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Why the tech giant is so high on Heirloom Carbon
Microsoft is betting millions on the promise of some magic dust spread on a bunch of giant baking sheets stacked in 50-foot-tall towers to reverse the company's carbon emissions.
I’m being cheeky, but the truth is really not much more complicated than that.
Heirloom Carbon, a startup that has pioneered a method to absorb CO2 from the air using crushed rocks, just signed the tech giant to one of the biggest carbon removal deals to date. Microsoft has agreed to pay Heirloom to capture 315,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere over 10 years. For a sense of scale, that’s equivalent to about 75% of the carbon Microsoft emitted in 2022 through its direct operations and energy usage. Neither company would disclose the price, but the Wall Street Journalestimated it would likely cost Microsoft a minimum of $200 million, “based on market prices,” or $635 per ton.
Climate scientists warn that we won’t be able to keep global warming in check solely by cutting emissions, no matter how rapidly the world acts to get off fossil fuels in the coming decades. Finding ways to pull what we’ve already emitted back out of the atmosphere and permanently sequester it can help balance out emissions from industries that might take longer to decarbonize, like aviation. In the long term, it could even cool the planet.
There are now hundreds of startups around the world racing to develop a variety of methods to do this. But many of them, including Heirloom, are still operating at a tiny scale, if they are even at the point of removing carbon at all. So this latest Microsoft deal stands out for signaling a high degree of confidence in Heirloom’s unique approach.
“Heirloom is quickly building a runway to low-cost CO2 removal at the gigaton scale,” a Microsoft spokesperson told me in an email. “This agreement accrues to our goal to become carbon negative by 2030 and remove our historic emissions by 2050.”
Heirloom harnesses the natural ability of minerals to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. The process starts with limestone, which is formed from the detritus of corals, clams, and other sea creatures that use the dissolved carbon and calcium in the ocean to build their shells. Heirloom grinds up limestone and does something that humans have been doing for thousands of years — heats it in a kiln. This loosens carbon dioxide from the rock, leaving behind calcium oxide, a white powder commonly called quicklime. The ancient Romans are believed to have done the same thing, using quicklime in the construction of many of their famous architectural marvels that are still standing today.
But Heirloom's modern kiln, which heats the limestone to about 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit, is electric, meaning it can run on renewable energy. Also, because no fuels are being combusted, the CO2 comes out in a pure gas stream that's easy to capture. Heirloom can either pump it permanently into underground wells, or inject it into long-lived products, like concrete.
This is only the first step. The real trick to Heirloom’s solution is what happens next. The leftover calcium oxide is “super thirsty for CO2,” the company's CEO Shashank Samala told me. “If you put that on your desk, it will start pulling out carbon.”
And that’s more or less what the company does. It spreads the powder on large trays stacked in 40- to 50-foot-tall towers, so that the maximum amount of surface area is exposed to the air. This, along with a proprietary bit of engineering that Heirloom has not disclosed, speeds up the material’s ability to absorb carbon even more. On your desk, it might take a year. In Heirloom's system, it takes a matter of days. Then the company pops the powder, which is now chemically similar to limestone, back into its kiln, and starts all over again.
Stacked trays of calcium oxide at Heirloom's research and development facility in Brisbane, California.Courtesy of Heirloom Carbon
It’s already been a big year for Heirloom. The company was selected by the Department of Energy to receive funding for a commercial-scale plant in Louisiana under the federal government’s $3.5 billion Direct Air Capture Hubs program. Heirloom will fulfill at least some of its contract with Microsoft at that facility, and has plans in the works to build a second plant as well.
Giana Amador, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, an industry association, told me the deal with Microsoft illustrates this positive reinforcing loop that’s happening between the public sector and the private sector, helping the industry to scale faster. She wants to see the federal government do more to set standards around what high quality carbon removal looks like, in order to encourage more deals like this from companies that maybe want to purchase carbon removal, but can’t afford to hire whole teams to vet projects the way Microsoft can.
Samala emphasized that the deal is significant not only for its size but for what he called its “bankability.” It’s “take or pay,” meaning Microsoft has to pay up as long as Heirloom delivers on its end of the bargain. Even though no money is exchanging hands up front, Heirloom can take this binding contract showing a predictable, durable, revenue stream to the bank, and use it to secure financing at a much lower cost than it would otherwise get from a venture capital firm.
Right now, much of the nascent carbon removal industry is being supported by venture capital. One of the obstacles to financing projects is that nobody knows what the business model will ultimately look like. Will this be a public service, like waste disposal? A regulated requirement, where polluters are asked to pay? Something else? And in the meantime, how do you raise enough money to scale your idea up to where you can credibly sell it?
The Heirloom deal shows the industry is increasingly looking to replicate the experience of early wind and solar projects. This long-term contract is similar to a power purchase agreement, where wind and solar developers finance new projects by pre-selling the electricity to corporations like Google or Walmart at a set price.
At 315,000 tons over 10 years, this isn’t the biggest carbon removal deal to date, but it may be the biggest for such a fledgeling company. The oil giant Occidental, which is building a facility in Texas designed to suck 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year, has pre-sold 400,000 tons’ worth of carbon removal credits, over four years, to the aircraft manufacturer Airbus. In May, a coalition of tech companies signed a 112,000-ton offtake agreement, over six years, with a small startup called Charm Industrial, for $53 million. Charm is working to turn agricultural waste into oil that can be pumped underground.
Microsoft was an early investor in Heirloom through its Climate Innovation Fund, providing some of the company’s Series A funding last year. “They’ve seen this in the front row seats as we made progress from pulling grams of CO2 from a Petri dish to pulling kilograms and hundreds of kilograms, to tons and hundreds of tons,” Samala told me when I asked what he thought gave Microsoft confidence in the deal.
Part of it was also showing them that this solution is modular, Samala said.
“It helps to see that okay, you just need to build more of these stacks, more of these trays. If you want to pull more carbon, you stack more trays and you put more stacks of trays around."
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Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.
Los Angeles is on fire, and it’s possible that much of the city could burn to the ground. This would be a disaster for California’s already wobbly home insurance market and the residents who rely on it. Kettle Insurance, a fintech startup focused on wildfire insurance for Californians, thinks that it can offer a better solution.
The company, founded in 2020, has thousands of customers across California, and L.A. County is its largest market. These huge fires will, in some sense, “be a good test, not just for the industry, but for the Kettle model,” Brian Espie, the company’s chief underwriting officer, told me. What it’s offering is known as “parametric” insurance and reinsurance (essentially insurance for the insurers themselves.) While traditional insurance claims can take years to fully resolve — as some victims of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire know all too well — Kettle gives policyholders 60 days to submit a notice of loss, after which the company has 15 days to validate the claim and issue payment. There is no deductible.
As Espie explained, Kettle’s AI-powered risk assessment model is able to make more accurate and granular calculations, taking into account forward-looking, climate change-fueled challenges such as out-of-the-norm weather events, which couldn’t be predicted by looking at past weather patterns alone (e.g. wildfires in January, when historically L.A. is wet). Traditionally, California insurers have only been able to rely upon historical datasets to set their premiums, though that rule changed last year and never applied to parametric insurers in the first place.
“We’ve got about 70 different inputs from global satellite data and real estate ground level datasets that are combining to predict wildfire ignition and spread, and then also structural vulnerability,” Espie told me. “In total, we’re pulling from about 130 terabytes of data and then simulating millions of fires — so using technology that, frankly, wouldn’t have been possible 10 or maybe five years ago, because either the data didn’t exist, or it just wasn’t computationally possible to run a model like we are today.”
As of writing, it’s estimated that more than 2,000 structures have burned in Los Angeles. Whenever a fire encroaches on a parcel of Kettle-insured land, the owner immediately qualifies for a payout. Unlike most other parametric insurance plans, which pay a predetermined amount based on metrics such as the water level during a flood or the temperature during a heat wave regardless of damages, Kettle does require policyholders to submit damage estimates. The company told me that’s usually pretty simple: If a house burns, it’s almost certain that the losses will be equivalent to or exceed the policy limit, which can be up to $10 million. While the company can always audit a property to prevent insurance fraud, there are no claims adjusters or other third parties involved, thus expediting the process and eliminating much of the back-and-forth wrangling residents often go through with their insurance companies.
So how can Kettle afford to do all this while other insurers are exiting the California market altogether or pulling back in fire-prone regions? “We like to say that we can put a price on anything with our model,” Espie told me. “But I will say there are parts of the state that our model sees as burning every 10 to 15 years, and premiums may be just practically too expensive for insurance in those areas.” Kettle could also be an option for homeowners whose existing insurance comes with a very high wildfire deductible, Espie explained, as buying Kettle’s no-deductible plan in addition to their regular plan could actually save them money were a fire to occur.
But just because an area has traditionally been considered risky doesn’t mean that Kettle’s premiums will necessarily be exorbitant. The company’s CEO, Isaac Espinoza, told me that Kettle’s advanced modeling allows it to drill down on the risk to specific properties rather than just general regions. “We view ourselves as ensuring the uninsurable,” Espinoza said. “Other insurers just blanket say, we don’t want to touch it. We don’t touch anything in the area. We might say, ’Hey, that’s not too bad.’”
Espie told me that the wildly destructive fires in 2017 and 2018 “gave people a wake up call that maybe some of the traditional catastrophe models out there just weren’t keeping up with science and natural hazards in the face of climate change.” He thinks these latest blazes could represent a similar turning point for the industry. “This provides an opportunity for us to prove out that models built with AI and machine learning like ours can be more predictive of wildfire risk in the changing climate, where we’re getting 100 mile per hour winds in January.”
Everyone knows the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, the one that allegedly knocked over a lantern in 1871 and burned down 2,100 acres of downtown Chicago. While the wildfires raging in Los Angeles County have already far exceeded that legendary bovine’s total attributed damage — at the time of this writing, on Thursday morning, five fires have burned more than 27,000 acres — the losses had centralized, at least initially, in the secluded neighborhoods and idyllic suburbs in the hills above the city.
On Wednesday, that started to change. Evacuation maps have since extended into the gridded streets of downtown Santa Monica and Pasadena, and a new fire has started north of Beverly Hills, moving quickly toward an internationally recognizable street: Hollywood Boulevard. The two biggest fires, Palisades and Eaton, remain 0% contained, and high winds have stymied firefighting efforts, all leading to an exceedingly grim question: Exactly how much of Los Angeles could burn. Could all of it?
“I hate to be doom and gloom, but if those winds kept up … it’s not unfathomable to think that the fires would continue to push into L.A. — into the city,” Riva Duncan, a former wildland firefighter and fire management specialist who now serves as the executive secretary of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group, told me.
When a fire is burning in the chaparral of the hills, it’s one thing. But once a big fire catches in a neighborhood, it’s a different story. Houses, with their wood frames, gas lines, and cheap modern furniture, might as well be Duraflame. Embers from one burning house then leap to the next and alight in a clogged gutter or on shrubs planted too close to vinyl siding. “That’s what happened with the Great Chicago Fire. When the winds push fires like that, it’s pushing the embers from one house to the others,” Duncan said. “It’s a really horrible situation, but it’s not unfathomable to think about that [happening in L.A.] — but people need to be thinking about that, and I know the firefighters are thinking about that.”
Once flames engulf a block, it will “overpower” the capabilities of firefighters, Arnaud Trouvé, the chair of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, told me in an email. If firefighters can’t gain a foothold, the fire will continue to spread “until a change in driving conditions,” such as the winds weakening to the point that a fire isn’t igniting new fuel or its fuel source running out entirely, when it reaches something like an expansive parking lot or the ocean.
This waiting game sometimes leads to the impression that firefighters are standing around, not doing anything. But “what I know they’re doing is they’re looking ahead to places where maybe there’s a park, or some kind of green space, or a shopping center with big parking lots — they’re looking for those places where they could make a stand,” Duncan told me. If an entire city block is already on fire, “they’re not going to waste precious water there.”
Urban firefighting is a different beast than wildland firefighting, but Duncan noted that Forest Service, CALFIRE, and L.A. County firefighters are used to complex mixed environments. “This is their backyard, and they know how to fight fire there.”
“I can guarantee you, many of them haven’t slept 48 hours,” she went on. “They’re grabbing food where they can; they’re taking 15-minute naps. They’re in this really horrible smoke — there are toxins that come off burning vehicles and burning homes, and wildland firefighters don’t wear breathing apparatus to protect the airways. I know they all have horrible headaches right now and are puking. I remember those days.”
If there’s a sliver of good news, it’s that the biggest fire, Palisades, can’t burn any further to the west, the direction the wind is blowing — there lies the ocean — meaning its spread south into Santa Monica toward Venice and Culver City or Beverly Hills is slower than it would be if the winds shifted. The westward-moving Santa Ana winds, however, could conceivably fan the Eaton fire deeper into eastern Los Angeles if conditions don’t let up soon. “In many open fires, the most important factor is the wind,” Trouvé explained, “and the fire will continue spreading until the wind speed becomes moderate-to-low.”
Though the wind died down a bit on Wednesday night, conditions are expected to deteriorate again Thursday evening, and the red flag warning won’t expire until Friday. And “there are additional winds coming next week,” Kristen Allison, a fire management specialist with the Southern California Geographic Area Coordination Center, told me Wednesday. “It’s going to be a long duration — and we’re not seeing any rain anytime soon.”
Editor’s note: Firefighting crews made “big gains” overnight against the Sunset fire, which threatened famous landmarks like the TLC Chinese Theater and the Dolby Theatre, which will host the Academy Awards in March. Most of the mandatory evacuation notices remaining in Hollywood on Thursday morning were out of precaution, the Los Angeles Times reported. Meanwhile, the Palisades and Eaton fires have burned a combined 27,834 acres, destroyed 2,000 structures, killed at least five people, and remain unchecked as the winds pick up again. This piece was last updated on January 9 at 10:30 a.m. ET.
On greenhouse gases, LA’s fires, and the growing costs of natural disasters
Current conditions: Winter storm Cora is expected to disrupt more than 5,000 U.S. flights • Britain’s grid operator is asking power plants for more electricity as temperatures plummet • Parts of Australia could reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days because the monsoon, which usually appears sometime in December, has yet to show up.
The fire emergency in Los Angeles continues this morning, with at least five blazes raging in different parts of the nation’s second most-populated city. The largest, known as the Palisades fire, has charred more than 17,000 acres near Malibu and is now the most destructive fire in the county’s history. The Eaton fire near Altadena and Pasadena has grown to 10,600 acres. Both are 0% contained. Another fire ignited in Hollywood but is reportedly being contained. At least five people have died, more than 2,000 structures have been destroyed or damaged, 130,000 people are under evacuation warnings, and more than 300,000 customers are without power. Wind speeds have come down from the 100 mph gusts reported yesterday, but “high winds and low relative humidity will continue critical fire weather conditions in southern California through Friday,” the National Weather Service said.
Apu Gomes/Getty Images
As the scale of this disaster comes into focus, the finger-pointing has begun. President-elect Donald Trump blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom, suggesting his wildlife protections have restricted the city’s water access. Many people slammed the city’s mayor for cutting the fire budget. Some suspect power lines are the source of the blazes, implicating major utility companies. And of course, underlying it all, is human-caused climate change, which researchers warn is increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires. “The big culprit we’re suspecting is a warming climate that’s making it easier to burn fuels when conditions are just right,” said University of Colorado fire scientist Jennifer Balch.
America’s greenhouse gas emissions were down in 2024 compared to 2023, but not by much, according to the Rhodium Group’s annual report, released this morning. The preliminary estimates suggest emissions fell by just 0.2% last year. In other words, they were basically flat. That’s good news in the sense that emissions didn’t rise, even as the economy grew by an estimated 2.7%. But it’s also a little worrying given that in 2023, emissions dropped by 3.3%.
Rhodium Group, EPA
The transportation, power, and buildings sectors all saw upticks in emissions last year. But there are some bright spots in the report. Emissions fell across the industrial sector (down 1.8%) and oil and gas sector (down 3.7%). Solar and wind power generation surpassed coal for the first time, and coal production fell by 12% to its lowest level in decades, resulting in fewer industrial methane emissions. Still, “the modest 2024 decline underscores the urgency of accelerating decarbonization in all sectors,” Rhodium’s report concluded. “To meet its Paris Agreement target of a 50-52% reduction in emissions by 2030, the U.S. must sustain an ambitious 7.6% annual drop in emissions from 2025 to 2030, a level the U.S. has not seen outside of a recession in recent memory.”
Insured losses from natural disasters topped $140 billion last year, up significantly from $106 billion in 2023, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest insurer. That makes 2024 the third most expensive year in terms of insured losses since 1980. Weather disasters, and especially major U.S. hurricanes, accounted for a large chunk ($47 billion) of these costs: Hurricanes Helene and Milton were the most devastating natural disasters of 2024. “Climate change is taking the gloves off,” the insurer said. “Hardly any other year has made the consequences of global warming so clear.”
Munich Re
A new study found that a quarter of all the world’s freshwater animals are facing a high risk of extinction due to pollution, farming, and dams. The research, published in the journal Nature, explained that freshwater sources – like rivers, lakes, marshes, and swamps – support over 10% of all known species, including fish, shrimps, and frogs. All these creatures support “essential ecosystem services,” including climate change mitigation and flood control. The report studied some 23,000 animals and found about 24% of the species were at high risk of extinction. The researchers said there “is urgency to act quickly to address threats to prevent further species declines and losses.”
A recent oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge got zero bids, the Interior Department announced yesterday. This was the second sale – mandated by Congress under the 2017 Tax Act – to generate little interest. “The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along – there are some places too special and sacred to put at risk with oil and gas drilling,” said Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to open more drilling in the refuge, calling it “the biggest find anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia.”
“Like it or not, addressing climate change requires the help of the wealthy – not just a small number of megadonors to environmental organizations, but the rich as a class. The more they understand that their money will not insulate them from the effects of a warming planet, the more likely they are to be allies in the climate fight, and vital ones at that.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap