Show Notes
Back in January, Captura CEO Steve Oldham was sitting in a conference room in Hawaii, entertaining reps from the company’s first potential customer. What the customer didn’t know was that Captura’s ocean-based carbon removal pilot –the whole reason for the visit – still wasn’t working.
The stakes were high. Steve’s team needed to prove they could pull off a major pilot under intense time crunch — amid broader pressure on the carbon removal sector to show it can scale reliably and fast.
So what did it take to install the pilot and win over a first customer?
In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Steve about Captura’s rapid scale-up from a desktop prototype to a 1,000-ton pilot. They also discuss the science behind removing CO₂ from ocean water, and the difficult decisions required to keep the company on track — including walking away from a premier industrial site and racing to rebuild the project half a world away.
Credits:
Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. This episode was produced by Daniel Woldorff and Erin Hardick. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.
More from The Green Blueprint
This week, we’re presenting a drop-in episode of Critical Capital, a new partner podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios.
While living in Delhi, Sorin Grama gave a window air conditioner to an employee. He found out weeks later she wasn't using it because the electricity costs were too high. It was a stark reminder that access to global cooling isn't about upfront equipment costs. It’s about the high electricity costs needed to run air conditioners.
When David Fauvre and his co-founder entered the battery space in 2015, they started as brokers exporting American battery waste to recycling partners in Korea and Japan. But as the industry grew, shipping companies increasingly refused to transport the hazardous materials, making it clear that the U.S. desperately needed its own domestic processing capabilities.
“Good fires" naturally regenerate forests. But a rise in high-severity blazes in the American West are leaving behind barren moonscapes filled with dead trees. These scorched trees act as hazardous fuel for future fires, but clearing them to replant the landscape is astronomically expensive. Add to that a massive shortage in the conifer seed supply chain, and land managers simply don't have the resources to regenerate these forests on their own.
To build the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition — from wind turbines and grid stabilization to massive new AI data centers — the world needs more copper between now and 2050 than humanity has produced in its entire history. But new copper mines take anywhere from 10 to 16 years to permit and build, meaning we’re not on track to meet our rapidly growing demand.