path: root/transcripts/hplus-summit-2010/d1s1-3-andrew-hessel

Andrew Hessel.

Altered Carbon. Carbon processing. Programming. Economics. 

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you Alex and David. Today's a different talk for me. Normally I speak about drug development. I do a lot of networking. I'm not sure if it makes me smarter. I wanted to share a story about some of the work on the front of Carbon. Now, carbon is the structural material for living things. It's where all carbon.. it's a carbon world. Carbon wasn't on my agenda for the last, what, but on the right hand side here, is a friend of mine. Ted Redelmeier. He is a trader, he observes massive amounts of information about the world. The stack of newspaper and information that comes to his home, is amazing. He's aware of global trends well in advance of other people. In January of 2009, he said carbon, and I didn't know what he was talking about. Ted had realized that this global carbon cycle had started to reach economic importance around the world. It's absolutely necessary that we balance this cycle, this century. And so, that cycle is well understood, and it effects each of us. Ted started to focus on two really simple technologies.

One of them is just a simple wood gas stove. Billions of people cook with very simple polluting stoves. It hurts them. It gives them health problems. Moving to a simple stove like this could be not only decreasing energy utilization, but improve global health. On the right is a technique called pyrolysis. Heating and starting a self-sustaining process. This is important for carbon sequestering. It goes a lot deeper than this. Deforestation is a major contributor to changing our atmosphere. We're repurposing the world. Plastics, we're polluting our oceans. This was from Chris Gordan's pop presentation last year. It's dead albatrauzes, photographed on Midway Island, furthest from any continent, and it's showing how we're contaminating our world. You've heard of the great garbage patch, of course.

I had no idea how my voice and my activities could have any impact in the carbon world. Of course, I'm flying all the time, I know I'm a contributor. We're all using energy as part of our daily lives. Then something strange happened. In the beginning of March, I got a phone call from 5 of the oil sand companies. These are massive companies. They said Andrew, we want to work up new ways of doing sustainable development. I went to board rooms. These are the halls of power in the energy industry in Canada, and I got to work with these people for almost a year. For those of you who are not familiar with oil sands, they are the largest petroleum reserves in the world. You have to wash the oil off of the sand with giant industrial tools. These are polluting forms of harvesting energy, because it costs so much to wash the sands.

Negative industry perceptron hurts them. Dirtiest oil and such. The amount of water that they were using. Toxic tailings, and the third was carbon. Carbon is taxed in Alberta, at $15/tonne, and globally, there are carbon credits programs that are really starting to impact their business. Carbon levels are rising, this is thought to be a contributor to climate change. Whether it is or not, that's not an issue; at some point, we have to lower the carbon dioxide to historical thresholds. You guys are so myopic, all you guys do is look down and drill holes to find carbon, but you just found a global resource. You have to start looking up, it's in our air. It's a resource, not a toxin. The oil companies have very limited ways to use CO2 in their industry. The only economical way to use carbon dioxide is to pump it back underground. They use it to pressurize wells to get more oil up, that works for them.

What about the rest of us? The carbon economics are going to change because of this event in the gulf. The overall cost of using petroleum is different. BP is learning this lesson. Every single oil company is looking at this, it's the largest driver of clean energy. This cleanup is going to cost billions, and that's going to be from BP's pockets. How do you capture carbon? We grow it. We grow many things. What you grow is really important. There's the food versus fuel debate. When you start making biofuel out of corn, well, in general agricultural policy keeps corn prices low. I highly recommend the Omnivore's Dilemma. It's generally trucked by the millions of tons to fatten up cows and generating tons of carbon waste. This is the form of carbon sequestering that is causing lots of problems in America and lots of other places.

The true cost of doing this type of work with carbon is far greater than is immediately apparent by the food. So, how does this tie into the work that I'm interested in? I am a synthetic biologist, I teach people how to program cells to do more interesting things. It's getting easier to do. A few weeks ago, Craig Venter had booted up the first synthetic cell. This is really interesting. It cost a few millions dollars, these tools and tech is getting really inexpensive. Chemical processes based on exceptionally high temperatures, petrochemicals and energy, toxin catalysists, and other requirements; most of this is going to start moving to biochemical processes. People are going to start programming biochemistry to replace structural materials, and new energy sources across the board. The petrochemical feedstock stuff is just going to start to change.

This isn't just for elite scientists. This tech is approachable by diybio, singularity university, we're teaching people how to do this. There was a program at MIT, where thousands of undergrads and high school students how to use the same tech that Craig Venter has. If my thinking is right on this, we're going to have a new IT industry based around on carbon. All living things are carbon processors, we need to learn how to use it more effectively.

Last year, I got these 5 oil sands company to bring 30 genetic engineers, their advisors, Rob Carlson, and a diybio representative, to go up to the oil sands, look at the real on the ground problems, and they are big. To see the scale of the operations that litterally, biochemists. Citizen scientists need to start thinking about the problems. This is one of the buckets. The piece of the equipment behind is a digger. It's massive, like something out of Star Wars.

Carbon, though, is already offering incredible promise, not just as a simple feedstock. We're learning how to shape carbon into an entirely new form. All of these offer the possibility of using this simple material in really high value forms, from drug discovery, to energy storage, drug delivery, and possibly even to brain-machine interfaces, because these compounds have incredible properties. It makes a simple compound very high value. Just graphene for example - a monolayer - could be the next generation of DNA sequencers. It's becoming very inexpensive and cheaper to do.

Let's not forget diamond. I believe we're entering a new diamond age in some way, diamond is one of our most precious and dearly held resources, and now we're manufacturing it on industrial scales. This is a group called Genesis. This is still done with very high pressures and temperatuers, maybe there's enzymatic routes to this as well. The new branch of evolution and tech that Craig Venter has opened up, is a whole new tree of life no longer selected by natural processes,and now we have human selection. These forms of carbon might be able to get into new structures that are much more durable and non-toxic at the same time.

How do we drive this forward? We do it through our own human efforts going to work. You have to go drive economy. I watched Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room. Energy trading and how it was manipulated. There is a lot of carbon trading being done in the world today. Last year, 8.2B tons of CO2 was traded as paper derivatives. Groups are aggregating carbon credits, they are getting them certified, there's no cross-rationalization. There was 135B dollars of these derivatives traded. Right now the problem is transparency, certification, and the fact that these are paper products. People think that there's going to be trillions of dollars in carbon trading. For things that grow, there's a new economy, one of the largest biotechnology R&D pushers in the next century. It's also important that everyone has a voice in this.

Bryan Bishop and I started to work on a new carbon trading platform this year. It's based on facebook. You don't have to leave facebook to do this. You're not trading derivatives, not paper. We're going to demonstrate this and start looking for partnerships. Anyone can be involved, not just with a few dollars, but apply political direction to start driving change. We need to clean up the world. It's not just humanity+, but also food+, environment+. I want to give thanks to Bryan Bishop, Ted Redelmeier, and Bob Mitchell from the oil sands leadership iniative, and to H+.

Thank you very much.