed by EU law. That is what will make our capture facilities financeable. Even at today's ~€80/ton allowance price, this is a €20B buyer arriving in a market with almost no eligible supply, and we're building some of the only capacity that qualifies. We've been preparing for this moment, and we're ready for it 🚀🚀
Thoralf Gutierrez retweeted
Europe has to renounce degrowth once and for all.
10-12 years ago I was part of the post-growth movement (never degrowth). At the time I thought that it would be easier to manage the climate transition if the economy didn't grow quickly at the same time.
What I didn't see clearly enough was that a poorer country will have a *harder* time paying for hard to abate emissions. €150/t CCS cost on cement is basically unthinkable for Bulgaria but a breeze for Switzerland. It doesn't help if the amount of cement used is reduced, its not that you use too much cement that is the problem, it is that you are poor.
Yes, growth can increase energy demand, the AI build-out can for example raise emissions in the short term if power demand grows faster than clean firm power.
The answer is not to make ourselves poorer so we consume less but to build the green economy faster. More electricity. More grids. More firm power. More industry. More permitting capacity. More innovation. More public investment. More companies that can scale. Much, Much More. The vision should be energy abundance for all.
Even if degrowth was good for climate, geopolitics still would make it a very bad idea. A region that grows slower than the rest of the world loses importance, industrial capacity, talent and in the long run even risks being invaded.
@Noahpinion has been writing clearly about this topic for years. Latest blog post below.