- Mobile carbon capture for semi-trucks
was thought to be impossible
until now.
- Here we go! Up to 1,000 RPM.
- That sound you're hearing
is mobile carbon capture in action.
The device on the back of this semi-truck
is removing 80% of the carbon from its exhaust.
And that's a huge deal.
- Every year, semi-trucks create 339 million metric tons of CO2—
that's 5% of the entire U.S. carbon footprint—
but we have to keep these trucks running
because they're an essential part of our supply chain.
It's just this massive problem.
And we don't have a good solution
to decarbonize these trucks.
- We're building something that's never existed before,
so we have to push ourselves to show people
just how far this could go.
We have the chance here to make a massive swing
in CO2 emissions from positive to negative.
- Detroit has given its country a lot:
most notably, in transportation.
The automotive industry started here in 1901.
12 years later,
Henry Ford invented the moving assembly line.
They laid the first mile of concrete highway,
painted the first road lines,
and even installed
the first modern three-colored traffic light.
And today, it's on the brink of yet
another first for transportation.
- Right behind me, this is the first of its kind
mobile carbon capture system.
The first ever to be deployed
to commercialization anywhere in the world.
- Carbon capture is getting a lot of attention
in the news lately as a potential solution
for climate change.
There are two main approaches to capturing carbon:
companies like Climeworks built facilities
that suck CO2 out of the air.
This is known as 'direct air capture.'
Another way is to capture it right at the source,
before it even enters the air.
This is called 'carbon capture and storage.'
Remora is taking this approach, but making it mobile.
- Semi-trucks are one of the very hardest
to decarbonize sectors in the U.S.
because we rely on semi-trucks
to move almost every good that we see around us.
And unfortunately,
semi-trucks are really, really hard to electrify.
- Everyone has been told that electric vehicles
are zero emissions.
This is the ultimate greenwashing
that we're seeing right now.
You have to charge them, you have to build them,
you have to recycle them—
and none of those things are actually figured out or green.
And as a vehicle gets bigger,
the batteries have to get significantly heavier
just to carry their own battery weight,
so the efficiencies come down drastically.
- Remora believes their solution
is the best option for trucks on the roads, right now.
- We can retrofit onto existing diesel trucks.
We don't have to replace every single one
of the 2 million trucks on the road in the U.S.
You know, we don't need to overhaul the grid,
build out all-new charging stations.
What's exciting here is that
it can start decarbonizing trucks now.
- Here's how it works:
the device connects to a truck's tailpipe
where it conditions the exhaust by removing water
and cooling it down.
Then, the conditioned exhaust
gets pushed through a filter made of 'zeolite beads'
which have microscopic pores
where carbon dioxide molecules get physically stuck.
Oxygen, nitrogen,
and other harmless gases are the wrong size,
so they flow right out into the air,
leaving the carbon behind.
Once the filter is full of carbon, it's heated
and pressurized, causing the zeolite pores
to release the CO2 molecules.
That pure stream of CO2
is compressed into pressure vessels
onboard the truck.
- The really cool part is that
we're using heat from the truck's exhaust
to heat up the absorbent bed,
which means that the system is extremely energy efficient,
and we have multiple absorbent beds.
So we can capture CO2 in one
while we're regenerating another.
And then we can switch back and forth.
- But turning that science into reality
and actually building this mobile carbon capture device
from scratch, is far from easy.
- There you go. - There you go.
- So how many are you guys typically making then?
- Well, this is our, this is our first.
The greatest challenge is the fact
that nobody makes parts to capture CO2
on a moving vehicle.
- The way these beads are distributed
is vital to our system.
We will definitely need to get to the point
where it's not multiple people over multiple days
doing this one layer at a time.
So a lot of the equipment that we need for our system
is not designed for this scale,
and absolutely not designed for this application.
- If the weld bead is, you know, right here
we'll never get a good seal.
We're putting ourselves at risk.
- Yeah, yep, yep.
- For some of this equipment,
we just know it's never been done before,
so a lot of it is very much an iterative process.
We learn something, quite often we break something,
and then we try again.
- In other words,
a lot of this is being figured out as they go.
- So this motor is actually designed to go
on like small, propelled airplanes.
We had some stuff get modified,
so we're trying to see why or where it broke.
- It's a big process to get this device installed
on a vehicle.
- The device gets installed in a small gap behind the cab.
- Most vehicles do have this space,
but we have to constantly validate that it will fit,
that the weight will get distributed correctly
between the axles.
- The device doesn't affect cargo space,
but at 5,000 pounds, inevitably, it lowers fuel efficiency.
- So the biggest challenge is really making sure
that we're not gonna make the vehicle unsafe.
- Most of my subsystems are welded underneath this truck,
and bolted onto the frame.
And if any of those fall off, we're in big trouble.
- This first device is truly built by hand—
so the team must rigorously test it,
as some parts are prone to fail.
- You can see a bump on the alternator.
- Yeah, a little. - Better than you can here.
What was that?
- The truck turned off, right? - Oh, the truck turned off.
- The way the installation works,
is that we essentially drop the device onto the frame rails,
and bolt into existing bolt holes
that are designed for aftermarket retrofits.
Other than that, we install a couple other systems
and different parts to the truck.
We install a little screen inside the cab—
and then we're good to go.
- One device captures 70% to 80%
of the truck's carbon emissions.
That's 200 tons of carbon dioxide every year—
and that's just one truck.
- It's just crazy how big a semi-truck engine is.
I think, you know, it's just so different from a car,
and you get like 200 tons of CO2 coming out
of this engine every year.
It's just, it's a crazy scale that we have to operate at.
- A single truck fitted with Remora's device
can capture and store up to 1,200 pounds of CO2.
Once the tank is full, the device shuts off,
and exhaust passes through the system as normal
until the driver can stop and offload the CO2.
- CO2 offloading works by pulling a truck
up to a tank just like this—
they're a lot bigger at a customer site.
It only takes about 15 minutes,
and it's the equivalent of reverse fueling.
After you connect the truck,
the CO2 will be pumped into this tank, stored here,
and then we can distribute that to our network
of CO2 buyers.
- Remora actually owns the CO2 captured
by their devices,
and requires it to be offloaded into their own tanks.
Remora then splits any revenue or tax credits
from the sale or sequestration of that CO2
with their customers.
- The market for CO2 around the world is actually massive.
It's a 7.7 billion-dollar market,
and we are not meeting the world's demand.
There are regular shortages of CO2 all around the world.
The market is also growing incredibly fast.
There are all these cool, new companies
using CO2 in new ways
to produce fuels, laundry detergent,
vodka, plastics, you name it—
someone is probably making it out of CO2.
- While these innovative uses
for CO2 provide sustainable options for sellers,
they're a small fraction of the market.
One of the largest industrial uses of CO2 is, unfortunately,
a controversial one:
Enhanced oil recovery
is a process where pressurized CO2
is pumped into existing oil reservoirs,
where it can push up to 60% more oil
than other recovery methods.
So for oil and gas companies, it unlocks more oil
and more revenue.
But Remora says they'll never sell their CO2 for use
in oil extraction.
- If we can't find someone to utilize the carbon,
we will pump the CO2 underground
into an EPA-certified well,
where it's gonna be stored for thousands of years.
There's lots of monitoring in place to make sure the CO2
is staying put,
and this is by far the best way to make sure
we're not letting CO2 back into the atmosphere.
- While storing captured CO2 underground
is the best way to sequester it,
it doesn't generate revenue for the owner
the same way selling it does.
But the federal government does provide a tax credit
to incentivize underground sequestration.
- So what I tried to do was work backwards
from July 26th, which is the date
that the Allison testing is gonna commence.
We're gonna ship the truck out that day.
- Remora says they already have all the needed approvals
from the Department of Transportation and the EPA.
Ryder, the world's largest trucking company,
is Remora's first customer.
Their first truck with the device will hit the road
in September of 2022.
The general model is that Remora sells 10 devices
to a company for a pilot: being the inaugural pilot,
Ryder is starting with one device.
- We are just getting our first pilot started
in the next couple months.
Trucking companies are facing a lot of pressure
from shippers to find some way
to reduce their carbon emissions.
So trucking companies are looking at the alternatives,
and Remora, in many cases, is the best solution.
We retrofit onto their existing trucks.
We actually deliver them revenue every year.
So the device not only pays for itself,
but starts generating a new revenue stream.
So this is a really exciting time
for mobile carbon capture
because there are 2 million semi-trucks in the U.S.,
so we've got our work cut out for us,
but even just as we get on the thousands of trucks,
we're gonna be capturing millions of tons
of carbon dioxide every year.
It's pretty staggering the potential impact here.
- Is Remora's device merely a stop-gap measure
to buy us time until better battery technology evolves?
Whatever happens, it seems their device, if scaled,
could have a large impact
on decarbonizing regional freight distribution.
- We need an all-of-the-above approach.
We can't afford to just bet everything
on a single silver bullet.
We need to develop a lot of different solutions in parallel,
and then we can figure out which one's best.
One of the single biggest challenges
is going to be scaling up our manufacturing operation
to meet the demand that we're seeing from fleets.
- The biggest challenge with convincing truck companies
to use this technology is honestly that
they can't order a thousand of them tomorrow.
- The future of carbon capture is modular and repeatable.
So what that means is, just like solar panels,
you wanna build carbon capture
that can be churned out off an assembly line
over and over again.
We're taking carbon capture
and shrinking it down so that instead of it being
this sprawling construction project,
it's this really concentrated manufacturing challenge.
And that's how we're gonna get carbon capture
to be cheap enough, to be a really important part
of the decarbonization solution.
- I've always had the mindset of leaving something,
like, better than you found it.
And that's what I see that we're doing here.
We see there's a problem.
Everybody knows it's a problem.
If you're making a company right now,
it should be to solve that problem
in any way that you can.
And the only way we're gonna make a dent in it
is if there's hundreds of companies like this one,
that are all tackling the same huge challenge.
- This is where we say, 'Do not try this at home, okay?'
- I mean, you shouldn't do this at home,
'cause why would you have a compressor at home?