This Insane Machine Sucks Carbon Dioxide Straight From Trains And Trucks

This company is named Remora, and it wants to do strange things to carbon dioxide. It wants to take all the machinery in this room, shrink it down, and attach it to trains like this, and also to diesel trucks. And that's not even the really weird part. Because Remora's goal is to grab the carbon dioxide produced by the trains and the trucks, contain it, clean it, and then shove it into your sodas and other carbonated bubbly drinks. Yes, this startup wants you to consume exhaust.

There it is.

There it is.

And it's probably even a good idea. Come see for yourself.

It's like Dune. We're spice farming.

Takes all kinds of workers to put an automobile together these days. Skilled, semi-skilled, and just plain unskilled.

Here are things you should know about Rimora. It's based in Detroit because Detroit lets you have a factory like this. It's got cranes, people who know how to build things, and it'll give you a permit for a train and let you bring it right to your factory. Rimora has also raised about $120 million because some VCs think the startup could build a decent business by combating climate change.

We're building carbon capture for trains and trucks.

This is Paul Gross. He's the fresh-faced, enthusiastic guy who co-founded Remora in 2020, and he's going to be our guide as we science the shit out of this thing.

So we're retrofitting semi-trucks and locomotives with a system that extracts and purifies the CO2 from their exhaust, and then we can actually produce beverage-grade CO2 from the exhaust.

The key to Remora's premise is this: It attaches a machine to the exhaust of trains, trucks, and potentially just about anything that spews out CO2. Then it captures the exhaust and flows it over these pellets. The CO2 gets pulled into the tiny pores of the pellets. This is what makes it possible for Remora to isolate it and vacuum it out, and then compress the CO2 and turn it into a liquid that can be sold.

Refreshment you can trust.

And then it sells it to companies like Coke and Pepsi. The whole process starts here.

All right, come on in. So this is the core of the technology. In particular, we've got these adsorbent pellets.

You say adsorbent?

Yeah, with a D. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't even think I've like ever heard that.

Adsorption versus absorption. Adsorption is where there's no mass transfer. It uses less energy to get the CO2 out. There's such a shortage of CO2 in some regions of the US. So for example, in Florida, I just talked to a CO2 distributor there. They're buying their CO2 from an inactive volcano in Mississippi where they're mining it out and then transporting it 800 miles to sell it in Tampa and Orlando because it's recycled.

That's fucking craziest thing I've ever heard.

Isn't that crazy? A quarter of all the CO2 in the US is mined. Is mined.

Yeah.

We're emitting too much of it and mining it.

Yeah.

So this is a lab-scale version of the carbon capture system. So these are the two cylinders filled with adsorbent pellets that we saw next door. And then we are simulating exhaust gas by mixing together air with CO2 and water.

Okay.

And then once the adsorbent bed fills up with CO2, we switch the exhaust over to this cylinder and then vacuum the CO2 out of this cylinder.

And getting the soda-grade CO2, that's a measure of its quality?

So it's 99.9% CO2, and then you also have to be below a bunch of thresholds on other constituents.

To figure out something this complicated, you have to start big, which is why Remora has built this hardware testing center.

This space would be 10 times as expensive if we were in the Bay Area. Not only that, but we are able to hire the very best mechanical engineers mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, chemical engineers who are all here in Detroit.

Oh, these are the pellets.

Yeah.

It's like quinoa. It's couscous. Couscous.

Yeah, yeah.

And to prove that this all actually works, we give you this experiment.

We gotta be safe with the CO2. I'm not authorized to do it, so I guess it's Zach.

We're bringing in Zach.

We're bringing in the big guns.

Exactly.

Press it.

Go for it. Ready?

There it is.

There it is. That's high purity CO2 from a truck.

From exhaust.

Yep.

95% pure.

There it is.

Oh, amazing.

We were thinking of creating a side brand, Diesel Water.

Yeah, Diesel. This water is diesel.

There we go.

Yeah, cool. All right, it works.

Remora has made substantial progress shrinking down that room's worth of gear and already has a truck-sized version of its weird carbon huffing contraption.

This is our first generation version of the system, and you can see it's the same architecture as the system we looked at upstairs. Now we have huge cylinders filled with pellets, dirty exhaust flowing in there, And then we get clean exhaust flowing out this blue tailpipe right there. And then it pumps out of the spout and into a big offload tank.

I know what a remora is, so I think I get the name, but I should ask to be sure.

So it's this suckerfish that has a symbiotic relationship with sharks where it sucks on and cleans them. So we are sucking onto trucks and trains and cleaning them. We learned a lot from this, but we also uncovered some significant challenges with this system. We had to actually load up a trailer, hook it up to the truck, and drive it around. Our next step was an unpackaged version of the system. So this was our solution. We're able to take that system that was on the truck and then spread it out. We put all the different components on carts. This is a 470-horsepower diesel truck engine. You just pluck it out of a semi-truck, you plop it down right here, and then it's attached to a water brake, which allows us to put load on the engine. This system has been able to achieve up to 90% capture efficiency from an actual diesel truck engine producing high-purity CO2.

We saw the early version that was on the truck. Is a new version based off everything you've learned?

Yeah, take this, now shrink it down and package it, put it on a truck. The other next step is to take this Scale it up and put it on a railcar.

While Rimora will continue on with the truck technology, it appears that its first carbon capture systems will actually go on to the trains where it has more room to suck.

This is our train. I think we're one of the only startups that bought a locomotive. This is a Dash 9, which is the workhorse classic locomotive. You can run it at full load stationary.

Holy shit!

This is exactly what I needed.

Ah! Oh my God!

These railroads, the largest one, BNSF, uses over a billion gallons of diesel every year. We are going to be the first carbon capture system on a train ever in the world. And then come on in. It's going to be pretty hot. We will be pumping 25 tons of exhaust out of this locomotive every hour.

Wow.

So it's just an incredible volume of exhaust that we have to handle. So I want to show you the engine. All right, this is a 16-cylinder, 4,500 horsepower diesel engine. Each one of these cylinders has the same displacement as the entire truck engine that we looked at back there. So this is the exhaust coming back across the locomotive, and then this is the place that the the capture car will meet with the exhaust. So we'll have a hose coming across here, and then the system will be spread out on these two cars.

A lot of what Rimora is doing makes a lot of sense. It sounds nice to talk about making electric trucks and trains, but actually producing them is hard and costly, and the physics don't always check out. So perhaps there's a better approach for the here and now. Also, spewing more CO2 into the air is dumb. The startup, though, has tons of questions to answer. Its machine seems big, heavy, and like a major pain for truck operators to deal with. And we more or less have to take the company's word for the moment that any of this process is efficient and that it makes financial sense. How much does this weigh?

This first system weighed 8,000 pounds.

Okay. If you're adding all this stuff, out of the truck, just producing more CO2.

That's a great question. So we capture any additional CO2 that we produce because we're attached to the tailpipe. And then from a weight perspective, the way that our customers are thinking about it is their option is to add batteries, and you need about a megawatt-hour of batteries for 500 miles of range. And a megawatt-hour of batteries is something like 12,000 pounds. So that's A lot more weight than we're adding here. Electrification, like any tool, can't just be applied to everything. Carbon capture is the right tool for big, heavy transport.

Yeah.

Still, the idea that beverage makers must mine CO2 while our planet is choking on the stuff is appalling and sad. And if these people can do something about it and make some money, well, Then let's get on with it.