If carbon removal's time has finally arrived, Etosha Cave will be one of the first to know. Her Berkeley-based tech firm, Twelve — named for the carbon isotope that makes up the vast majority of carbon on earth — has been around since 2015, exploring various applications for its technology, which splits carbon dioxide and water into carbon monoxide and uses it to create fuels. Cave, Twelve's co-founder and chief scientific officer, is particularly excited about the Inflation Reduction Act, which has incentives for carbon removal, sustainable jet fuel and manufacturing. The company is also getting new buzz from sustainability commitments from companies that are trying to go further than traditional carbon offsets, like e-commerce firm Shopify, which last year agreed to buy $2.5 million worth of its jet fuel. It also has an agreement with Alaska Airlines and Microsoft to deliver 1,000 gallons of the fuel, which they're planning to blend with conventional fuel and deliver in time for one round-trip flight between Seattle and San Francisco at the end of 2023 or beginning of 2024. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. How has policy helped you, and what policies are you looking to now? When we first were getting off the ground, there were no investors that were looking to fund us. Our only investor in our early days was the government through the Small Business Innovation Research Program. Later on, we've attracted almost $200 million in private follow-on funding. But that was only made possible because of those early supports. We also were housed at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. With the Inflation Reduction Act, that's been really amazing. We're so excited about that. There's so many provisions in there: The manufacturing investment tax credit is going to be big for helping us on our manufacturing floor. And there's the 45Q, which is for CO2 utilization. There's the sustainable aviation fuel production tax credit, that'll be really huge. What it really does is just gives the ability to go to market quicker, because we've always been kind of like, 'Okay, how do we get to cost parity with petroleum?' And we've seen that there's small markets, there's some customers that are willing to pay a premium early on, but not as many as you need to really get to scale. And so this just helps us get to scale much quicker. Is that already changing how you're able to market it? Yeah. Because we have this engagement with Shopify and Microsoft and they're kind of acting in place of the jet fuel tax credit, where they're covering the costs of their Scope Three emissions in jet fuel. They're paying for that now. So once the IRA comes fully online, we'll have that in future years and say, "Okay, we can cover that difference between what we're selling it for and what it actually costs us to make it."
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