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0:16 the show. We're here today with Aaron Fitzgerald of Mars materials. They make a lot of, I guess, feedstock or feed materials for a lot of carbon intensive materials today and they have a way to do

0:26 it. That's, I'm going to say carbon neutral, right? Carbon negative, actually. Carbon negative, which is like the holy grail here in carbon devalue. So Aaron, tell us about what Mars does.

0:35 Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. It's so exciting to connect further and introduce ourselves to your audience. So for those who don't know me outside of YouTube, I'm Aaron Fitzgerald, CEO and

0:48 co-founder of Mars materials. We are based here in Houston, Texas, Yee-haw. And we are working to turn everyday products into long-term carbon storages, which we call or the industry cost carbon

1:01 sinks. So think everything that we make today in modern society requires carbon.

1:10 And there's an overabundance of it now in the air, mostly driven by our demand to use fossil fuels and needing to combust those materials, those raw materials to make products. So we're able to

1:22 make a raw material called acrylic nitrile. You can say that 10 times fast if you like Or you can think of it as like flour, a

1:33 monomer that is really not useful in and of itself until you process it into a variety of products. So it can make a bunch of products, everything from carbon fiber, where it's a soil raw material.

1:46 And also that's the strongest material that man can synthesize to date naturally, or excuse me, synthetically. It also makes things like carpets and keyboard keys clothing parts in LEGO blocks.

1:59 And then also we drink a lot of water, right? It helps to purify

2:06 water from fresh water sources all the way to water that needs to be treated because it's been, you know, it's gray water, for example. So it has a variety of applications and uses and it's really

2:19 prevalent in our modern society. Yeah. And so what I'm hearing is because this is such a like a fundamental building block for a lot of materials, making that carbon, carbon negative a sink can do

2:31 a lot to decarbonize the value chain. Is that a plastic value chain? Is that, is that what we're talking about here, I guess? Yeah, so it's a, you know, I think the word plastic has gotten

2:42 negative connotations over the last decade or so. So now folks are calling it polymer. Oh, polymers, that's the euphemism. When I think of polymers, I think of, I don't even know. I guess I

2:52 don't think of polymers. I think of a very advanced things, but that's a plastic for you, I guess Yeah, literally is plastic for you. So, it makes a variety of plastics, but it also makes

3:04 acrylic fibers, which is the common term for it. It's also called polyacrylonitrile. And

3:11 if you were mittens in the winter, for example, I know it doesn't get that coat of hair in Texas, but if you go to Colorado for skiing, for example, very likely that fabric is acrylic nitrile.

3:21 Advanced textiles like nylon, for example, a precursor for that is acrylic nitrile So the reason why I say it's like flour, you know, flour can make everything from cookies to cakes to, you know,

3:35 croissants and a variety of other things, if you process it differently. And that's effectively how acrylic nitrile is. It can make 14 different derivatives, and that's 100, 000 plus products.

3:48 That's a good analogy. So how did you get into this business? Like at five years old, did you be like, I want to create a acrylic nitrile.

3:59 In a sustainable manner. Could you spell acrylic? I tried a lot at five years old. I think I could have. Honestly, I still struggle to spell it now. I always forget, is the Y before the L? I'm

4:07 not the best speller anymore. Although I was like a spelling bee champion. I was like, Kiss some more. Okay, that's a nice thing. I grew out of that. That's the regression. No, so

4:17 a good question. A little bit about me and my background, do

4:23 the short, long story So I actually grew up in poverty, I'm from, consider myself a Yankee, here in Texas, is moving to the south. It was one of the first times I heard myself call that, but so

4:34 I'm from Western Pennsylvania. I went to 17 grade schools, moved around a lot because of poverty and stability. So I think that gave me a lot of, as an entrepreneur, the ability to exist in

4:47 instability and made me a lot, a grit. In addition to that, having a fragmented educationment, I had to do a lot of self learning and teach myself. So in college, I studied international

4:59 business, graduated in 2010, and right after college, I moved into politics where I worked in the US Senate. It was not the right change agent for myself after working there for a couple of years.

5:11 The government can do a lot of amazing things, but when you look at what it is there for, it's really there to create the incentives for the market to actually solve social problems. Doesn't always

5:23 mean that the market can solve those externalities that it creates, right?

5:29 So I moved out of politics and became a startup founder. Started two companies. They didn't work out. The first one was a software platform where we helped hired institutions to raise money through

5:41 their annual funds with their peer alumni, with peer alumni, excuse me. And then from there, spent that company out, didn't work out, but I learned a lot about B2B sales, building a team,

5:53 building software, building product. And we took our learning and our insights and we restructured the company, got an investor and that became my second company. There we found an application

6:05 with more formalized customer discovery training and hotel rewards programs. Ran that business for about two years, grew our team to about six. And at the time, the market got very competitive.

6:19 And we just could not really differentiate ourselves So after two years running that company, I shut things down. Now, two companies in my back pocket, not having worked out, having learned a lot,

6:32 I wanted to figure out like, what more can I do? And what is my next fit? Moving from politics, where I recognize that I'm very mission driven, but also have the business mind and acumen to be

6:48 successful in business I started to think, how can I combine my passion with this knowledge that I have?

6:57 Moved out and found that I had a path forward after taking a life-changing trip to Lake Tahoe where I fell in love with the lake, recognized that for the first time in my life, I was 27, I had

7:10 escaped poverty, which is nowadays very rare. I think they say 7 of folks in poverty are actually able to move up into the next bracket, which is really low and quite staggering and disappointing

7:24 in today's times. But I had beat that statistic and I was thinking about how can I do work that aligns better with my values? Rewind back to my freshman year of college, I took a life-changing, oh,

7:36 I witnessed for the first time really the devastating impacts of climate change after doing an alternate rebuild trip for spring break in New Orleans. I was a year after Hurricane Katrina and folks,

7:49 their homes were still devastated. Some folks still have water in their basements and the ninth ward, right? So we help. there and I had chosen to do small, take my own small personal steps to be

8:01 a better environmental steward. Lake Tahoe, everything kind of came full circle. We moved out to California from DC and worked and I got

8:11 a job working at a firm called Kyros Aerospace, now called InsightM. Oh, okay. I didn't know you worked at Kyros there. I did, yeah. I was their first product manager and helped to identify,

8:24 get our first customer,

8:26 generally oversaw aspects of commercialization, and helped kind of divine our first survey and then our next survey after we kind of expanded our geography. So Kyros, the founders that created this

8:41 remote sensing instrument that we detached to low-flying aircrafts and we could survey oil and gas fields to detect methane gas. And these are, at the time, their technology could only detect the

8:51 largest of these methane gas leaks. So we're expecting that to be very infrequent. And shortly after becoming operational, we saw that there was a lot more methane leaking into the air. Yes, yes,

9:03 yes. Like a lot more methane. This is

9:07 2018 now, and it made me sick to my stomach. I remember going home and sometimes just getting nauseous, thinking about like the devastation that was happening, but also thinking about the economic

9:19 downside to that. That's product leaking into the air, right? That's carbon leaking in the air, hydrogen So I started to think, what more can I do? How can I stop extraction and do more? And

9:30 that's where the thesis for Mars really came in. And we probably say it a lot on here, but part of the reason the methane is so challenging is it's like 34 times more impactful per ton than carbon.

9:43 Yeah, so there's the global warming potential for it. Is anywhere between 24 to like 82 times? I guess it depends on how you measure it the year and the half-life, but CO2, for example, has a

9:55 half-life.

9:58 of a hundred years, I think. And so it can be in the atmosphere and it won't break down for that long. Methane is only like eight years, but the very fact that first capture potential for it is a

10:09 lot more. And you look at it, just the molecule itself has a lot more hydrogen. So it can actually like, you know, absorb more heat. Oh, interesting. And I guess a lot of that's driven by just

10:19 the value chain of how we get to modern polymers, right? And you know, it's funny, we're in this interesting time now where we might have like peak oil trade, where like, we're not necessarily

10:31 yes, we're exporting, but it's the only driver of demands. If automobiles are going down, if we're going into SAF or airlines, it's going to be polymer production, right? If we're no longer

10:44 having the demand for transportation. And I assume there are a lot of different types of polymers, and it's just one of them. But I assume it's a big one, and that's why you're focused on it It's

10:54 a major. Um, feedstock that can make a variety of derivatives that also have their own chemical names. Right. Uh, but it itself is also, uh, you know, if you look at the chains of carbon, um,

11:11 you know, you have, uh, kind of one chain molecules of one carbon chain molecules, two carbon chain molecules, three, it's a three carbon chain molecule, which means that there are three carbon,

11:21 uh, bonds on it. Um, well, actually, so we're going to get super nerdy You tell me if it's too much, like,

11:29 okay, so we know propane is like three carbons in hydrogen, but like what makes acrylic nitrile like not propane? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah. So, um, you have these higher chain

11:41 molecules and, you know, that adds certain advantages to, uh, the polymer and how it performs, uh, what makes acrylic nitrile unique is that it has a nitrogen backbone Um, so adding that

11:52 nitrogen group makes it have more advantages in terms of stiffness. So you can change the properties of the plastic, which is why you get more durability and some of the derivatives. There are

12:02 other kind of nitrogen things out there, and this just happens to be the right size where like you're not going to get like eight carbons attached to. Well, it's a when you convert, perform

12:14 chemistry on the acrylonitrile with that nitrogen group, it creates

12:19 a variety of different polymers. You're just in a really strong different position and advantages. And when you combine it with other monomers, you can get then different types of polymer. And a

12:31 monomer is like a functional group is it's a little different. Think of it as the polymer is the is a monomer in sequence. So it's it bound to itself. So you get two monomers together, you get one

12:44 polymer, and then you get whole polymer chains. And that's what you start to see as like when you're seeing, you know, plastic itself or or fabric itself. those you're seeing long chains of that

12:56 polymer, if you will. And because acrylic nitrile has nitrogen in that polymer chain, it provides more durability and stiffness to the - Correct. To the end products. So it can change things from

13:10 like the heat resistance, for example, as one of the benefits there, the stiffness, you know, the nitrogen itself can hold the molecule more strongly so you can perform more advanced chemistries

13:24 on it. So there's just a lot of kind of different advantages across the, about 14 or so derivatives that you can, derivative pathways for acrylonitrile that you can use to create different

13:35 molecules. So the most, the two most widely known derivatives, I would say for acrylonitrile are the acrylic fibers for clothes. Okay. And then nowadays it's ABS, so acrylonitrile, butadiene,

13:50 styrene. This is the a and ABS. Yeah, interesting If you think the products there you have like car dashboard parts components for sometimes, you know, depending on the manufacturer it could be

14:05 keyboard keys

14:08 Vacuum parts components Lego blocks are the most famous. Oh yeah So who are the current producers of a krillow nitrile and how do you compete against these? I'm assuming giants like and maybe the

14:22 question I was going to go out to is like Like what does that value chain look like today? Like it's not like yeah I don't know do you put methane in and like out comes an and like how does that

14:31 actually get down to Lego blocks? If you can kind of paint for us. Yeah, well going back to your propane So the current process for maybe a little bit of history here. So a krillow nitrile Isn't a

14:44 new molecule. It's been around at the industrial scale the current industrial and comment process for about 60 years And that current process is called Sohail. And Sohail might sound familiar if

14:56 you're familiar with anything with like John D. Rockefeller. It was the standard oil of Ohio company. So it was the kind of pride and jewel of his firms. And they created what is now, I think,

15:06 their legacy, the most adorable legacy, which is the process to produce acrylic nitrile globally. So prior to the

15:15 Sohail process taking over, there was another process in place called the IG Farber process It was environmentally horrible, right? A lot of emissions, it was an efficient reaction, but acrylic

15:26 nitrile was used at the time, particularly during World War II, was kind of its first major application in synthetic rubbers. We needed more rubbers for machinery and transportation during World

15:40 War II, as we were supply chains were getting tapped out, and we needed a domestic supply So an inventor figured out a way to convert the - nitrile into a synthetic rubber which became one of the

15:54 first major applications. From there, after the World War II died down, you saw businesses wanting to continue to be successful. So, continuing with that application for a synthetic rubber, but

16:06 then expanding into new applications. So, then you saw the first use of acrylic nitrile, polyacrylonitrile, where it's polymerized form to create what marketers then called acrylic fibers. So,

16:17 that became the hot trend in the '60s So, think like, you know, clothing, and folks were talking about clothing of the future, and part of that was acrylic fibers. And they were cheap fibers to

16:27 make, and they were great replacements for cotton and other things, similar breathability. And then, applications really, since the

16:36 Ohio process came online, have really ballooned,

16:41 including carbon fiber, after they realized that the polyacrylonitrile textile, if

16:46 you treat it a a certain way, you could create high tensile strains. carbon fibers, which are now in use across all of defense and aerospace industry.

16:57 So acrylonitrile itself has had a long history, and there's been a

17:03 show of progression of the technologies in use to produce pure acrylonitrile and more volumes of it. So today, the propylene amoxidation process, or SOHIO process, takes propylene or propane. So

17:17 these C3, three carbon chain compounds, converts it through an amoxidation reaction, which, not to get super technical, but basically - Amoxidation, amoxidation. Is that like a soda pop? No,

17:29 please tell us.

17:33 So technically speaking, it's like a partial oxidation.

17:37 And it uses oxygen - I mean, it's putting oxygen in it. Yeah, exactly. So it uses oxygen from the air and just one pot reaction. So think we would not cook - nitro in like an open container, but

17:49 you know, you have one pot with like your propylene in it, your bread, you're adding

17:56 these to it.

18:01 You have a catalyst that was proprietary to so high. And you have ammonia, which gives you that nitrogen source and helps drive the reaction forward.

18:15 And then you oxygen over it that you can get from the air. And then you process it, and then you get acrylic nitrile. Now, the byproducts are tremendous. You get about 13 to 15 of them,

18:27 including some that are sold on the market, like hydrogen cyanide, big no-no. This is the output of just that reaction. Adjust that reaction. So they're 15 different chemicals. Yeah. So you get

18:37 acrylic nitrile as the main, as the target molecule and the main source of that kind of crude mixture. then you get hydrogen cyanide, you get acetyl nitrile, which is used in RD and

18:48 pharmaceuticals, and you get other byproducts, CO2, CO. And what's bad about that first gas? Is that like mustard gas or something? Hydrogen cyanide, it sounds terrible. Hydrogen cyanide is

19:01 used in industry for a variety of applications. It's used in consumer spaces as well. The issue when it comes to acrylic nitrile production, though, is that it likes to, in ammonia, do not

19:15 really play well together. So it creates a toxic kind of sludge black polymer that requires certain types of handling and waste discharge. So at industrial scale, commercial scale, it requires

19:33 siding near these class four injection wells These are shallow hazardous wells that are specifically designed to handle some of the gnarliest of waste. Right, so that's a challenge. And there's

19:47 only a few of those. So what you see is that there are only a few acrylic nitro plants around the world because of those limitations.

19:56 Okay, and so when we get back to the value, I guess the value chain, so you have all these chemicals produced and then

20:05 you just said like that it gets produced in a factory. Does that factory also then provide derivatives or is that like shipped off to a derivative specialist? Yeah, that's a great question. So it

20:17 really depends on the manufacturers. So the Acryl and I trial market was really built here in the US. So Heil was acquired by BP before

20:28 I was born, right? So I don't want to give a specific date because I don't recall right now. But the

20:37 patent for the catalyst after that went public, you saw other companies. you know, kind of jumping into the market. So there are several players. BP sold their assets to a firm called Inios a

20:51 couple of decades ago. And they were a startup in and of themselves with a really particular eye for targeting distressed assets. So they were looking to make the acrylonitrile, existing

21:04 acrylonitrile plants more economical. At the same time, there were two other players in the US market, the North American market, that were broadly ascend performance chemicals and cornerstone.

21:16 Asend is the second largest acrylonitrile producer in the US. Most of their product goes for internal use to make nylon 66 downstream. And then Cornerstone was a company that was the third largest

21:31 acrylonitrile manufacturer. They licensed their process from now in the new IP holder is Inyos But recently, they've actually announced that they're shutting down their coal and nitro operation.

21:44 Okay, and so I guess to your earlier question pile, like where do you fit, are you licensing? Are you building your own factory? Like where do you fit in that supply chain essentially? Yeah,

21:55 that's a great question. So we have a completely different process that enables us to produce the same Acrylonitrile monomer, but our kind of soup mixture, right, that the different products,

22:10 byproducts are different So our chemistry was built on green chemistry principles. It was developed originally with the researchers out of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. or Are NREL y'all

22:21 familiar with our national lab system? Well, we can talk about it. Maybe our audience doesn't know. So, and I think what's confusing about the national lab system is it's unclear what every lab

22:30 does. And some of them are super specific and opaque, and some of them are not. So please tell us like what NREL does. I'm part of that as if you've seen the movie Oppenheimer, right? like they

22:40 were literally created to help create. the atomic bomb and because of that, each national lab, maybe just some historic history here too, had a piece of the recipe and they were also all working

22:54 on their own components for it. So concurrent research, and that was also creating competition, but it was also creating, you know, just enough for everyone to kind of be able to move forward in

23:07 unison, but not the same time. Right. So the national app system has been scaled from that. So you have these institutions that are, they work together, but they also compete against each other.

23:18 Yeah. And, uh, and they're, they're, it seems like a distributed Bell Labs across America. Yeah. I think that's right. Um, and run by the Department of Energy, right? So they focus on the

23:28 priorities that the US government views as critical, particularly for energy security and national security. Um, but NREL is unique in that it is the only applied national lab of the national app

23:39 system. Um, so they're hoping to, uh, focuses on developing technologies that will achieve commercialization. That name would not tell you that like National Renewable Energy Lab, like why would

23:49 I think that's applications? But that just happens to be where they've developed amongst all the others, and all the others more fundamental research. I know one of them is specific on nuclear,

23:58 some of them do more kind of basic physics, but I think that explains why they're at all the commercialization things. It's 'cause that's what they do. So they focus, they like fundamental

24:08 research, but then they will move it further along than the other national labs. So to something where it could be tested by the industry or taken up by a startup like Mars. So if most of the

24:21 national labs focus on basic research, I'm assuming there's a mechanism or a process for entrepreneurs like yourself to be able to license that technology. So tell us about how you were able to do

24:35 that. Yeah, not an easy process, I would say. And I am hoping that

24:40 there is opportunities to transform it a bit. 'Cause it did take us well over two years to go from kind of initial contact with the lab to actually getting the full license and being able to then

24:54 kind of sleep easy at night knowing that, hey, we can actually now move forward with this technology and say like we have access to it in a way that is, we'll create value for the company. So the

25:05 governing laws, because it is, these are government organizations, it's called the BIDOL Act. So as part of the BIDOL Act, it more broadly looks at tech transfer and kind of sets the rules for

25:19 tech transfer across not just the national app system, but also academic institutions and other kind of IP related agreements. But there are specific provisions for the national labs. So as a

25:30 national lab, your technology that you're developing is being funded by the public, right? So the BIDOL Act states that the public has a right to participate in commercialization of it. With that

25:45 said, the National Labs are building technology little different from an academic institution where they're building technology that is literally meant to change industry and transform it overnight.

25:57 So I think like our technology, a broader process shift versus maybe a new pump that's more efficient, right? They're gonna look at, they want a transformation of industry So when they're thinking

26:11 about tech transfer, they're thinking about the right partners that can actually lead that. And oftentimes that means you need a lot of capital, you need a lot of know-how. I was gonna say no

26:21 offense, scale. Those are things you don't have. Right, it's sort of, right? So yeah, let's hear about how you got your foot in the door with them. And you need scale. And they put that

26:29 really under two criterion, your commitment and your capacity. Now there is a framework for how they go about assessing

26:40 And I would say it's not as aligned with startups. So we went through a program called LAPSTART that actually was meant to help kind of bridge that gap and help us demonstrate our commitment and

26:53 capacity to license the technology. And then from there, after we got that initial door open for us, it was a series of conversations and showing what we can do, really solving the chicken and the

27:06 egg problem at the same time to get the technology So finding the market while saying we have the technology, even though we were still working through commercial agreements for it, starting with

27:17 the research license, moving from that research to an option agreement. So if we can go back in a second. So I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, because this question comes up, they know the

27:25 market they wanna be in, and there may be an experience here in Houston where they got like 20 years of experience in industry, and they know what technical solution they want, but they're not

27:34 technologists, they don't know where to go find it. And when I asked the question, Why don't you go to universities, licensing office. Why don't you go to a national lab and like find the right

27:43 technology for you? It seems hard to navigate. They don't know where to find it. And they often say it's not worth the time 'cause it's like too opaque. So how did you even find that this

27:54 technology existed and that you'd wanna go into this program? Like that's kind of step one. And it sounds like you identified the technology before you went into the lab start. No, actually, so

28:04 it's maybe a little bit about Mars's origin story. So we got started in 2019 So after I left Cairo, so I started to think, how can we, you know, it was really driving into, I wanted to stop

28:15 extraction. And if you stop extraction, I like our modern life. You know, I love the fact that

28:23 I can like literally, you know, hit a button and food is delivered to me. And I don't even think about it, right? That's amazing, particularly like my busy life. So how can I continue with all

28:33 of that, knowing that there's emissions and everything tied to that and fill, you know, and make it so that we can continue our life. So that was the thesis, Incorporated Mars and our hope focus

28:45 has been on, okay, well then you need a new carbon source. So I started learning a lot more about draw down opportunities. You know, there's elevated CO2 and just carbon in the air more generally.

28:59 Maybe that is an opportunity for a cheap carbon source. That also means that we can stop extraction. So that was Mars is hyper focused I got into a program with a group called Carbon 180, which is

29:11 a DC based think tank. They helped get the CCUS

29:17 tax credit 45 Q passed and expanded. And in 2019, they put out an RFP for entrepreneurs who were looking to move into carbon removal And the program was a year program. They provide us with funding

29:34 to become experts in carbon removal. So there were seven of us selected of 126 applicants and the only prerequisite is that you needed to have been a founder beforehand. What they weren't trying to

29:47 teach was the founding skills, what they wanted us to learn was how to commercialize these technologies, because their whole thesis was a lot of these technologies exist, which seem to move them

29:56 into the market. And we can find the commercialization people and train them up, then we have a better shot at hitting our goals

30:04 So I spent a year learning from the top policymakers, researchers, and thinkers in carbon removal to become an expert. At the same time, the charge for us was to identify technologies and business

30:18 models that could help us remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. So I now have my charge, what I needed to focus on And I had worked with a national lab that was not in rail prior to

30:33 working with carbon 180 And after Cairo says. initially focused on biogas utilization. It was, I knew that we had, at Kyros, we had surveyed landfills. And on a column per column basis, there

30:47 was more methane spewing out of landfills than some of these oil filled assets. And that was where I thought that I could have the most immediate direct impact. So I spent about six months looking

30:60 for the root cause, and then actually initially partnering with Lawrence Livermore National Lab to address that root cause. So I learned a lot about tech transfer from the point person at Lawrence

31:13 Livermore National Lab. In talking a little bit about, for people here on the internet, maybe don't know, you just call them up. Do you find them on the website? And how do you get them to take

31:21 you seriously because it's the government, and I don't know if they take people seriously? Yeah, yeah, just so random calling in. Right, no, so I knew that you could not just go into the front

31:30 door. Like Lawrence Livermore has created, you know, like Livermorium, right? elements, right? Like her name. Okay. Wow. So they were not just going to be like, yo, dude, we want to work

31:42 with you, you know, you got a business degree, like not. Are you ready to lead the decarbonization charge? Energy Technexes is your platform for growth, offering unique resources and expertise

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31:56 and carbon tech founders. Join us at energytechnexescom and start building your Thunderlizard

32:01 I got connected to a researcher, one of their prominent researchers, and had a chat with her. And then she was like, Oh, you need to meet this researcher, Lady Knight, by the name of Dr.

32:13 Jennifer Knight, who's also interested in biogas utilization projects. So she and I started to explore different ways where her technology could be useful to what I was also seeking to do. And then

32:24 we found what was an initial fit

32:29 more and every other national lab wants to work with startups, they just don't know how. They don't

32:37 know how to assess if you're an entrepreneur that can move the needle. And they don't want to look like they've put their bets in the wrong, you know. And that's just normal people. Being people,

32:44 yeah. Right, yeah, exactly.

32:47 With no profit motive though, 'cause we're the government. So they don't have to move fast. There's no incentive for that. So the researcher was driving that. That's initially how we got

32:59 connected to Lawrence Livermore. Ultimately, that project didn't work out And at the time, this was actually under Trump one. All of the methane that was, you know, kind of being, they were

33:12 looking at targeting that for renewable natural gas. So there wasn't really any other option to utilize the methane outside of that. And there was no funding for it. So we had to make a pivot. So

33:23 we recognized though that the National Lab System had unique value, a lot of technologies, lot of brilliant people and they were looking for people like me. to come in and say like, Hey, I have

33:35 an idea. What do you think and how about we move this forward together? So

33:41 with Carbon 180, they encouraged me to make this pivot and reminded me that I had the runway and the now network to be successful at it. They got connected to Lab Start, which was piloting this

33:54 idea, and they had heard that I was working with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and they said, Oh, I think, so we have a pool of entrepreneurs we can tap into, all looking for technology. How

34:04 about we pilot our programwith these carbon 180 fellows? And that's then how I got connected to the Lab Start team. Lab Start was piloting specifically with NREL. So to get connected to NREL, we

34:20 went through Lab Start. Oh, I remember when I met Lab Start three or four years ago when I was at Greentown. Okay, it's funny how all that stuff is like in the moment, you knew, and it makes

34:30 sense, objectively. Sorry, my brain's just catching up with what you're saying. Yeah, there's a lot. It's like I live a crazy journey. Yeah, okay. And Lab Start's mission is to get

34:41 individuals with commercial expertise to be - Already founders, right? Like people who've got, who've proven they have, what's, and grit, right? Yeah, so I'm on their board, their advisory

34:50 board now, and it's changed a lot since I went through the pilot program, but ultimately, yeah, to connect, you know, ambitious founders, you know, folks with, I think, strong business

35:01 acumen to move technologies. And I think it's no longer just a national lab. I think it's, you know, academic institutions to help improve tech transfer, which is a big area problem. Yeah,

35:14 improved more generally. Yeah. So with LabStar, we had an end to end rail. I knew that there were other national labs. And my co-founder and I, who's a chemical engineer, We put out a broader

35:30 RFP.

35:32 or RFI, excuse me, request for information, and said like, here's what we're looking at. Our thesis is carbon dioxide removal and industrial decarbonization. We are looking for technologies that

35:42 can utilize CO2, but also have some downstream products that have downstream co-benefits. And here is the kind of criterion for the technology that we're looking at. We don't want it to be

35:55 sufficiently mature We are looking for a billion dollar, multi-billion dollar markets. And we're looking for not just multi-billion dollar markets, but within that, there needs to be beachheads

36:06 that also are multi-billion dollars and have growth potential. And we don't want any technology that's earlier, that's still in the kind of paper study. We want it to have been some form of a real

36:20 world tested, be that at the bench scale, but enough data for us to validate it So to translate like

36:29 TRL5? Actually, well, TRL3. Three, okay, as someone who's not trained in science, anything below that would, I'm not useful. Yeah.

36:40 I'm not useful, to be frank. And then we didn't want anything that was gonna require too much engineering complexity. And we wanted to be able to hit the techno-economic targets that would make the

36:54 product competitive in the market. Okay. So those are our criteria, very, yeah And what I heard is you issued an RFI. So you put this together in basically a request and sent it in and they had a

37:06 smart person look through, essentially. And they gave a, and in total, we went to several national labs and we got 18 technologies back. Okay. I did not know you could just issue an RFI

37:18 government lab system and be like. And they will like actually respond. Like there's a person that's doing this, right? There's more to the story. Yeah, they're check transfer, that's their job.

37:27 And you know that I got the list of all of them. Make this sound easy. Okay, I thought they just had meetings. I didn't realize they actually, like, like - They didn't work? Yeah, no, no, no.

37:35 That's interesting. But you gotta use the credibility that you have, right? Of course, of course. It's not just you, a stranger. You've been in the system. I'm in the ER with Carbon 180. I am

37:44 part of this Lapsart program, which is working with NREL, right? So they see NREL, and they're like, oh, okay. And I'm focused on carbon utilization. And that was a really hot topic at the

37:54 time So there was interest, and not every lab responded, right, and okay. So like, if Jason and I sent an RFI, we probably would not get any of this. They'd be like, Jason, there was nothing.

38:06 No, it's very well. But then, or you could, you know, message me, and I'm happy to connect you to - Okay, you gotta work the system and your network. Right, it's just like a VC. You gotta

38:15 get the introductions and stuff. Yeah, and we were running this program called Lift Off to kind of train entrepreneurs and how to raise money and things like that. And I think the two things I'm

38:24 learning from this kind of conversation is one, you can be very deliberate with building a business and kind of working your way through a thesis you wanna solve. You're gonna learn things along the

38:33 way, but you can kind of develop those key relationships to solve this problem. So this is a deliberateness to Mars that is not obvious from a person outside who wasn't paying attention before,

38:45 like myself. But the other thing is successful entrepreneurs have to tell a story that kind of paints the dots of like, this is why I'm the person. And even if you didn't develop the technology,

38:57 you're the person who kind of acquired the technology, built the relationships 'cause you have to convince all these other stakeholders along the way that you're the person. And that's kind of what

39:08 differentiates a successful founder from one who's not. It's being able to construct that story, that back history and the why am I the person here and now who should take seriously. Yes. And you

39:18 did the work, right? It's not just like fabrication of the story. like, but it all builds into this thing where it in hindsight, like, looks easy. We all know how hard it was, having billion

39:30 issues. Yeah, you put all the Lego pieces together. You had a box, but you put them into something that actually is a standing structure. And what I'm trying to compliment is it's a very, you're

39:36 a very good storyteller. Thank you. And I think that's very helpful. I'm always learning, you know, and I try to get better as I go, you know, I accept compliments, but I also am like, how

39:46 can I get better, right? Like, I think that, like, continuing thinking about, like, being retrospective, like, introspective, and then figuring out how to move forward is like, a core to

39:56 our philosophy at Mars and our operating principles, which we have six of, safety first,

40:04 customer focus second, and our, without going through all of them, the last one is don't let perfect be enemy of the good, right, iteration trumps perfection. 'Cause you can get, you can get

40:14 stuck being a perfectionist.

40:17 Yes, engineers, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a, why don't you want things to be right? Sometimes I'm like. I'm gonna do this next time. Like you go off on one of your like hyper focus, like

40:30 perfectionism. I'm upset that one of our power points, things don't line up. It's like, oh, it makes me angry on this. I personally to myself. I'm sure Kim is gonna listen to this and they're

40:40 like, he just explained to Carla Nitro how completely wrong, right? But like, I could explain it more technically accurate, but like it's gonna go over people's head. It's much better to be

40:48 flour.

40:51 Yeah. It's perfect, I love it. So tell us about, so one,

40:57 you've got an amazing story and a running business. So tell us about the business today and what you hope to achieve in the next year or two. Yeah, so we got connected to NREL. We put all those

41:09 technologies through that rigorous framework I just mentioned, right? like first looking at impact and then market beach head. the engineering feasibility, scientific feasibility, economic

41:21 feasibility, and then what does the commercialization look like? Commercialization for us was the biggest unknown. And in fact, we're still learning some of the things that we should have assessed,

41:30 like safety, for example. But we looked at like headcount, estimated amount of money we'd need to raise to bring the technology to the market. And then ultimately, the technology that we selected

41:40 was from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It's called nitrilation We don't really get hung up on - It's so good at naming.

41:48 You don't get hung up on the name, like at all. But at the end of the day, it enables us to produce this acrylic nitrile. And we can produce this acrylic nitrile through a variety of pathways.

42:01 The one that we favor, and is the most advantage when it comes to production costs, is our carbon removal pathway. So it enables us to take CO2, so capture it CO2, water, electricity and ammonia.

42:14 along with a catalyst and produce the acrylic nitrile.

42:19 And I think that's important too. Like you realize the end product has to be cost-competitive with what is already in the market because - We're in a commodity space, especially chemical space. So

42:33 it's a little less commoditized, but if we're successful, it will be a commodity. So yeah, it makes it even harder. So yeah, so we got the technology, we got the full license in 2020, and now

42:45 I'm forgetting dates,

42:47 2022. Prior to that, our whole strategy in addition to partnering with NREL is about partnerships. So as an entrepreneur, you can look at your balance sheet and there's really two sides to the

42:58 capital in and the money out. And we know exactly, not exactly, but we have plus or minus 40, how much money we need to raise over the next 10 years to get to our third-of-a-kind full commercial

43:11 plant.

43:13 hyper focus on thinking, how can we reduce that capital intensity from Mars' angle and leverage partnerships? So from the start, after we got our first option with NREL,

43:25 we joined two programs sponsored by NYSERDA, which is a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Carbon and Value Adventures for Climate Tech. Those programs helped us connect and

43:35 identify our beachhead market for the technology.

43:39 Because, again, there's 14 of us I don't know if you know that, Gilliana and I spearheaded C2V within the Greentown side. Oh, I didn't know that. And then we obviously partnered with the - it

43:46 was NYSERDA and then the group out of Brooklyn. I forget what their name right now. But that was like a - Urban Futures Lab. Urban Futures Lab. Urban Futures Lab with Pat. And she was great. But

43:56 it was a - I don't want to call it a homunculus, but it was like a zombie program. We had to put together to make it work for all the stakeholders, but it was one of the most important things that

44:05 we did because of the need to figure out how to create value from these carbon products And we were the earliest of cohort one, like literally. Carl won't just always the best career program. We

44:17 were the earliest, like I was just like, I have this technology that where I have a research license and I'm trying to figure out like, how do we get the option? And this program will connect us

44:27 to hopefully, help us identify the market that we can go into. And we did it through their leadership council, the carbon tech leadership council, we got connected to folks in the water industry.

44:39 The water industry is downstream of us, but upstream of like some of these customers like Veolia for example, they use polymers to help treat and purify water. And that is a polymer called

44:53 polyacrylamide. So three global players, Veolia connected us to all three. And we found out there was an appetite and an interest to decarbonize and to pay a premium while you're scaling up for

45:06 that material. And that appetite was immediate They were aggressively looking for low carbon material, found any, and that was like the tune of like half a billion dollars. So we saw there's a

45:16 market demand, now we just need to scale up into it. And then with venture for climate tech, the program manager, Jackie had started a manufacturing company. So we use that program to help us

45:28 figure out how do we operationalize the company and like build towards scale at the start. So with those two programs in mind, that gave us a great jumpstart. We then graduated from those programs,

45:38 had a market that led to an option with the National Lab. I got another fellowship with a group called Prime Coalition, which is a Boston-based nonprofit. They also have a VC firm called AZOLA,

45:51 and a first-of-a-kind infrastructure fund called Trellis - Trellis was with them, yeah. So they pioneered catalytic capital. And I got to learn from them for six months, the benefits of catalytic

46:05 capital, how it operates, but then also got to learn - I get to sit in on their VC team and learn that from the inside out. So I got trained up there. We were able to - So you were preparing for

46:16 all these meetings that - Preparing, were you with Matthew or Matthew Norden? Yes. But I got to learn from Joanna. Joanna is awesome, yeah. And Amy do for as well, and others on the team, like

46:28 Michael and Lauren, who have both since left. So people that I still look to professionally and reach out for guidance often, actually. And I still meet with Matthew monthly Good. I still wonder

46:43 if I would be afraid of Matthew, even though I'm 10 years older now. It's been the last time I met him. He's very intense. Really brilliant. Really brilliant. And I'm like, I feel stupid in

46:52 front of him. Has already probably answered the question that he just asked you. Yes. He

46:58 knows the answer. He knows the answer. He knows the answer. Yeah. But very gentle. He's like Neil, but more focused. Okay. But is he trying to prove that he's smarter than you? Or is he just

47:08 like 18 years? No, no, no. Oh, he's trying to, he wants you to be better. I just don't like to be stupid in front of people. I don't like to either. I know.

47:18 It's like yesterday when you made me do math in front of you.

47:23 It's like a real-time demo. It never works, right? Oh, yeah. You practice beforehand and it goes on. To be clear, we were trying to calculate pre-money valuations with dilution. It's hard math.

47:32 Oh, yeah. 'Cause it's like the X is in the wrong place, people.

47:37 You learn that VC math is all made up At least I did through Matthew's guidance.

47:42 But, so they helped me successfully raise our oversubscribe pre-seed round a few years ago. That was meant to last us nine months and we were able to stretch that 19 months. Oh, that's a really

47:55 interesting thing. Yes. Nine months, you stretch it. Cash management, maybe. Yes, yeah. And part of that is because we, outside of partnerships, we also like to look at, when we looked at

48:05 that commercialization, as I said, like how much money we would need,

48:09 from equity and how much do we want from other sources? So diverse capital stack. So to date, we've raised66 million.

48:15 88 has come from non-dilutive funds like grants and prizes and such. So

48:23 raise that. Then we got into the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program. So this is Bill Gates's climate arm. They're focused on scaling up climate impactful technologies. I assume they want to be

48:34 there at the very beginning, but actually you've already been in operations and had raised capital, if I'm doing math right, four years. With, we had raised a seed round and we got Breakthrough

48:44 that summer. So it'd been a few months. But we had applied, the process is a long time, right? So like we had applied back, we got notified we were awarded in June. We had applied in like

48:57 November, right? So in between then we had to raise some money. Okay, okay, okay. We needed money in the door. And the money was meant to help us with one of the pitfalls of licensing.

49:08 technology from the National Lab is that the feedback that we'd received was that they don't do a good job at tech transfer. The labs don't, right? Because that means you typically have to go on

49:18 site, that's destructive, right?

49:21 But they acquiesced and we were on site for nine months, but we raised the funds to go on site, learn the tech, produce samples for those three customers, and then those three customers validated

49:32 our material as a drop-in to Acrylamide But there was still a big unknown. Can this actually polymerize downstream? So when you have alternate processes, particularly bio-based processes and our

49:45 material is certified through ASTM standards as a bio-based material, they often don't polymerize really well. And is this because there's other junk in there because it's not a carb, like I said

49:55 carbon copy, that's like a weird thing to say It does have to do with

50:01 different molecular weights, but I would say that's the extent. I am not okay. It's like a chemistry is complicated and this is about improving yield. So

50:14 there had remained for years this concern like okay you can produce acrylamine great we'll continue to we're interested in moving forward with you on testing your acrylamite trial and all of our

50:27 products but these manufacturers these three global acrylamine manufacturers have like 1, 500 products minimum right so there's a lot of polymers

50:37 and and they have never found an alternate pathway that can actually perform the same as the incumbent so high acrylamite trial so there hasn't been a technology to date and partly because like when

50:49 you think about way process engineering works like all the stuff is set up around the thing that works and they don't have like the tools or the analysis or even the I don't know the recipe book to

51:01 deal with something that's a little different and so they almost have to rebuild. all that surrounding infrastructure, 'cause there's just so good at this one process. And it's not obvious, 'cause

51:09 you're like, it's just chemicals, right? Like, why is one chemical different than the other? But it's these little things where they're really good at living with this one molecular weight. As

51:18 you said before, like that's the recipe they're used to. And if it's shifted over, they in some way, they might not even have the talent internally to like make that little adjustment because

51:27 there's so much infrastructure built around the current process, right? And that's what you're fighting against And that's where our unique insight was that we wanted to make just drop in

51:38 replacements. But when you get into industry, you learn there's nuance there too, right?

51:45 And things that we're learning as we go. Being new, my co-founders are chemical engineers, right? We have a team of experts are - How did you meet your co-founder? Yeah, through a group called

51:55 Air Miners. So Air Miners is the largest carbon dioxide removal have also they but, Slack on group virtual world the in group

52:04 other programs like Launchpad, which helps to train folks interested in moving into carbon removal and even launching a business in carbon removal.

52:17 So,

52:20 I think the question we were getting to is, what's next? Yeah, yeah. So we produced all that, so we went through Breakthrough. Breakthrough gave us the funds to design our pilot plant. So we

52:32 were based in California and we moved to Houston about two years ago, because with those funds, we designed, fabricated, and commissioned our pilot plant, which can produce about a kilogram per

52:42 day of our material. And we ran into some challenges with site selection. It turns out, siting is very difficult, and particularly first-of-a-kind technology at the piloting scale, where even it

52:59 requires a lot of understanding of what your technology is going to do, that you don't always have answers to when you're getting a permit. So Texas was great for us to relocate because the

53:11 requirements were kind of switched on their heads. It was about minimum emissions thresholds, which we don't exceed. That made it easier for us. And therefore, you don't need a different kind of

53:21 permit, exactly, or to pull a permit more generally, which can be its own challenge.

53:28 So fast forward, our piloting efforts, we produce our first sample from our pilot, which we brought online in record time about 19 months, about two months ago. Oh, it's very recent. Yeah,

53:42 very recently we produced that first sample. We sent it to our first customer, the major acrylamite producer. This customer owns 56 of this11 billion market. And they were the most skeptical of

53:57 our ability to actually achieve polymerization. And we found out last week that we are the first alternate equivalent nitrile process to pass their entire polymerization. All right, that's a huge

54:08 15-hundred polymers. Oh, okay. And that was the announcement you kind of pushed out. Yeah, so we made an announcement, just kind of internally to investors about that. And we are looking to do

54:18 some more outreach and sharing that here now. Yeah, that's huge. And I just want to thank the partners that we've had So in addition to then going through Breakthrough, we found a co-location

54:36 partner with Shell. So I came down here about two years ago in a month or so, got 18 leads for different spaces. And Neil Dykeman actually met him. Good. And he connected us to Shell. Oh, Neil

54:52 was good. And Neil used to be at Shell too. Oh, wow, okay So

54:58 we had conversations. We found initial strategic fit the shell potentially providing us with capture at CO2. And then we investigated that further. And then we had a series of meetings with them

55:10 over nine months that ultimately led to our lease agreement with them. Okay. And that partnership has been transformative. And did you mean, was your principal over there? Was it Ed Holgate or

55:20 was it Amy or who's the - Yeah. Our first meeting was with Ed Holgate and one of the science officers. And Amy Lefour, who's our CVC, Ed Holgate's on their Game of Change program. Okay. I know,

55:34 Amy. Oh, wow, the world is small. It is, right? It is, yeah. Well, it's small, okay. But that's also very interesting too because - That's why I want to name drop, like, all these helpful

55:44 people 'cause it's like, our audience can go find them and ask us to do an introduction. Yes. Yeah, they're the movers and shakers. They are. Make it happen. And I mean, tremendous value add

55:56 in partners, right? Because it gives you a ton of credibility and resources that other founders at your stage would not have. I mean, for context, in California, we were quoted to have our lab

56:09 build out would be12 million, and it would take about a year or so. Yeah, our burning cash while you're waiting. Yes, expensive quote was actually from Shell, and it came in at like 300K. And

56:24 that was only because we had to like tear down a wall because of move of our facility end. Yeah. And so we saved a lot of money, and within three months, our lab was up and running. Three months

56:37 from a year. So their expertise, they've done piloting before. The feedback they gave when we were looking at doing the tie-ins for our plant was tremendous because it added safety features that we

56:52 hadn't considered, and it's been exceptional. And that partnership has expanded. So the first piece of it was we got their

57:02 Show show gave us hundreds of documents from, you know, their centuries of operations and said like here take this Take what you need as a

57:12 starting point and we'll use this as a bridging To make sure that you're you know operating safely while you're you know on our campus and Safety's caught us. So like we have four safety pillars

57:26 Error prevention so making sure everyone we call our team members plan of tears making sure they all speak the same language Our governance. So we have a safety board. We have SOP. So standard

57:37 operating procedures So we use standard operating procedures on the operational side on the commercial side and on the engineering side and in the management plan So that management plan we've now

57:49 adopted We started with 23 we've grown to 24 documents now including a hurricane preparedness cuz we're in Texas Okay, yeah, and that's been tremendous Talking to other Startups in the space who've

58:03 had to raise to implement safety later because it is a requirement when you're a supplier Two to three million dollars. It's yeah, it's a retrofit. Yeah, so we have that as a core So we money we

58:15 didn't have to save right part of that commercialization kind of framework there And then shells also been helpful. They helped us with sample production Access to their analytical and even just

58:26 experimental and contract Development work, and then recently we got a game changers grant with them to develop an alternate pathway to a feedstock as well And if I remember just to Plug the shell

58:41 folks they are looking for other kind of low-carb and carbon-negative Technology to bring in there's aren't you guys a neighbor to another startup? Is that dex mat? Yeah, yeah, so dex mat and

58:51 Brian Hasen's team big fans of them. So they do carbon nanotubes. I believe from natural gas And there were one of two companies with them, two companies on this Shell technology center site. So

59:09 Stitch is what they call it. And there are, it's

59:12 one of three RD campuses for Shell around the world. And the only one in North America. Okay. And I think edge really pioneering, trying to bring in companies like yours that have a chemical

59:21 process that are around carbon, carbon to value and leverage that kind of resource. Sounds like you have more ideas on like the, who they're looking at. But I can say that they are, there's some

59:32 space that is available. And we've, and they've since seemingly expressed interest in bringing more collaborators on site, be it startup, sort of. Yeah, and I don't know if it's a formal program,

59:45 but I know that there's that interest. So it's definitely a great thing to have here. Yeah. I'm looking at the clock and I'm like, oh, we gotta wrap up soon. Oh no.

59:55 Time flies, do you want to do everything? I don't really like so much about science. I think like from this conversation, you're a great founder, Erin. And one thing I've just noticed from

1:00:07 talking to you the past 58 minutes is of all founders, I know, you're probably one of the top 10 in using different programs and resources to leapfrog and put yourself in a position And you stack

1:00:22 these programs and fellowships, et cetera, to fill in

1:00:27 knowledge areas that you may not have and they all add credibility. And so I think a lot of founders could learn from you. Yeah, and you gotta have the wherewithal to go find the resource that you

1:00:40 need at that moment. And sometimes I think it's hard if you're an adult and have adult responsibilities to pick up your life and say no, I'm gonna go to this group in DC. I'm gonna go to this group

1:00:53 in California. But when you're mission driven, you kind of have to, right? And you don't have a choice in that sense. But I think sometimes when we talk about Houston as an ecosystem, it's like,

1:01:05 why doesn't Houston have more things? We have more capital. And it's like, Houston has its own strengths, but you need to open up your mind as an entrepreneur to get the thing you need. I think

1:01:14 Enroll actually has this great report they put out of where climate entrepreneurs go when they get the resource they need And in some ways, you are the example of a successful climate entrepreneur,

1:01:26 because you do go to all the resources. And people will go to elemental, out in Hawaii, or they'll go out to Greentown in Boston, or they'll go to these various programs. And that's where the

1:01:35 resource is. You kind of have to open your experience that's what's not just Houston. And I'm sure at some point, you're going to be fundraising in Sandhill Road, because that's where the capital

1:01:43 is. So it's not necessarily a question of what does Houston have. It's like, how do we create that connectivity

1:01:51 I think it's also, one thing I've recently learned about Houston or recognized is that it is a global city, right? And in some ways, there's kind of three Houston's. There's the local Houstonians

1:02:03 who are still elusive to me. I would love to meet them. They don't exist, they're not real people. They are probably at country clubs that we're not members of. I don't think they particularly

1:02:15 like then all the newcomers from Houston, folks like me who moved from California and other states in the US who then have their own view of Houston. And then there's the global Houston, right?

1:02:27 There are the international delegates and all the embassies and a lot of the oil and gas companies here look more globally. I think than they do kind of at Houston in their backyard outside of just

1:02:39 being able to leverage the talent pool here for business activities. But so what we've been trying to do over the last couple of months is really connect with us. all three of those different

1:02:51 constituencies and introduce Mars to those audiences. What was the third Houston, so there is - It's the local Houstonians, the kind of US-based transplants who are moving here, and then the

1:03:02 international crowd. Okay, got it. And if we can get all those groups to talk to each other, I think that there'd be more cohesion, particularly in the clean energy space, but it's such a spread

1:03:15 out city that, yeah, I think that just takes a little while. Yeah. Yeah So ETN's doing that. Yeah, that's what we're trying to put together. That's what we're trying to put together. Thank you.

1:03:23 So if someone heard the show and they wanna get in contact or help you out, what do you need help with and how do they find you? Yeah, so Acryl and Ichos also use as the sole raw material for

1:03:23 carbon fiber, I mentioned. And carbon fiber is that co-benefit material that we see. So it's a permanent carbon sink. So it qualifies as a carbon dioxide removal pathway. We can sequester about

1:03:23 two units or like two tons of CO2.

1:03:50 per ton of carbon fiber, but you can use it in products. So our goal is to proliferate the use in applications of carbon fiber, particularly as a replacement for steel in certain applications. So

1:04:02 what we're seeing nowadays is Texas and California are using carbon fiber in their transmission lines instead of steel, because it increases grid capacity, reduces line loss. US government is

1:04:12 interested in re-shoring the domestic supply of carbon fiber, particularly the raw material and the textile production. So Acrylonitrile and the polyacrylonitrile, because that market has moved to

1:04:25 China and that creates the Defense Department uses carbon fiber. So that creates some national security issues. And as of last week, the administration announced that hypersonic, so very fast

1:04:41 aviation

1:04:44 devices, if you will,

1:04:48 for aerospace and for deep space. are,

1:04:53 used to be just a defense department activity. There's a new executive order that enables the commercial aviation space to use hypersonics. And the issue with hypersonics is when you slow them down,

1:05:06 they create, they get very hot. So use carbon fiber as a way to radiate the heat. When you speed them up, when you're starting to slow down. Oh, when you're slow, because they're friction on

1:05:14 the way in, on the way on the way. Okay. So yeah, it's probably on both, to be honest. I'm not an expert in this. We're still learning. But that's one major application that's going to grow

1:05:23 for carbon fiber in the US government. So, you know, we're seeking ways to plug in there. But at the end of it, you know, in by 2030, our plan is to launch our first full commercial plant. And

1:05:36 we'll produce about 50, 000 tons of the material, specifically for, you know, hygiene and, and water purification, but also for carbon fiber. So my goal. is one day you're buying a new carpet

1:05:53 and you are paying for carbon removal because you don't know the difference. It looks the same, but it also sequesters carbon permanently. Awesome. That's great. Well, thanks for coming on the

1:06:02 show. I'm glad to have you here. I'm sure we'll have to check back in a year or two and see what you've done. Yeah. And I would say we're looking for funding. So we do have a Pre-C2 open right

1:06:12 now. This will help us as we're bridging the gap to get to our first purchase order, which is for 100 tons. So we move from kilograms to 100 tons. And how do people get in touch with you? Yeah.

1:06:24 So you can find me online at MarsMaterialsTech. My email directly

1:06:34 is AaronMarsMaterialsTech. And I'm also on LinkedIn and all the other social platforms. Awesome. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.