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Business challenge story

A new approach to tackling climate change

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing mankind today. Scientists are predicting dire consequences as a direct result of global warming: drought, flooding, severe storms and disruption to food and water supplies. But what can we do to confront the problem? Newlight Technologies has developed a pathway that it believes can be part of the solution.

Mark Herrema, CEO and Co-founder of Newlight Technologies, explains: “Back in 2003, I read a Los Angeles Times article about methane from cows, and the sheer weight of carbon going into the air. At that time, people were talking about taxing carbon or burying it underground.

“But if you look at nature, greenhouse gas—carbon in the air and water—is the backbone of life: what trees and coral use to grow.  So I teamed up with an old high school friend, and we thought, if nature can use greenhouse gas in a manner that reverses the flow of carbon out of the environment, why can’t  we do something similar?  Instead of villainizing greenhouse gas, what if we could transform it into valuable products?  Starting in 2003, with hardware store parts, internet searches, and a lot to learn, we set out to see if we could turn our vision into reality.”

Over the next ten years, Newlight developed a technology that converts greenhouse gas directly into a high-value, naturally-occurring energy molecule that can be used to replace plastics, fibers, and other materials. The company’s bioconversion process uses renewably-sourced energy and greenhouse gas, such as methane sourced from landfill sites, abandoned coal mines, and farms, and converts them using microorganisms found in the ocean into a high-performance, biodegradable, meltable energy molecule called AirCarbon at a yield that allows them to produce at scale.

Mark Herrema continues: “Our impact is small right now relative to the problem, but our aim is to expand as fast as we can using both direct production and licensed production.  One of our primary challenges has been the time it takes to engineer and build new AirCarbon production plants, but we have developed a modular solution that  we think will significantly accelerate that.

“The other challenge we have faced is verifying our supply chain We realized that we needed a way to demonstrate to end-consumers purchasing AirCarbon products that their items had started out as greenhouse gas, that we had used renewable power to produce them, and that they generated a reduction in carbon that would have otherwise become part of the air. To achieve this, we started to search for a technology partner to help us add this crucial element of verifiability—and to enable us to do this at scale.”