CDR Innovator Interview - Eion

'Unbound Showcase' is a globe-spanning series of interviews with pioneers of carbon dioxide removal (CDR). We’re deep-diving with innovators, business leaders, policymakers, academics, buyers, and investors who are taking on the challenge of our lifetime—gigaton-scale carbon removal from the earth's atmosphere.

Today, we talk to Anastasia Pavlovic Hans , the new CEO of Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) specialists Eion . Eion's recent delivery of a purchase from @Stripe sparked headlines in November, alongside securing a guaranteed supply of olivine from @Sibelco to scale Eion's efforts; what better time to find out more about what attracted her to the world of ERW and this carbon removal start-up with big ambitions.

"What is Eion?"

Anastasia Pavlovic Hans - Eion is a carbon removal company scaling Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) technology on agricultural land. For people learning more about the technology, rock weathering speeds up Earth's natural process of carbon removal through the CO2 interacting with rocks as they dissolve slowly over time. That process removes carbon from the atmosphere. So effectively, ERW accelerates that natural process in various ways, which is what the industry is doing and experimenting to improve. The ERW process involves pulverising these rocks, making them into fine sand or more of a powder that increases their surface area - helping speed up this weathering and mineralisation process. We work with partners in the mining and logistics sectors and the farming sector to spread those rocks across farmland. The powder is a natural replacement for AgLime, and it is used in farmers' processes each year as part of their standard land management. Eion condenses the removal process into a short, four- to five-year weathering that removes carbon from the atmosphere much faster than nature could on its own.

“What drew you to Eion? Why did you think this is the place for me?”

Anastasia Pavlovic Hans - My background is originally in engineering. I ended up getting into agtech. I built a company modelling agricultural crop systems using software to determine sustainability and climate change's impact on food production. Imagine the data needs of a company that requires millions of pounds of tomatoes, looking at its supply chain 40 to 50 years from now and planning how climate change will impact its food production zones. So, we considered modelling and simulating questions like that to think about the outcome. That made me incredibly interested in carbon crediting models because I started to think about how land use would change over time. What are the things that we can do to provide incentives that help maximise the potential of land? If we're using land today for something inefficient or less efficient, how do we learn to fix that over time? Can we manage that land in a much better way? How are we going to do that? 

I became fascinated with the carbon crediting space, which was mainly in forestry back then. If you optimise a specific land use today, you could plan better for the future. How can you incentivise for those changes to be made? And what are the unit economics and some driving functions that would help make those changes? I combined the ideas of carbon crediting and land use planning to build a company called @Agoro Carbon Alliance, a carbon crediting platform based on soil organic carbon. 

We looked at all the developments necessary to make management changes on farms that would allow for soil organic carbon credits to be generated. While creating Agoro, I reviewed many technologies involved in carbon crediting and land use change. I came across ERW; the space had been a well-understood science, but more needed to be done commercially and at scale. I was excited by the growth potential for carbon removal because the scalability is very practical, especially in agriculture. That's something that I've helped develop and could understand, so connecting the dots between these parts, there were many synergies between the problems that I had in the past and my interest in expanding the category of ERW for a company like Eion and to help other companies in the space be successful. ERW is the most exciting nature-based CDR technology we can develop over the next few years. 

“The US is such a prime place for ERW to grow because of the monumental scale of its agriculture, right?”

Anastasia Pavlovic Hans — That's it. You're not creating enormous amounts of physical infrastructure from scratch—those systems and supply chains already exist. We just have to plug into them.

"What was the inspiration that led to Eion?" 

Anastasia Pavlovic Hans - The two founders of Eion are @Adam Wolf and @Elliot Chang. Interestingly, Adam was Elliot's mentor at Princeton. Elliot is a geochemist. And Adam is a soil scientist. Adam had been fascinated by the rock weathering process, which was in its scientific infancy. Elliot had been doing a postdoc and then in the National Labs, working on rare element tracing techniques - using rare earth elements to track different things in the soil. There's a whole bunch of applications that can be applied in industry. They came back together and shared ideas on this. They got the idea that rare earth element tracking was the key to helping ERW efficiency. Could you use the trace elements to create a fingerprint and track the applied material and how carbon removal occurs over time? Could you quantify that? 

So, that idea was the genesis of the company. Adam’s experience in industry and agriculture led him to gravitate towards a few other people who knew a lot about what it means to scale this in agricultural infrastructure. They started testing, doing trials and exploring what this looks like, so we continued growing. I'm here to take on the next chapter and expand the company’s operations and services to align with MRV and quality. We need these things to do this in the wild and grow the field of ERW. That’s a fantastic origin story for Eion that continues to excite me.

"Can you share that 'aha' breakthrough in your company's journey that left you especially excited about its potential?"

Anastasia Pavlovic Hans - One of the big ones worth mentioning is that Eion had been working with the team at @Stripe. To help achieve scale, Eion took part in Stripe's pre-purchase carbon removal program. And so, the first deployments after the trials were around pre-purchase delivery for Stripe. At the end of 2023, we delivered the first quantifiable carbon removal tons for ERW to Stripe as part of that program. While those projects were relatively small, they were thorough. Stripe’s team of scientists, its commercial diligence and rigour, is almost unparalleled in the category. It was the first time we could show that you can do this process end to end with rigour - and it was proven by one of the few credible companies to determine its quality. That was a huge moment for the company in terms of its journey towards scaling; that was a fantastic time. I had just joined, and we were completing that work officially, so that was an exhilarating time in Q4 for us. It sets the stage for 2024; it will be a massive year for us thinking about scaling and growing in a much more commercial framework. 

“What have you found the best way of garnering investor or buyer attention?”

Anastasia Pavlovic Hans - Education is one of the most significant areas we focus on and see success in. This was true throughout my journey in these nascent early markets and categories. Many clever people are in this small carbon removal world, but that's a tiny subset of humanity. And then you have this massive number of people outside in industries who need help understanding what it means and how it works. We understand the category in all aspects and know what it means for carbon removal. But, things like the agricultural systems, policy components, unit economics and how they impact technology scaling require more people to input. Educating a broader set of people wherever they are in their learning journey is incredibly important because that's how more people understand and think about these technologies. You have a trigger effect where that hooks new people to get involved. New investors will hear about it, and new buyers will listen to about it. And so I've been doing this for the last ten years in a couple of different Technologies. And it's one of the most powerful things you can do to help people and bring this technology to life. Especially ERW, it’s so new and different for many people I meet, so I think bringing that to life for them is super important. Various stakeholders know more or less depending on how they fit into carbon dioxide removal or ERW. So, it allows us to think about bringing the potential of the technology into a much broader conversation. That helps people think about investing time and capital in the industry.

“How are you approaching scalability, and what tools or strategies have proven most effective in levelling up your solution?”

Anastasia Pavlovic Hans - Those early deployments were critical because most things don't go seamlessly from the lab to the real world. Undertaking those first deployments and examining each element to deliver carbon removal at the end and do that at scale was a vital learning process for us. @Stripe was the big enabler for us to do this; our partnership with @Sibelco regarding our rock supply also allows us to keep doing this and growing. 

As part of what it means to scale, there are two prominent elements that you look at, and this is true for almost every carbon removal technology that's growing today. You have the quality you need to keep high in carbon removal. You need the rigour to look at things like permanence and additionality. Then, make sure that you're able to quantify the removal with the technology that, at the same time, can keep quality high with a clear path towards cost reduction. Cost reduction over time is one of the most significant areas that we examine when we think about the future impact of carbon removal technology and what it looks like to grow it and reduce the cost to the point that we can deliver billions of tons a year for example in over the next 1500 years. 

And we talked a little bit about scaling in existing infrastructure. That's incredibly important, but partnerships, business models, and policy approaches allow you to deliver what you need to do operationally. These things can be critical unlockers of cost reduction drivers. You'll hear similar stories in many of the other technology areas. Still, those elements are required for everybody to achieve outstanding quality in 10 years but at half the price or less. 

Finally, you have these stakeholders in carbon removal to win over. If you look at different types of land owners and other types of carbon buyers, they could not be more different; they come from different worlds, their jobs look different, their day-to-day looks different, and so there’s a real challenge that a lot of the industry faces in telling stories and educating and communicating in ways that meet people where they are. It's not like one market segment and target audience; we can’t blast buzzwords to that. It's a much more careful dance. 

“What's the biggest challenge your business / the industry is facing, and what do you think is required to solve it?”

Anastasia Pavlovic Hans - Going back to education. We've already talked a decent amount about this, so we don't need to harp on it much more, but if you look at everything required to bring a complex set of stakeholders and infrastructure online to deliver something new. It requires that many of those parts of the chain are informed and aware of the changes they're trying to make and how to do that. That means policymakers need to know much more about ERW, ag systems, financing systems, and carbon crediting systems than they do today. That's also a challenge for carbon removal writ large, particularly for the niche technologies we discussed. People just can’t believe some of these technologies are real!

You also highlighted the agricultural side of it. That's right. Historically, farmers have been excellent at adopting new technology, but they’re very shrewd business people. So, they carefully examine new technologies and new things that are coming out, and they think about risk and growth. We have to do an excellent job of educating that community on the benefits many of these things provide and what it means to slot them into their existing systems. Otherwise, they seem scary or threatening or, weird or unsavoury. So we have to do an excellent job communicating with and educating them. 

Finally, you have the big challenges. Again, this is true for almost every carbon removal technology quantifying and measuring the removal and what it means to do this in different geographies with different climatic variables. It needs to be proven. It needs to be examined. It needs to be iterated upon. There's a lot that has to happen in terms of collaboration.

In ERW, it's so new that only a few companies and academic institutions are leaders. We must build more working groups to achieve a shared understanding of what great quality and measurement looks like. To achieve gigaton scale removal, all technologies must be considered; people are fighting about which one's better, and it's natural, but we have to do all of them and do them faster and better than we have to date. So, we want Eion to succeed, but we want the whole CDR space to succeed. Organisations like Unbound are exciting because you focus on improving that entire chain.

Unbound Summits’ mission focuses on unrivalled connections, new insights, and unbound CDR opportunities. Learn more about Eion’s groundbreaking ERW solution here.