Ep. 166 - The Crazy Rock Lady: How Eion is Turning Crushed Rocks into Climate Gold
SHOW NOTES
You’ve heard of carbon capture machines, but what if one of the most powerful tools for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere isn’t high-tech at all—just crushed rock and rain?
Meet Ana Pavlovic, CEO of Eion and the self-described “Crazy Rock Lady.” Her company is pioneering a process called enhanced rock weathering, which uses the natural properties of a green volcanic mineral called olivine to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away—permanently.
The best part? They do it on farmland, replacing conventional agricultural lime with olivine. The result is a two-for-one win: healthier soil for farmers and long-term carbon removal for the planet. It’s nature’s chemistry, accelerated—and rigorously measured using Eion’s core technology, what they call a “soil fingerprinting” measurement technique.
In this episode, Ana explains how Eion is turning geology into climate cash, why they’re focusing on agriculture instead of oceans, and how they secured a $33 million carbon removal deal from Frontier, the coalition backed by Stripe, Shopify, and Meta. We also talk about farmer adoption, measurement challenges, and why Ana believes carbon removal can be both scientifically credible and scalable.
So if you’re interested in the wild new world of carbon markets, the surprising magic of crushed rocks, and what it takes to scale a climate startup from idea to impact, you’ll dig this conversation.
Let’s rock.
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
The 2020 Beerling paper: “Potential for large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands”
Eion’s $33 million deal with Frontier and its deal with Perdue.
Eion’s patent application for a soil fingerprinting verification technique
Our 2022 episode on enhanced rock weathering with Kelly Erhart from Vesta.
Ana recommends reading Ministry for the Future.
MORE ABOUT Anastasia Pavlovic
Anastasia Pavlovic brings deep expertise in global operations and software with a passion for driving global change through local impact. Before joining Eion, Pavlovic led operations, commercialization, and growth for the Agoro Carbon Alliance, which works with farmers to sequester carbon in soil. Prior to the Alliance, Pavlovic commercialized software solutions in the US and Canada for Yara's Digital Farming organization. She has worked for venture-backed software companies scaling agtech and security products around the world. From West Virginia, Pavlovic holds dual B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Systems Engineering.
TRANSCRIPT
Paul Shapiro: Hello friend and welcome to episode 166 of The Business for Good Podcast. Before we get onto this episode, I wanna say thanks so much for the continued feedback on episode 1 64 with author philanthropist and venture capitalist Nick Cooney. The feedback continues to be pretty high on that episode.
It really struck a chord and I wanted to just give a shout out to one listener, Joe Hopkins, who wrote in, and he said he's a longtime listener, first time emailer, and he said, thanks so much. Really likes the podcast. But then he said that since. I, Paul always say that I like constructive feedback. He wanted to gimme some thoughts and he essentially said, I'm summing up his message that I talk a lot about how technology has done a lot to free animals from, for example, wailing, being displaced by kerosene and horse-drawn carriages being displaced by engines and.
Metal found pens, displacing goose, quil feathers and so on. But Joe wondered, what [00:36:00] about all the technology that's harmed animals? Like, for example, in animal experimentation, which has been enabled by increasing technological advancements. Obviously factory farming has been increased through technological advancements and so on.
And I just wanted to point out that I completely agree with Joe. I wrote him back. But I'll, to clarify my point of view, I'll say that my general feeling is that. Pretty much every single time that a millennial long form of animal exploitation has been ended, it has been due virtually, entirely to technology, not to moral examples.
The whisk of those goes on and on. I enumerated a few of them, but that does not mean that technology has been a net good for animals. Obviously, factory farming has been a very big net harm for animals, but if I think that there is a hope for animal salvation from some. Types of technology. I think more technology is probably the way that it is going to happen rather than through moral arguments alone.
What do you think? Feel free to write in and let me know at Business for good podcast.com. I do read and respond to every message that comes in, so I'd love to know [00:37:00] your point of view. But Joe, thanks so much for writing about that. Now, you have heard about carbon capture machines like direct air.
Carbon capture, which have still not made a big dent in the carbon problem in our atmosphere. But what if one of the most powerful tools for removing CO2 from the atmosphere isn't high tech at all? What if it's just crushed rock and rain? Meet Anna Pavlovich, the CEO of Eon, the self-described. Crazy rock lady.
Her company is pioneering a process called enhanced rock Weathering. Yes, you heard that right? Enhanced rock weathering, which uses the natural properties of a green volcanic mineral called INE to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away permanently. The best part, they do it all on farmland, replacing conventional agricultural lime with ine.
The result is a two for one win. Healthier soil for farmers and long-term carbon removal for the planet. It is nature's chemistry accelerated and rigorously measured using eons core technology, which they call soil [00:38:00] fingerprinting, which is a measurement technique of to measure how much carbon they're sequestering.
In this episode, Anna talks with me about how eon is turning geology into climate. Why they're focusing on agriculture instead of oceans. How they secured a $33 million carbon removal deal from Frontier. Now, keep in mind that's not a $33 million investment deal that is cold, hard revenue to store away Carbon With Frontier, which is the coalition backed by Stripe, Shopify, and Meta that does carbon credits.
We can also talk in this episode about farmer adoption. Measurement challenges and why animal leaves. Carbon removal can be both scientifically credible and scalable. So if you're interested in the wild new world of carbon markets, the surprising magic of crushed rocks and what it takes to scale a climate startup from idea to impact, you're going to dig this conversation with the Crazy Rock 80.
Now, with that said, let's rock.
Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Anna, welcome to the Business for Good podcast.
Ana Pavlovic: Thank you, Paul. Thanks for having me.
Paul Shapiro: Anna, lemme just start out. What the heck is Olien? What is this?
Ana Pavlovic: I am I'm the crazy rock lady now. I will, I will show you, the listeners might be able to hear my jiggling rocks. Ah, love that. All right. Yeah. I have lots of them here on my, on my desk.
Paul Shapiro: Cool.
Ana Pavlovic: INE is this kind of amazing magical rock, although it has some cousins that do similar things. And the idea is that it actually, you know, for millions of years has been hanging out in the Earth's crust and removing carbon from the atmosphere as part geological of the controls environment.
And so does this. Make it any more special than it already is. It, it does these incredibly strong carbon removal elements on its own. And so what we do is [00:01:00] grind this rock down to be like a sand that increases the surface area of the particles of rock, and that in turn makes carbon removal happen much faster.
And so think of it as like engineering a faster natural process. Which I love. It's this great mix. And then you can use that rock to remove carbon in different industrial use cases that.
Paul Shapiro: Okay, so Ian, on its own removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Mm-hmm. You are grinding it up or I, I presume you're buying it from somebody who grinds it up.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. So you're buying it from somebody who grinds it up. I think I read you're getting it in Norway, right? Correct. So you're, you're, you're buying Norwegian ian ground up into a sand, and by grinding it, how much more efficient is CO2 removal, is it than if you just left it in Norway as
Ana Pavlovic: it's, so this process would happen, you know, think of it in.
10,000 year timescale in terms of removing carbon. When you, when you grind [00:02:00] it up, you can do a deal like the one that we talked about that we'll talk more about, I assume with Frontier, where you can remove carbon in the like five to 10 year cycle. And so imagine that if we're doing this for a five year project, we're able to remove about 80,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere in a pretty like.
Carbon removal terms.
Paul Shapiro: Okay, cool. Well, I'm eager to get more into that and we will talk about your new deal with Frontier in just a little bit. And for people who weren't familiar with 80,000 tons even looks like, whether that's big or small, I wanna get into that too. But let's just first talk about what you're doing because for very astute listeners of this podcast, they'll remember.
Three years ago that we did an episode with Kelly Erhardt from Vesta, in which she talked about using ine, but putting it on beaches and coastal areas, right? In order to try to remove CO2 and and ize the ocean. What you're doing is very different from them though, right? Like what, what you're doing for very different.
So tell us how [00:03:00] are, how is what you all are doing at ION different from what Vesta is doing?
Ana Pavlovic: Yes, investor. Good, good friends of ours. Anyone who heard that episode will see similarities as well in what we're, in, what we're doing. So my background is in agriculture and technology. And what I, what drew me into this space, Paul, is that the industrial Ag complex, while it is a massive source of emissions it is a great tool to scale technologies.
Because of the way that it runs as a very efficient, effective supply chain. And so if you could find carbon removal technologies that fit into the industrial ag complex, you can scale them to an unbelievable capacity. And that's what excites me about this is like, as you know, in order to make a dent in climate change that is like so impactful.
And so what we decided to do is focus our applications today to agricultural. Applications. Whereas best, like you said, is, you know, a coastal [00:04:00] application. Similar processes in terms of grinding, perfecting the type of size of the particle that you need to remove carbon and how that works in its atmosphere.
But we focus on agriculture. And so the way this works is that farmers and ranchers typically use a product called agricultural limestone, which we call Ag Lime. They use this to mitigate the pH. Their fields. So whether they have acidic soils historically from the, the creation of their soils originally on the planet or they have become more acidic due to consistent farming over time.
They use Ag Line to help mitigate the pH to help the plants grow as best as they can. We replace. Into their ag lime supply chain. And so the idea is they get a product that looks very similar to their limestone, but it is this special rock that removes carbon. And that is important because getting farmers to do things new can be challenging in certain ways.
And we want things that [00:05:00] are easy for them to be able to like pull into their, they're existing operations. You don't want a lot of rub when you're seeing that kind of happening.
Paul Shapiro: Right. Okay. Very cool. So basically you're saying the adjustable market is just so huge 'cause there's so much farmland out there that lime is already applied on.
Ana Pavlovic: Correct. And there will be, you know, with, with increasing climatic impact, there will be more need for pH mitigation. Interestingly,
Paul Shapiro: does INE do as good of a job or would you argue an even better job for them? I, I know there's carbon credits associated with this as well, or, or at least some carbon ignition, but is ine in and of itself, would they want to switch away from Lyme to this even if there were no other benefits?
Ana Pavlovic: Yes. And the other interesting thing that we're you know, there's a whole bunch of different agronomic benefits and sort of like environmental benefits that we're working to prove out at scale as part of the data collection efforts with a, a project like Frontier Size. But one of them is that because INE is a in structure in [00:06:00] nature, which is different than conventional ag line we also that there be sustain.
Which basically means that, whereas with ag, you apply it, you get this big change in pH and then that goes away after a year or so, depending on your environment. We think that this could be a more sustained pH mitigator which could mean that they can like actually apply less, fewer times, which is cool.
Paul Shapiro: Yeah, that is a, a good benefit for the farmer. O okay, so I, I mentioned the name of the company Ion, but it's EION, which I had to look this up. I think you used it 'cause it's, it's a Greek God of the eternal stream. Is that what this is a reference to? Yes. And also
Ana Pavlovic: environmental ions is what we also thought about.
So it's a kind of a twofold name that we think is is interesting.
Paul Shapiro: Alright, cool. So tell me the, the Greek God. Of the eternal stream who I had never heard of, sadly, and I'm into Greek mythology and I still didn't know about this. But tell me why, why is what you're doing relevant to this God? [00:07:00]
Ana Pavlovic: So to me, the ability to change a fundamental truth, and this is something I also mentioned later about how the world works into something that can be harnessed for good.
That's like what I'm all about. And so when I entered the Carbon world I saw this as, you know, a lot of industrial folks who were seen as like the bad emitters and a lot of folks who had spent most of their life in climate and science. And they were like at odds. And I became this interloper of like, I actually think we.
Do the right thing here. If we can find like better ways to communicate and to meet the gap. And I think that's what it takes to like change this eternal stream. So yeah, that's the, that's the route.
Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Alright, cool. Well hopefully you're gonna have an eternal stream of stream of revenue coming into the company.
Indeed. And you already had a as, as we foreshadowed. This big deal with [00:08:00] Frontier. So this is a $33 million deal. Now, you know, for a startup, for, for any company, $33 million is a lot. But for a startup, $33 million is just a gargantuan deal. So tell us. What is this deal and when will you receive this money?
Ana Pavlovic: Yeah, so Frontier is this buyer's consortium which was created by, originated by Stripe. And I'm sure you guys have talked about this in, in various ways on the pod previously. And then other members joined. So it's managed kind of like a buyer's fund or a buyer's collective. And the reason that I think it's been so, it's been so successful for the set of members present there today is that, you know, doing diligence on Imagine.
You're trying to figure out how to do a project in rock weathering, direct air capture biochar, ocean alkalinity. Trying to do diligence on all of those different pathways is incredibly difficult. If you're a. You don't have, [00:09:00] you know, 80 climate scientists on staff to just spend all of their time diligence in these opportunities.
And so I think Frontier filled this really interesting void where they like started to support the companies in thinking about what is quality, how do we define it, and how are we gonna use these against our goals? So now there's more members JP Morgan. A whole bunch of folks. And so the way it works is that Frontier essentially helps those buyers negotiate a carbon removal deal that's multi-year.
It's a take or pay contract. So it's constructed in delivery across five years. Which is quite standard in this carbon removal industry. They can be 10, 15 years or longer. And they purchase those tons that we remove outta the atmosphere as delivered annually. And so, like I said, that's 33 million, represents about 80,000 tons.
That is delivered up until 2030. So we do a deployment this. The Frontier Coalition buys everything that we create until [00:10:00] 2030, essentially.
Paul Shapiro: Okay. So you're gonna get this revenue over five years and you say it's gonna remove 80,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. 80,000 tons sounds like a lot.
Right. But if you said 800,000 tons, it would sound the same to me. Right. 800,000, 8 million, like at all. These are all just really big numbers. So how much is that to the way person? How, like, does this make any dent in climate change at all? Or is this just a good start?
Ana Pavlovic: Yeah, so the and this is also something that's like incredibly difficult to understand, like when I was getting into this space, like trying to figure out what we're doing and how are we doing it in carbon removal is, is complicated.
So think about, I'll give you sort of a low end anchor and a high end anchor. So on the high end, one of the goals is to make sure that the pathways that are invested in by a group like Frontier is able to get to a megaton scale per annum or a million tons of carbon removed per annum and more with cost curve going down over time.
And so a huge part of this is, to your point if we're [00:11:00] investing in a handful of pathways and. 10 to 15 prominent companies. We wanna make sure that all of those technologies are able to deliver a million tons or more per year in order to like hit our goals. From IP
Paul Shapiro: and, and just to be clear, it is a million tons of carbon removal, right?
Not a million tons of olive oil spreading.
Ana Pavlovic: Correct. And so, you know, depending on what technology you're doing, whether that's like direct air capture, any of the different ones you are looking at essentially like what investment does it take to grow to that scale and how does the cost per ton of carbon come down over that, that timeframe.
And so, you know, when you think about rock weathering overall as a category, you know, you wanna get to the point where you're removing, you know, 10 million tons. It's aggressive, but between, you know, 10 companies all over the planet operating we wanna try to get to like that, millions of tons. A second anchor up there is that, you know, presently Microsoft is the biggest buyer of, of carbon [00:12:00] removal.
They just did several deals that are massive in nature, millions of tons. Are the biggest deals ever done in carbon removal? Most of them are longer term, 10 to 15 years. But they're trying to remove several million tons of carbon per year already so that they're getting towards their 2030 goal on the low end.
If you think about this from the consumer perspective when you buy a flight, some flights give you the ability to like remove your carbon by purchasing like a little extra carbon removal. That's usually like a couple times.
Paul Shapiro: Okay. Well that, yeah, that, that, that is very helpful to know that like one, I presume that's a cross country flight is a couple tons per, per passenger.
Not per flight, but per passenger. So 80,000 sounds like a good start, but it sounds like you still have a, a long way to go. And so there's a a lot more left to do here. But it's not just frontier. I, I saw that you also just think to deal with Purdue, the agribusiness company. And that looked like a different nature that you're doing more in setting rather than offsetting, right?
Mm-hmm. So tell, tell me for those who are [00:13:00] uninitiated, what is the difference between in setting and offsetting when it comes to carbon removal?
Ana Pavlovic: Yes. So the accounting and the way that it is used to think about the company's sustainability goals is slightly different, but the process that we go through as ion and what happens like.
And how the carbon is removed from the atmosphere is all the same. A big part of this is related to folks that have agriculture in their supply chain. And so if you have some, if you're a, you know, consumer foods brand and you don't have any agriculture in your actual, like corporate value chain, you're still sourcing from commodities players who.
Agricultural products with associated emissions. And so if you touch ag in your food chain, which is like tons of people you want to find ways to be able to like affect that scope, what we call scope three impact. And so the in setting deal is really cool with anyone who [00:14:00] does have that agricultural supply chain in-house because it allows them to use what they're really good at.
So in the case of a company like Purdue, they are typically supporting the farmers that they buy grain from. Their meat products with various value added services, ag, retail, et cetera. They're able to do that themselves without changing anything for their existing farmer base. And remember what we talked about, about like reducing friction for farmers to get them to do stuff that's new that makes it way easier for them to do that.
And so it's a great partnership for companies like ION to use the existing value chain that exists and.
Paul Shapiro: So basically Purdue is in, is having the farmers that grow the feed for its chickens instead of in, instead of putting ag lime, they're putting your lovine on the ground. Yep. And then they can inset. So they're basically inset their own emissions as opposed to offsetting by paying somebody else to do something They're reducing Correct.
Their own emissions. Yeah,
Ana Pavlovic: exactly. Right. And then the idea would be that you [00:15:00] know, down the road there are multiple pathways. To monetize the low carbon grain, whether that be all the way in a low carbon chicken, whether that be part of the grain product going into a biofuels mm-hmm. Blend for example.
But Purdue has sort of flexibility on how they do that.
Paul Shapiro: Interesting. Okay, so let me ask you a provocative question here, Anna. Like what is the moot, like you're talking about buying ground up oli and spreading it on the ground. It doesn't sound like a company with a lot of IP as a moot. But I saw that you do have a patent application and I'd love to hear more.
About what the protection is that you have from somebody else coming and, and selling their ine against yours.
Ana Pavlovic: Absolutely. So the, the few things I would mention when this industry started out there were a couple papers by a, a professor who's a friend of all of ours in the industry named David Burling in the uk.
Thinking about using enhanced rock weathering at a more industrial scale in agriculture and like, could this work as a carbon removal technology that [00:16:00] got several people interested in starting companies in this space. And the biggest question was, how the heck would you measure this accurately?
And could you do that over the next 10 years in a way that you could reduce costs to make it a viable. And so the core original IP of the company is in this measurement technology, which essentially allows you to use trace elements that are present in both soil and rock to understand what carbon is removed over time when you apply the rock.
Now provocative parts starts here. The challenge with all these carbon removal companies is that the only way to for the industry is to trust. Know that carbon is really removed. We need third party registries that have methodologies that they stipulate and can audit you against. So there's a bit of like a trick there of like, a lot of this has to actually become open source in order for the community to have greater trust for buyers to have [00:17:00] greater trust.
And so over time the, like, we have our own proprietary like IP of measurement and no one else can do it, is not a thing. What is a thing is differentiation within how you do that to reduce cost. And so the things that I would point you to are it's actually more of a cost mo over time which is lended to by IP and Trade Secret across everything we do in the stack.
Those partnerships that we mentioned, fixed long-term partnerships are absolutely critical to get to like good economies of scale. And then the data that you get out of all of these. At scale deployments is something that takes, to your point about the frontier deal, five years to replicate and no one else will have access to.
And that will be a huge linchpin in what drives down MRV cost. So I view it as like more of the cost mode flywheel.
Paul Shapiro: Okay. So essentially what you're saying, Anna, is that sure, anybody could buy ground up ine, but [00:18:00] your methods of actually measuring how much carbon has been removed are more cost effective than somebody else.
That's what you're arguing. Yeah.
Ana Pavlovic: Correct. And then essentially like you, you continue to innovate in each of those areas. And you continue to like partner to get partners to do the right step in the chain so that ION doesn't have to own all of that. And all of those partnerships and advances are incredibly difficult to replicate at speed.
Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Okay. And so what are folks paying you know, if you think about carbon credits, like per ton of CO2 equivalent removed I, I like what, what is Frontier paying on that for if it's 80,000 tons of removal, what is that perton.
Ana Pavlovic: Yeah, so the the frontier deals in rock weathering have all been between 300 and $400 a ton.
Okay. Again, to give you some anchor points. You have sort of like direct air capture on the high end, which can be a thousand, $2,000 a ton. And in durable carbon removal you have some versions of biochar and [00:19:00] other solutions like bikers and ves that are in the couple hundred to. Range. Okay. So you kind of have a few options in that space
Paul Shapiro: for, for the companies looking to buy offsets, why would they ever go to three or 400 if they could be doing it for 200?
Like what's the benefit to them of doing ions method versus somebody in biochar, let's say if all they care about is carbon removal, what's the benefit to them?
Ana Pavlovic: So one of the things that Frontier focuses on is they have a mandate around permanence. And so one of the reasons that all Carbon is not created equal and why the market needs to advance to become more liquid is that if you compare this to, you know, forest carbon or soil or organic carbon the permanence, meaning how long are we guaranteed to have that removal created is shorter, and thus the price per ton is lower.
And so the reason that people would invest in a swath of these and think of it as like a portfolio, so folks. [00:20:00] By 2035, I'm gonna be having to buy, whether it's through insetting or offsetting, I'm gonna have to remove, you know, 500,000 tons a year. How the heck am I gonna do that, given the price of all of these options?
And so typically you're looking at a portfolio where you have blended risk and blended price to get to like an all-in price that allows you to get through the next 10 years. Managing it with just like a portfolio.
Paul Shapiro: Okay. So how long are you removing it for? Like in, in, in your process for rock weathering, you're taking, you're removing the lime, you're putting the ion on the field, it's going to rain.
That's going to cause the the capture of carbon from the atmosphere. It's gonna go out into the ocean. And how long will it remain out? Out of the atmosphere.
Ana Pavlovic: Exactly. So this part is very similar to the, the approach. What I love about it is like the, the understanding of. Release in that cycle. So like lots of carbon is removed, some is released.
The understanding of that in the cycle [00:21:00] in rivers and oceans is extremely sound. And so the idea is that you're able to remove that for 10,000 years plus 10,000. Pretty
Paul Shapiro: good. That's pretty good. It's pretty much as, as long as our civilization has lasted so far,
Ana Pavlovic: very durable. And the hard part is, you know, I worked on organic carbon, which is challenge.
Keep it durable for a hundred years. Nonetheless, all of these solutions have to exist. They're just different. And so we need, like this whole ecosystem to have like more asset classes that explain this and get more liquid so that people can enter into the market.
Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Very cool. So what drew you into Anna?
Like you, you were not a climate tech person before this. You're not a co-founder of the company. You've been the CEO for years now, but you're not the co-founder. What drew, what drew you into Ion? Why do you want to do this and what, what were you doing before that led you to this?
Ana Pavlovic: Yeah. So I originally was, I did electrical engineering in school.
Software was like really hot. Startup space was really hot when I left school. So I did a few software [00:22:00] startups in a totally different space in in data and identity security. And I worked in the federal government for a while in dc and I, at at heart loved natural science and sort of like. A conservationist as a kid and just like loved being close to nature.
And so I got an opportunity, it was kind of a wild hair to go into agriculture technology which was sort of like big data plays. And this was in 2015 when like agriculture tech was really growing and I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with the like, combined tech with this like very close to earth.
Of the planet, sort of group of people who are farmers and ranchers. I got addicted to that. I wanted to do more and more. I ended up going to Yarro, which is a really big fertilizer company. And I built their sort of carbon removal business in focusing on soil carbon. And so we helped farmers and ranchers transition their land into like conservation and regenerative farming practices by monetizing these carbon assets.
And I, like I told you [00:23:00] before, I just saw an ability to like be an interloper in these worlds that sort of don't talk to each other and don't understand each other. At a time when I think it was really needed. And when I started thinking about what I wanted to do next, in the, in the like gauntlet of carbon removal.
I wanted something that we've talked about already twofold. One, something that was easier for landowners to do. So like the greatest hurdle if we are able to do everything else in carbon, if we're able to, if increase demand. With policy and other incentives, if we are able to reduce cost of carbon so that more people can buy it, to your point, W gets cheaper.
Everyone can start to buy more of it. If we're able to do all those things, measure it well third party audit it, well, landowners will be the ultimate. Deciders because if they don't wanna do the thing, it won't happen. And so to me, staying laser focused around like how to make this as frictionless as possible for people to start doing it and keep doing it is like the name of the game long term.
And so I wanted something that was easier for [00:24:00] farmers and I wanted this permanent piece. I wanted something that was extremely permanent in terms of removal because that's important when you think about removing fossil fuel. Claims long term. I knew a friend of a friend Adam Wolf, the co-founder of this company who also has started a, a really cool ag tech company that I knew in the past.
I started talking to him. He is a brilliant scientist and wanted someone who was thinking about commercializing this stuff the way I had and thinking about building a network in the industrial complex the way I had it at my previous company. And so we kind of decided to try it out and it's been like great fun and being a.
Not technical, not technically the founder, but very much like the heart of the founder with Adam has been like a really cool process for me. I think it, people wonder if it can work and it's been like really amazing because we're close, so it's cool.
Paul Shapiro: Yeah, that's great. You mentioned Anna, the fossil fuels, and there are critics of these type of geoengineering projects [00:25:00] who would argue.
If you succeed, it reduces the pressure on humanity to stop using fossil fuels. Right? That if we can just geo engineer our way out of this, why stop emitting if we can just remove this. So what's your counter argument to that? What do you think is the reason to do this? And does it, does it remove some of the pressure on humanity to wean ourselves off of our addiction to fossil fuels?
Ana Pavlovic: Yeah, no, it's a, it's a great question and something I've thought a lot about with respect to like, how I spend my own time. So one of the things that I think is most surprising to people is that when, when you start to get into the, like how do you account for these types of removals and how do companies account for them you know, there are.
Federal and jurisdictional rules about how this looks, depending on like what country you're in. But there's also guidance around by groups like the Science-Based Targets Initiative which essentially help corporations figure out how to use standards to account for their emissions and thus the reduction of their emissions.
And one of the things that's always really surprising to people is like [00:26:00] almost all of that guidance actually there's a lot of stipulation on what you can reduce internally. And what you can use removals to reduce. And so what lots of people who ask me about that find surprising is that the goal is not we are going to keep doing everything we do as an oil and gas company and just remove, that's like against the rules basically.
And so the idea being you will never get to the amount of removal that you have to do if you aren't doing both. Right. And as I said before about this like portfolio approach, this is so important because people also often ask me, oh, are you competing with biochar? And like, I'm like, no. Like all of this stuff needs to come online way faster than it is.
Right? It's, and all of it needs to happen, and we're barely making a dent, even if that all goes right. Right,
Paul Shapiro: right. It's like saying, oh, is solar competing with wind and geothermal? Well, correct. Maybe, maybe in one sense. But you want them all right? You want
Ana Pavlovic: them all. It's like [00:27:00] all, all of it. Faster and harder than we're, than we're able to do.
Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Right. And you know, the way that I think about it is that even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, so we went to zero, literally today in 2025, there still is too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and we still would have to remove it. E even just the amount that's in the atmosphere today requires removal.
It, it, it's a little bit like plastic. Like even if we stopped using plastic. We still have to find a way to remove and, and biodegrade like all of this plastic that we've made, right? It's still choking our waterways, and we still need to find methods of degrading the plastic. So I, I'm, you know, I'm a fan of geoengineering for that reason alone, and I, I wish that humans would do the right thing for the right reason.
But sadly, we seem to only do things if there's ways to make money from doing it. And I'm glad that you have found one such way that you can make money by doing the right thing here. Let me ask you, Anna, you've been a denizen of startup land now for some time both at ION and prior, as you noted.
Have there been resources that have been useful for you that you would recommend to others? Any books [00:28:00] or speeches or anything that you found influential for you that you think is a good idea for someone else to check out?
Ana Pavlovic: Yeah, I love more, more recent history. But I love ministry for the future.
I'm sure that that is something that others have mentioned or many of your listeners have come across. Yeah, it is to be,
Paul Shapiro: to be clear, this is, this is a, a novel that is very, very popular of like a dystopian climate tech novel
Ana Pavlovic: Indeed. It is, you know, one of the hardest things I think about what we're doing in addition to like all of the tactics of like.
It's hard to raise money to do something. To your point, that's weird that no one totally understands yet it's hard to know if a market is gonna exist. It's hard to know how policy is gonna affect this. Somewhere out beyond the horizon there is a future world that we're trying to create. And what is actually hard about what we're trying to do is this is sort of infinite game, right?
It is. The rules are not clear. Who wins is not clear and the end is not clear. And so that requires an immense amount of, like [00:29:00] visualizing a world that doesn't exist yet. And so, you know, Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of this, of this book who I haven't met but would love to he thinks at great detail about how this might look.
World and what all of these governments technologies are. And I actually think what was helpful to about minutia. Operate more in this way is actually like really important as an entrepreneur to think about like, what is the world gonna look like? How is my business gonna interact with that? And in a way that as an entrepreneur, you very infrequently have quiet time to sit down and like try to think about.
And so I loved that like piece of it.
Paul Shapiro: So what will the world look like if you succeed, let's say 10 years from now, we're in 2035. Ion has been wildly successful. You've hit all your projections and more, hopefully it won't look like ministry for the future. But what will it look like?
Ana Pavlovic: I believe that there are ways for different types of subsidies, whether that be [00:30:00] before agriculture and like conservation improvement or biofuels.
That will help farmers and ag retail participate in this space at a much greater extent. And so all of your conventional products that we use today, I believe, will have low carbon zero carbon, even negative carbon alternatives because we're able to do r and d that surpasses our kind of conventional product products in a way that isn't insane for farmers to use.
And like that is huge. And so like, I think you see rock weathering right in there of like, it's gonna be part of a product stack that is used to create low carbon grain for food. Low carbon fiber for clothing and low carbon fuel for biofuels and ethanol the way we think about event today. And so like to me that is like working at scale 20 years from now.
Paul Shapiro: All right. Well, I'm glad you're going 20 years out. I only gave you 10, but I'm [00:31:00] glad that you're going 20 years out because it's a big, it's a, the problem has taken far longer than 20 years to create so
Ana Pavlovic: long game.
Paul Shapiro: Yeah, it, it'll take a while. A while. Hopefully we can, hopefully you can make this happen fast.
Finally, Anna, what companies do you hope exist? Right? You're talking about the long game. You think there's a lot of solutions out there. You've mentioned you think that what you're doing with enhanced rock weathering is complimentary to other technologies out there. But in order to solve this vast problem that humanity has created for ourselves and every other living being of, of climate change, what other technologies do you hope somebody else who might be listening right now will advance themselves?
Ana Pavlovic: Two, two sort of different thoughts in this which I spent a lot, actually a lot more time thinking about than the what will the 30 year from now world look like? And I hope to balance those two out. One is closer to the, the agricultural side. There are so many incredible technologies in the biological space, so everything.
Seaweed different types of [00:32:00] rise, omal technologies, different types of fungal technologies. Everything you can imagine that could improve the way we think about nutrition supplement for plants in a way that is like lower carbon and more effective than they are today. That space is like booming.
There are way more advancements to be, to be had there. I was talking to someone earlier today about the, think about like the microbial gut as we understand of like the human body. If you think about that for the soil and the plant, similar problem, we don't really understand it. We don't really understand how to change it.
And it probably impacts tons of stuff about our system that we don't even realize. So there's like a massive amount of work to be done there. On the flip side, on the financing side I'm also thinking a lot about, one of the things that I think has to be true in a future world is that the, the venture space today is.
You know, think about what [00:33:00] venture is excellent at. It's excellent at drumming up new technologies and making them succeed or fail quickly. Bringing more, more companies online, faster with the capital they need to make change. Where venture is limited in this new space is that to your previous point, a lot of these technologies look more at scale like industrial renewables.
And so we have this, you know, some have written about it or talked about it as like the climate tech valley of death, but it is true that like somewhere between an infrastructure investor writing a hundred million dollars check and a venture investor writing a $20 million check there is a more, innovative capital stack that must exist to further these technologies to massive scale. And that doesn't really exist today. So partners on both sides are trying to lean closer to the middle to understand how to make this work. But if I were starting again, I would be thinking about what are all of the things I can do that also help form, capital, capital that looks more like the needs of the businesses [00:34:00] that we're gonna grow in the next 20 and 30 years. Because like as you said, our world is not set up to do that now. Mm-hmm. We only do this if people make like software margins and like, these businesses don't look like that. So like, how do we think about it?
Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Yeah. Software margins. Maybe not the same as rock grinding margins. So I, I hear what you're saying on that, Anna, and it reminds me a little bit. We had Lisa Nunez Safari and the president of Pivot Bio on the show mm-hmm. Who talked about what they're doing to affect the microbiome of plants and, and make.
Possible for farmers to use less nitrogen, which would also have a, a pretty big environmental impact if, if they could succeed. If it's scaling further than what they've done. They've done a lot, so we'll link to that so people can check that out. But Anna, I really appreciate what you're doing. A lot of the times people talk about running startups as like they're beating their head against a rock, and I'm, I'm glad to say that you maybe not, are not beating your head against rock, but if you are beating it, I hope that rock is Olive Levine and I hope your head is.
Strong enough to crush it into a fine sand so that you can spread it and remove way more than 80,000 tons and get to the millions of tons of removal as you are suggesting. [00:35:00] So I'm grateful for what you're doing, Anna, and I can assure you I'm rooting hard for your success.
Ana Pavlovic: Thank you, Paul. I appreciate it.
And yeah, super excited to share our story out in the world with your listeners.