Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something that’s never been done before. They’re building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains. It’s a system that captures CO2 from moving vehicles before those emissions ever enter the atmosphere. Then they turn those captured emissions into revenue by selling to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products.
In this episode of Hard Tech, YC’s Gustaf Alströmer visited Remora’s headquarters outside of Detroit to find out how a recent college graduate with no engineering background is helping transform the $2 trillion transportation industry.
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Chapters:
00:00 – Carbon Capture on Trucks
00:47 – How It Works
02:33 – Remora’s Origin Story
04:19 – Lessons for Founders
06:19 – From YC to Detroit
07:59 – Building a World-Class Team
09:31 – Train Prototype
10:37 – Testing and Iteration
11:47 – Big Goals Ahead
The body actually expels CO2 because it's waste. Now you are putting it back into the body. How stupid is that?
Pretty silly: Just build electric trains (you can even dual use them for energy transport for other users) and for trucks electric and H2O are gonna be cheaper than retrofitting all the different old models…
For reference CO2 comprises only 0.5% of atmosphere and plants needed to breathe.
I'm not sure it will make sense to put carbon capture on locomotives. The large rail companies are already working on hydrogen trains. In Alberta there are 3 or 4 of them running already. Sure the hydrogen comes from natural gas but you can capture the CO2 from that process at the source and then either store it or use it. I think in BC they also have a test plant that uses NG for hydrogen and does it in a way where the only output is pure carbon. Their plan for that is to have natural gas go through pipelines and then have communities are built where the heating is all done with hydrogen. They will be able to put a plant in to do the conversion close to those communities.