Factory in the Sky

Anthropogenic climate change is quite possibly the world’s most heavily researched, scientifically-validated threat. Its existence has been corroborated by decades of studies by thousands of scientists who have looked at millions of years of climate history. Hundreds of thousands of pages have been devoted to examining the causes of climate change and nearly as many to illuminating its effects. Agricultural devastation. Coral reef collapse. Hurricane and fire seasons that span the majority of the year. The number of extinct species could be in the millions. Human refugees in the billions. All in the next 83 years.

The International Panel on Climate Change, in its Fifth Assessment Report, concluded that the only way for this disaster to be averted is by keeping global warming to 2℃ over pre-industrial levels, and the only way to do that is by limiting global carbon dioxide emissions. The Paris Agreement was signed shortly after, with the one hundred and ninety-five signing nations pledging to do what is necessary to keep warming under that 2℃ threshold. We are not on pace to follow through. In fact, at its current rate, the world will emit enough CO2 to cause 2℃ warming in the next thirty years.

Yay

As such, attention must be paid not just to ways to limit global CO2 emissions, but also to ways to actually remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere. In fact, the I.P.C.C. estimates that to meet the Paris goals there is almost a 90% chance that negative emission technologies will need to be deployed. Without them, our current trajectory leads to catastrophe.

The nature of the problem—that the consequences of environmental inaction are incontrovertibly dire, that they will be felt most strongly by the rising generation, and that the only way to avert them is through action now—makes it exactly the kind of issue that Helena was designed to take on.

So, in 2016, Helena launched The Helena Prize, an international competition for embryonic concepts, technologies, or companies in climate science, to be awarded to the applicant whose project would have the largest measurable effect on climate change (or, more specifically, the largest net-negative effect on radiative forcing). Yeee

The Prize was intended to enable Helena to recognize and evaluate as many external teams in the climate change sector as possible, to identify the ways Helena could potentially catalyze the biggest difference, and to accelerate the development and effect of the eventual recipient’s project. In order to do that, Helena made the benefits of the prize proportional to the magnitude of the problem.

The Prize gave the winner management and digital consulting from Boston Consulting Group, technological and scientific mentorship from top climate experts, access to a cutting-edge laboratory and workspace, and permanent Helena membership, which provided access to and assistance from Helena’s full network of world leaders.

The Prize accepted applications from around the world, with each applicant judged by a panel of some of the preeminent scientists, analysts, entrepreneurs, and policy-makers in the climate science field.

After analysis, the winner of the Prize was announced: Climeworks, a direct-air carbon capture company based out of Switzerland that was founded by a pair of thirty-three-year-old German engineers, Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher. Climeworks offered the prospect of building facilities that remove carbon dioxide from the air and then store or repurpose it, making it an effective negative emissions technology. It offered a for-profit venture that had the technology to be revolutionary, but it was still nascent and needed help developing.

Since the announcement of the Prize, Helena has been working to help Climeworks with its growth, scalability, and funding.

In that time, Climeworks has made tremendous strides. It first launched the world’s first commercial-scale direct-air capture plant in Hinwil, Switzerland. And then, less than six months later, it launched the world’s first direct-air capture plant with carbon removal, making it the first developed carbon capture plant that is carbon net-negative. It is now the world leader in the field of direct-air carbon capture.

Beginning in August 2016, Helena held a series of focused member meetings on the critical issues threatening our world. Chief among them was the vital importance of taking action to fight climate change. Members looked at Helena’s unique structure and asked: what are the most unique and efficient means through which Helena could help to address climate change?

To answer this question, our staff and members interviewed dozens of experts from Oxford, Harvard, MIT, the Center for Carbon Renewal, the American Renewable Energy Institute, and elsewhere.

This research revealed two important facts. First, carbon capture technologies are vitally important to averting climate disaster. It is not enough just to transition to a carbon neutral society – rather, mankind will need to emit large negative quantities of CO2 by the middle of the 21st century. Second, the technology to achieve this planetary-scale carbon capture and storage does not exist in any technically or economically viable form.

Given this, it is vital that global society devote significant resources to carbon-capture R&D and commercialization now, so that the technology will be ready for global deployment by mid-century. In late-2016, nowhere near enough attention or resources were being used to do so.

This presented us with two options. Either:

In this instance, Helena did not have the proprietary expertise or technical abilities that would have enabled us to make a technological breakthrough in the science of carbon capture. Instead, it was evident that our assets would be more useful if applied to help commercialize an existing technology, by supplying it with management and technical expertise, customers, investors, media exposure, and more.

Furthermore, assisting an outside organization or team would allow Helena to produce disproportionate impact through leverage. Helena was well positioned to benefit from this leveraging effect for a number of reasons.

First, we had already assembled a network of skilled and globally influential individuals whose support would be significant for an early venture. Second, we held relationships with a number of partners who could offer valuable services to an eventual winner. Third, we had proven capable of finding and recruiting passionate and accomplished individuals pursuing meaningful work across the globe.

With these advantages in mind, we felt confident in our ability to successfully support an external venture designed to fight climate change. Our task was now to search the globe for the person or people doing the best work in the world on this issue and to support them from every angle with the full power of the Helena network.

In order to find the best possible team to support, and incentivize them to share information we could use to evaluate their quality, we launched a formal award: The Helena Prize.

Helena’s first step was to populate a panel of judges to evaluate the applicants. Using our network, we recruited thirteen globally recognized scientists, analysts, clean-tech entrepreneurs, and policy-makers in the field of climate science and technology.

The judging panel, once established, worked with Helena to finalize both the metrics for evaluating the applicants and the parameters for accepting them.