Scaling climate tech inside heavy industry: lessons from the field

INTERVIEW

Featuring insights from: Saad Dara (Mangrove Lithium), Sean Lowrie (Arca), and Jonathan Rhone (CO280)

TALKING POINTS

• The real challenges of moving from lab validation to commercial scale

• How to work with large industrial partners and navigate risk-averse industries

• Why waste-to-value can be a winning value proposition

• Tactical lessons from building pilot plants and hundred-million-dollar projects

• The economic edge for Canada to transform existing industry

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DEEP DIVE

Tactics: breaking into heavy industry

We hear a lot about pilots, offtake agreements, and industry partnerships. What we don’t often hear about is the multiyear grind through technical de-risking, commercial structuring, risk reviews, and relationship building - all critical components to get climate solutions deployed in the field.

And that deployment is key to making progress on climate change. The industrial sector is the #1 source of greenhouse gas emissions across burning fossil fuels, process emissions, chemical inputs, and waste.

At the same time, deploying low-carbon solutions is difficult because of the high capital investments required, long equipment and facility lifespans, regulatory requirements, and more.

Across lithium refining, pulp and paper, and mining, our guests share the tactics that worked for them to scale up and deploy industrial climate tech:

Control the flow

Relying on partners to prove parts of your process can offload complexity and cost - but also control and learning. Mangrove Lithium found that running the full integrated system for their commercial pilot gave them credibility with offtakers, investors and industrial buyers.

Saad put it this way: it’s like knowing how to play the cello vs running the orchestra. Just because you can make good music with that one instrument doesn’t mean that it runs as a fully integrated process. Buyers want to know the whole orchestra works.

Be ready to fit into their process

Arca was able to get its carbon mineralization deployed in an active mine site by matching the operational rhythms, safety reviews, and risk frameworks of a major mining company.

It takes patience, but also knowing your customer inside and out. For Sean, that means knowing what matters to decision makers (finance people vs engineers) and finding champions in that structure.

Sell the economics, not just the emissions.

Pulp and paper shows up everywhere in our lives, but it’s not an industry known for adopting new tech. CO280 was able to succeed by leading with the economics first, and pitched monetizing a waste stream to create new profit. They could also deliver a million tons / year of carbon removal, but that’s a bonus.

For Jonathan, you can’t lose sight of the fundamentals: selling value to customers. Particularly in carbon removal, where he believes solutions need to be part of a complete value chain to scale.