The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device

**Paul Gross** (0:00)
This is the first carbon capture system on a commercial truck or on a commercial train ever.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:06)
This is Paul Gross, the founder and CEO of Remora.

**Paul Gross** (0:09)
We take that captured CO2 and we transport it to an end user who can recycle it in an incredibly new way. This is CO2 that we captured today from a diesel truck engine. And then we've got this nice tap water here that we're going to carbonate with some of the captured CO2.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:26)
He and his team are trying to fundamentally change the way we approach one of our biggest climate problems.

**Paul Gross** (0:32)
Transportation is the largest sector of emissions in the US. 29% of all emissions come from transport.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:37)
So the goal for the team at Remora is to reduce the emissions dramatically by going after the parts of the industry that will be the most difficult to electrify, like long haul trucking and freight trains.

**Paul Gross** (0:47)
People told me that what we were doing was impossible, but that's exactly the type of startup I want to work on. I wanted to create something where I could say, if I don't build this, it might not happen.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (1:06)
I worked with Paul and his startup Remora closely since they went through YC a few years ago. This summer, he invited us out to his headquarters outside of Detroit to get a behind the scenes look at their operations.

**Paul Gross** (1:17)
So this was our V1 truck system. Once the cylinder fills up on one side, we vacuum the CO2 out and then capture on the other side. We're storing the captured CO2 in those three black pressure vessels.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (1:29)
I wanted to learn more about how he and his team built their hardware and what lessons he has for other spying hardtack founders.

**Paul Gross** (1:36)
Remora is building carbon capture technology for vehicles. And we're particularly focused on semi trucks and locomotives. We're retrofitting these vehicles with technology that extracts and purifies the CO2 from their exhaust. And we're actually able to produce beverage grade CO2 from these vehicles.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (1:52)
Here's how their device works.

**Paul Gross** (1:54)
We take the exhaust coming out of the tailpipe and flow it through a cylinder filled with these little pellets the size of peas.
The CO2 molecules in the exhaust get stuck in the microscopic pores in the pellets, but all the other clean gasses flow right past and out into the air. We offload the captured CO2 as a liquid into a big tank, and then our distributor customers come by and pick up the CO2 in their tanker trucks and transport it to end users like food and beverage companies, greenhouses and water treatment. So the system reduces emissions and generates new revenue for these operators.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (2:32)
How did you get started with all of this?

**Paul Gross** (2:34)
The insight was we have a CO2 shortage in the US. And I learned about this in college. I started with this question of why is there a CO2 shortage? Why aren't breweries able to get enough CO2? And yet we're emitting 375 million tons a year from trucks and trains. So I started thinking about, well, what if we retrofitted those vehicles with carbon capture? Why don't we extract and purify some of the CO2 from these industrial processes and sell it to the end users that need CO2? And I wanted to understand would this be possible. So I built my own model to understand how this would work. And I started reading articles, science papers, and reaching out to experts. One of the experts that I reached out to was Christina Reynolds, who had just finished a PhD at the University of Michigan on this very topic. And she and I talked, and we really hit it off. So we ended up deciding to start the company together. And that was how the original founding team got together.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (3:36)
You didn't have a science background, did not study mechanical engineering or chemical engineering. Decided to start a very science heavy company. What would be your advice to another founder today who wants to start a similar company faced with this situation? Like don't have the domain expertise or the science expertise, but want to solve a very hard problem.

**Paul Gross** (3:52)
My advice would be just start working on it and try to learn as much as possible yourself. I think expertise can be really valuable, and we have a lot of people with a lot of experience on the team. But also, if you're a founder, you don't have to be the expert. You have to create a team of experts. And it's much faster instead of going out and getting a PhD to just start learning and start working with people who are experts.