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Instead of rocket fuel, they’re burning biomass.
Arbor Energy might have the flashiest origin story in cleantech.
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
Take that, all you founders humble-bragging about starting in a dingy garage.
“It’s not new science, per se,” Hartwig told me. The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions. Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
“Arbor is the first to bring forward a technology that can provide clean baseload energy in a very compact form,” Clea Kolster, a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital told me. Lowercarbon is an investor in Arbor, alongside other climate tech-focused venture capital firms including Gigascale Capital and Voyager Ventures, but the company has not yet disclosed how much it’s raised.
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires. Hartwig told me that for every ton of organic waste, Arbor can produce about one megawatt hour of electricity, which is in line with current efficiency standards, plus about 1.8 tons of carbon removal. “We look at being as efficient, if not a little more efficient than a traditional bioenergy power plant that does not have carbon capture on it,” he explained.
The company’s carbon removal price targets are also extremely competitive — in the $50 to $100 per ton range, Hartwig said. Compare that to something like direct air capture, which today exceeds $600 per ton, or enhanced rock weathering, which is usually upwards of $300 per ton. “The power and carbon removal they can offer comes at prices that meet nearly unlimited demand,” Mike Schroepfer, the founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, told me via email. Arbor benefits from the fact that the electricity it produces and sells can help offset the cost of the carbon removal, and vice versa. So if the company succeeds in hitting its cost and efficiency targets, Hartwig said, this “quickly becomes a case for, why wouldn’t you just deploy these everywhere?”
Initial customers will likely be (no surprise here) the Microsofts, Googles and Metas of the world — hyperscalers with growing data center needs and ambitious emissions targets. “What Arbor unlocks is basically the ability for hyperscalers to stop needing to sacrifice their net zero goals for AI,” Kolster told me. And instead of languishing in the interminable grid interconnection queue, Hartwig said that providing power directly to customers could ensure rapid, early deployment. “We see it as being quicker to power behind-the-meter applications, because you don’t have to go through the process of connecting to the grid,” he told me. Long-term though, he said grid connection will be vital, since Arbor can provide baseload power whereas intermittent renewables cannot.
All of this could serve as a much cheaper alternative, to say, re-opening shuttered nuclear facilities, as Microsoft also recently committed to doing at Three Mile Island. “It’s great, we should be doing that,” Kolster said of this nuclear deal, “but there’s actually a limited pool of options to do that, and unfortunately, there is still community pushback.”
Currently, Arbor is working to build out its pilot plant in San Bernardino, California, which Hartwig told me will turn on this December. And by 2030, the company plans to have its first commercial plant operating at scale, generating 100 megawatts of electricity while removing nearly 2 megatons of CO2 every year. “To put it in perspective: In 2023, the U.S. added roughly 9 gigawatts of gas power to the grid, which generates 18 to 23 megatons of CO2 a year,” Schroepfer wrote to me. So having just one Arbor facility removing 2 megatons would make a real dent. The first plant will be located in Louisiana, where Arbor will also be working with an as-yet-unnamed partner to do the carbon storage.
The company’s carbon credits will be verified with the credit certification platform Isometric, which is also backed by Lowercarbon and thought to have the most stringent standards in the industry. Hartwig told me that Arbor worked hand-in-hand with Isometric to develop the protocol for “biogenic carbon capture and storage,” as the company is the first Isometric-approved supplier to use this standard.
But Hartwig also said that government support hasn’t yet caught up to the tech’s potential. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct air capture companies with $180 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, technology such as Arbor’s only qualifies for $85 per ton. It’s not nothing — more than the zero dollars enhanced rock weathering companies such as Lithos or bio-oil sequestration companies such as Charm are getting. “But at the same time, we’re treated the same as if we’re sequestering CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant or a coal plant,” Hartwig told me, as opposed to getting paid for actual CO2 removal.
“I think we are definitely going to need government procurement or involvement to actually hit one, five, 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal,” Hartwig said. Globally, scientists estimate that we’ll need up to 10 gigatons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Even at $100 per ton, 10 gigatons of carbon removal is still a pretty hefty price tag,” Hartwig told me. A $1 trillion price tag, to be exact. “We definitely need more players than just Microsoft.”
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The end of consumer electric vehicle tax credits isn’t great, but clawing back federal funding has been even worse.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill took a huge bite out of the climate economy. One segment that emerged largely unscathed, however, is advanced climate tech. Companies working on nuclear, geothermal, battery storage, biofuels, and carbon capture may be shaken by the volatile business environment and a tad worried about provisions such as foreign entities of concern rules that could make their supply chains more complicated. But as of now, they can pretty much proceed with business as usual.
There is one big exception to that, however: The growing ecosystem of electric vehicle charging startups. Not only did OBBBA take a hammer to consumer EV tax credits, Trump also paused funding for key federal charging initiatives on his first day in office. While the startups I talked to were notably blasé about the former situation, executives are seriously worried about how attempts to clawback funding for charging infrastructure will impact the industry as a whole.
The outlook isn’t entirely bleak. Highway fast charging — generally the domain of larger companies such as Tesla, Electrify America, and ChargePoint — has actually seen solid growth so far this year despite the obstacles. But figuring out how to make charging work in urban centers and outlying communities has been a hot market for venture-backed companies over the past few years. And now some of them are facing a moment of reckoning.
“Cities are still pushing forward, but I would say there is a capital-C caution that’s being applied,” Tiya Gordon, founder of the curbside EV charging company It’s Electric, told me. “I think they feel that they need to get it right, and this is true for us as well as a startup. There’s not a margin for error in this environment.”
It’s Electric’s core innovation is siphoning off spare electrical capacity from buildings in cities to run its curbside Level 2, a.k.a. non-fast-charging EV charging network, negating the need for what can be a lengthy and complex grid interconnection process. The company then shares a portion of its revenue with the building owners who agree to the arrangement.
Just days before Trump took office, the startup was awarded $2.2 million from the Department of Transportation’s Charging and Fueling Infrastructure program to deploy curbside charging in Washington, D.C., legally obligated money that the new administration is now trying to rescind. That award remains in legal limbo. “We are proceeding as if we can’t count on that,” Gordon told me. “It’s sand through your fingers in an hourglass.”
That funding came on top of the company’s numerous awards from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, an interagency collaboration between the Department of Energy and the Department of Transportation created under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Now the Joint Office has been effectively dismantled as former employees took deferred resignations and Trump has tried to revoke the funding awarded to It’s Electric and other startups.
All of this represents a significant financial setback for It’s Electric, as Gordon told me nondilutive funding — largely from federal and state grants — represents nearly half of the company’s total capital raised to date.
Gordon is hoping states will step into the breach, as climate leaders such as California and New York have thus far stood by their EV expansion plans. But Gordon has already noticed cities employing more diligence than ever when it comes to selecting partners. “They’re really going deep, they’re really taking time, they’re not rushing into any awards. So time is a big factor that represents caution,” she told me. And when it comes to the amount of chargers that cities seem to be looking to build, “the numbers are a little bit more modest.”
She mainly credits this pullback to the whiplash that Trump’s attempt to rescind funding for EV charging has caused. Compared to that, whatever deceleration the end of EV tax credits will cause in consumer uptake is a secondary concern..
“Honestly, that doesn’t really impact us at all,” Jeffrey Prosserman, CEO at Voltpost told me of the tax credits. His company retrofits lampposts in cities and suburbs, turning them into Level 2 EV charging platforms. “At the end of the day, EV adoption will either increase X or Y percent in a given year, but it’s going to continue to increase year over year. We’re past the tipping point, going from early adopters into the mainstream,” he told me.
EV prices are still falling, large businesses still want to electrify their fleets, and self-driving cars — which are far better suited to electric drivetrains — are still getting people excited, all of which should continue to fuel demand for a charging buildout. So while Prosserman acknowledged that nixing the consumer tax credits could “slow adoption by a couple percentage points,” he’s optimistic that the next political cycle will see a resurgence in support.
Like Gordon, however, he is quite concerned about the holdup in funding for both the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure program, or CFI, and its sister initiative, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, or NEVI. “It creates challenges for the EV charging companies like Voltpost, but it really fundamentally creates challenges for the cities and the general public who expected to have access to charging through these programs,” he told me. “That’s not to say that there isn’t a path forward. It’s just that the path that effectively the entire sector was operating on for the last few years has been reconfigured.”
NEVI is a $5 billion program that aims to build out a national charging network along highways, while CFI allocates $2.5 billion to deploy charging infrastructure in cities, towns, and hard-to-reach areas. Both were stood up in 2021 by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Politicians, industry analysts, and transportation officials alike have heavily critiqued these programs over the years for appearing to lack urgency, as building a network from scratch has proven to be an enormously complex and cumbersome undertaking. The former executive director of the joint office, Gabe Klein, said at a conference last year that the NEVI program wouldn’t really hit its stride until sometime between 2026 and 2028. Then Trump entered the White House and paused funding for both initiatives, creating a major roadblock for “the entire U.S. EV sector,” Prosserman told me.
Much like It’s Electric, Voltpost started the year by winning CFI funding to deploy its chargers in Washington, D.C,. and also secured a number of awards through the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. With all of that money now tied up in lawsuits challenging Trump’s attempts to freeze the programs, Voltpost’s plans for growth have slowed. “We’re taking a more conservative approach for this year,” Prosserman told me, saying that while the company will eventually seek to raise a Series A it’s “not actively raising that Series A right now, given the macro situation.”
Prosserman said he’s been disappointed to see the general pullback in climate tech venture funding in the first half of 2025. “You have a group of investors who frankly said they are mission aligned, but are now taking a pause, not a stop, given the macroeconomic conditions, and having to wait until the dust settles to see how to reconfigure their portfolios,” Prosserman said. For now, he told me that Voltpost is leaning into its private-sector partnerships such as those with AT&T and Zipcar.
Not all charging companies have experienced this whiplash of funding awards and rescissions, though. SparkCharge, which makes portable, battery-powered fast chargers for commercial fleets and businesses, hasn’t received any NEVI or CFI grant money. The startup primarily serves customers by dispatching off-grid chargers on-demand or setting up stand-alone deployments, which are not core focus areas of either program.
The startup’s Chief Financial Officer David Piperno told me he’s glad that SparkCharge hasn’t relied on such capital, as it’s managed to “become a profitable enterprise with zero incentives, no state funding, no government funding.” That, he said, has allowed the company “to take a different approach to EV charging and be more innovative and have a variable pay-as-you-go model.” So far that seems to be working out pretty well, as it announced $30.5 million in new funding in May through a combination of equity financing and a venture loan.
Reaching former President Joe Biden’s goal of installing 500,000 publicly accessible EV chargers by 2030 still might be a longshot, though, especially as long as the Trump administration continues to target all things EV-related. And yet, charging executives remain relatively upbeat about the sector’s long-term fortunes.
“If you drive one of these vehicles, compared to what you had before, it’s just a superior car, right?” Piperno said, arguing that should continue to power steady consumer growth, even if it doesn’t happen as quickly as experts once predicted. While growth in EV sales increased by 40% in 2023, that slowed to just about 10% last year, as concerns over the availability of charging infrastructure, price, and range persist. “I think everyone thought that [the EV adoption] curve was going to be a lot faster. But I think that’s really normalized over the past few years already, and we don’t, quite frankly, see it normalizing much more than it has.”
At least now, executives told me, there’s more certainty regarding the policy landscape than at the beginning of the year. That holds especially true for startups that are willing and able to operate under the assumption that they might never see much of their recently awarded federal funding — at least anytime soon.
“The expression was, wait and see, wait and see, wait and see,” Gordon told me of Trump’s first months in office and the uncertainty around EV incentives and funding programs. “And now we waited and we saw, and it’s gone. And so we mourn and we move on, right?”
On NRC drama, Big Tech’s thirst, and Uplight’s for-sale sign
Current conditions: From Japan to California, the Pacific is preparing for tsunamis after one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck the eastern coast of Russia • The Deep South is bracing for stifling temperatures • Hurricane Iona, the first named storm of the 2025 hurricane season in the Central Pacific, has reached Category 3 strength as it passes south of Hawaii.
It’s official: The Trump administration is going after the endangerment finding. The 2009 decision that greenhouse gases pose a danger to human life established the federal government’s legal right to rein in planet-heating emissions under the Clean Air Act and is the bedrock to virtually all national climate regulation. A rule proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday would scrap the finding and wipe out existing greenhouse gas rules on automobiles and heavy trucks. Also on Tuesday, the Department of Energy issued a report that “concludes that CO2-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies may be misdirected.”
The outcome of the rollback in the near term is likely years of lawsuits. As Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo: “It doesn’t take effect for 30 days after it’s final. But yes, at that point, they get sued. These rules go to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals because that’s what the Clean Air Act says, and usually it would take about a year or so for a D.C. Circuit decision to happen. So now you’re in 2027. You can see the timeline on this stretching out.” In followup remarks by email, Freeman said: “From a legal perspective, the most aggressive argument they’re making is that they CANNOT regulate GHG emissions at all. If the Supreme Court agrees with that, a future administration can’t fix this. The backup arguments are more subtle and say, we have DISCRETION to use a different method to calculate a contribution toward endangerment, and we can consider many things other than science when making the endangerment finding. If the courts buy these arguments, a future administration could reverse course and rebuild.”
Since President Donald Trump first appointed Annie Caputo to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2017, the Republican has made a name for herself as an industry-friendly champion of faster deployments of new reactors. Reappointed by former President Joe Biden in 2022, her term stretches through 2026. But on Tuesday, Caputo resigned, as I reported yesterday as a midday scoop in my Substack newsletter, Field Notes. The official reason she gave in the email she sent NRC staff is that the time had come to “more fully focus on my family.” But Caputo’s exit comes amid major political upheaval at what was once an oasis of bipartisan consensus.
In May, Trump proposed overhauling the way the NRC has long assessed the health risk from radiation as part of his four executive orders on nuclear power. Last month, in a move that critics decried as an illegal stretch of the White House’s authority over an independent agency, Trump fired Christopher Hanson, the Democratic commissioner who previously held the chair position. Earlier this month, E&E News reported that the Department of Government Efficiency representative detailed to the NRC had told the commission the White House expected it to “rubber stamp” new reactor designs that already gained approval from the departments of Defense or Energy. Emmet Penney at the conservative think tank FAI told me that if Caputo’s departure signals “radical changes” in the future, then the Trump administration’s efforts could backfire and lead to an “own-goal for energy dominance.”
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At least 34 factories or mineral refineries totaling more than $30 billion in investment have been paused, delayed, or canceled since Trump took office. That’s according to a new report from researchers at Wellesley College. “When you look at the projects that are slowing down, it’s all up and down the supply chain,” Jay Turner, an environmental studies professor who leads the database, told Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer.
A chart from the study.The Big Green Machine
The picture isn’t entirely bleak for EVs, at least not yet. Another 68 projects have advanced in the past six months, representing $24 billion in investment and more than 33,000 jobs.
Earlier this year, the lobby group Data Center Coalition and Facebook-owner Meta each asked the Trump administration to loosen permitting for data centers under the Clean Water Act. In an executive order unveiled last week, Wired reports that Trump responded by proposing a set of specific recommendations that mirror what the industry requested.
If implemented, the effects would vary by project, environmental lawyers told Wired. But the move comes amid increased scrutiny of data centers’ thirst for water. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that a town’s wells ran dry after Meta broke ground on a new data center in Georgia.
In 2023, the startup Uplight tightened its grip on the distributed energy resource management market by acquiring the AI software company AutoGrid from Schneider Electric. Now Uplight is looking to sell itself. The company is pitching itself as “an AI-enhanced, full-stack platform built for the grid’s new demand,” according to a scoop yesterday from Latitude Media’s Maeve Allsup. With electricity demand surging and the aging grid heaving under pressure from extreme weather, technology to harness the solar panels, batteries, and other energy resources traditional utility infrastructure struggles to tap into is becoming crucial to avoiding blackouts.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse take stock of all the trends threatening to push up power bills.
In the next few years, the United States is going to see the fastest growth in electricity demand since the 1970s. And that’s only the beginning of the challenges that our power grid will face. When you step back, virtually every trend facing the power system — such as the coming surge in liquified natural gas exports or President Trump’s repeal of wind and solar tax credits — threatens to constrain the supply of new electricity.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why they’re increasingly worried about a surge in electricity prices. What’s setting us up for an electricity shortfall? What does the recent auction in the country’s largest electricity market tell us about what’s coming? And what would a power shock mean for utility customers, the economy, and decarbonization?
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: None of these trends guarantee that electricity prices will go up, but suffice it to say, by the end of President Trump’s term, we could be exporting one fifth, right? 20%, 25%. And so that is a huge increase, and going to increase demand for U.S. natural gas supplies. How the supply side of U.S. natural gas responds is still an open question.
But even that isn’t the only trend. At the same time, the president’s tariffs, specifically on inputs to production — so copper, steel — have gone into effect. They’ve remained in effect. And what we’ve seen is that for these key ingredients and components to build more grid infrastructure, prices have gone up. I think steel prices have doubled, copper prices have increased. It doesn’t seem like those prices are coming down anytime soon.
And so just the raw ingredients that are required to produce, to expand the grid, and to increase electricity supply and electricity capacity are going to be more expensive in the world we’re living in than in the counterfactual world.
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, I think if you go further upstream, too, there’s some — partly because of the tariffs, partly because of the uncertain trade environment, the uncertain macroeconomic environment, we’re not exactly seeing the oil and gas industry pouring capital into expanding natural gas supplies.
So, you could argue, and I’ve heard the folks from the American Gas Association argue this, that there’s no problem with expanding LNG exports as long as we expand supply to match that. And there’s some truth to that — except that we expect supply curves to be increasing, meaning the more we produce of something, in order to get incremental production up, we have to spend a little bit more per unit of energy we produce. That’s sort of characteristic of most markets.
So sure, we could increase our supply by 10% or 20%, but that would also require paying a higher cost per trillion cubic feet, or million cubic meters, or whatever unit you want of natural gas we get out of the ground in the U.S. And that alone would put upward pressure on prices. But if the U.S. is also not expanding supply at the same time that we’re expanding exports, then that just straight-up drives prices up.
We would see, basically, a delayed response from the market, from the supply side of the market, to those prices. This is partly why natural gas prices are so volatile. Prices spike — that sends a signal to add supply, but you can’t turn on the spigot overnight. You’ve got to drill new wells, identify them, get drill rigs out there, and open up production, and in some cases even expand pipelines to get that supply to market. All that takes several years. And so there’s a lag time there that often leads to these spikes in gas prices going quite a bit above what you would expect, the kind of marginal supply curve picture alone to reveal.
And I think if you look at the rig counts, declining rig counts, stagnating production, and sort of the secular decline of our conventional gas resources and oil resources, which are all on decline curves. As we pump more oil and gas out of the ground, the pressure falls and we get less and less from those wells. All that points to the potential for a relatively constrained supply of natural gas in the near term exactly at the same time that we’re ramping up LNG exports.
Mentioned:
Jesse on The Ezra Klein Show
From Rob: The Electricity Affordability Crisis Is Coming
U.S. power use to reach record highs in 2025 and 2026, per EIA
Why the EIA expects natural gas prices to rise
The Messy Truth of America’s Natural Gas Exports
Governor Josh Shapiro’s legal action to constrain power prices
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s downshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.