The Power Hungry Podcast: Danny Rice

Robert, good to be here. Thanks for having me. I warned you, as I told you, I don't warn all the guests, but guests on this podcast introduce themselves. So imagine you've arrived somewhere no one there knows you and you are told you have 60 seconds to introduce yourself. Please introduce yourself.

Alright, okay. 60 seconds. Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, probably as far away from the oil and gas industry as you could be, but somehow I find myself in the oil and gas industry. Shortly after college, I start a company with my brothers called Rice Energy back in 2007. We moved to... through going public in 2014 till the very end and merged with EQT, so now the largest natural gas producer in the country. Toby, the middle Rice brother, is the CEO there. And that was a fantastic journey. We learned a whole lot about natural gas, about being able to decarbonize the grid responsibly by displacing coal. So I went on from the Rice Energy days to then starting to make investments in private energy companies, a lot in the energy transition space, again around responsible decarbonization. Started a business, scaled it into one of the largest in the world, sold it to BP at the end of last year. And then I went off and said we need to find ways to decarbonize baseline power generation responsibly, and that's led me here to becoming the CEO of Net Power. We just took the company public last month, so I've been in the seat for the last month.

Yeah, and we've done this a couple times over at this point. So we formed our first SPAC back in 2019, 2020. In the... and that's an abbreviation I'm sorry for... that cash to take that private company public through your blank check public company, and the private company becomes the surviving entity of the public company. So it's an alternative to taking the company public versus the traditional IPO route. And why SPAC? Why do we do a SPAC? Well, we did this SPAC the first time around because this was during the early days of the energy transition craze and people were starting to see a lot of these companies go public in the energy transition space. Anything energy transition to most people is electric vehicles, electrify everything, batteries, wind and solar. And most of it, the real focus at the time back in 2019, 2020 was really around decarbonized power generation just by displacing coal-fired power in the US. We said all the stuff that people are starting to put capital into is good, it's helpful, but is it really going to move the needle and achieve the results that people expect? And we said, given our knowledge of most of the energy space, we said not really. So we said, what's the quickest and most expeditious way for us to get access to this capital to make sure that capital is going to companies that are actually going to make a meaningful difference in reducing emissions, but doing in a way that's not going to destroy shareholder value but actually create it? And so that's why we did a SPAC. A SPAC for us was a very quick way for us, as seasoned energy executives, to raise a lot of capital to then go find those... we went and acquired OurKia. We actually acquired OurKia and the largest renewable natural gas developer in the country at the time, a company called Aria. So we acquired two companies that were both private, took them public through Rice Acquisition Corp One, and the surviving entity was Archaea. So through that combination, Archaea was really, really well capitalized, great scale, and now it was this public company. And over the course of the year that it was actually public, we grew it into the largest landfill gas developer in the country, and then eventually BP said we would like to get into the RNG business, renewable natural gas business, in a big way, and BP acquired that platform for over four billion dollars. So we went right back into our second SPAC, and we said what do we really need to be doing? We need to be focusing on ensuring that we have this baseload, dispatchable, reliable power, but we need to find technologies that can reduce the emissions from it rather than trying to move us away from these sources of power. Because what you'll end up with the alternative way is you'll end up with a very unreliable, very expensive grid, and unfortunately, like you're seeing in some countries around the world, if you go too hard into renewables, you end up having to get back onto coal as your emergency source of power, and you're not going to get the emissions reductions that you intended at the beginning. And so that was really the thesis behind Rice Acquisition Corp Two. The ticker for that one was RONI. Really looking at everything in the private space that was promising. And so it wasn't just Net Power that we were looking at, right? We were looking at all forms of carbon capture. Net Power is certainly unique, but we're looking at post-combustion carbon capture, we were looking at other forms of low-carbon baseline power generation too. So we looked at geothermal, both conventional and advanced geothermal, we looked at all colors of hydrogen, blue, gray, green, pink, we looked at all of it. We looked at hydro. And then obviously nuclear as well, both conventional nuclear as well as small modular reactors. So we looked at everything. And I think that's an important part of, as we think about just energy and the energy mix going forward, we've got to have a truly objective view of the pros and cons of every single source of potential energy, and really evaluate does it make sense to do this here? Does it make sense to do this now? And so that was certainly the perspective that we really approached this with our second SPAC: what energy solution do we need now? And Net Power was a really, really interesting one because it's a new type of power generation using natural gas. They built a fantastic IP, intellectual property portfolio around it, such that they're kind of the only ones out there able to do this oxy-combustion, supercritical CO2 power generation. And so we approached them and we pretty much said, you guys have developed one of the most important energy technologies we've seen in the last... which way we can. So that was really just the genesis of us getting to taking Net Power public through the SPAC in the first place.

Headquarters in Durham, North Carolina.

Yeah, La Porte, Texas. La Porte, Texas. We built that demonstration plant there.

Yeah, yeah, you're heading down the right path. So you're 100% right. I think before we even start getting down the path, the critical question that Rodney Allam and the team at 8 Rivers had was... the process that was really the whole thesis was if you really want to eliminate emissions, you need to totally redesign the way the power is generated in the first place. And why is that? So maybe start with helping the listeners understand how does a traditional power plant generate its power and why is capturing the CO2 from a power plant so tricky, right? Let's do that. Go ahead.

So in a traditional combustion process, you have the methane, the natural gas, which is the fuel, CH4. It goes into a combustion... that breathing in oxygen. And most people just assume the atmosphere is just 100% oxygen. It's not. Three quarters of it is nitrogen, which is an inert gas, a harmless gas, just part of the atmosphere here on Earth. And so what goes into that combustion chamber is that mixture. In a traditional combustion process, you have the air and the methane. That combustion process, when you light it with a match, it's the methane and the oxygen that combust. The nitrogen doesn't really react. Some of it reacts with the oxygen and that's how you end up with NOx, which is a very, very bad air pollutant. But that nitrogen just flows through this combustion process, through this power generation process unobstructed. So that flue gas that gets vented to the atmosphere in a natural gas-fired power plant is 5% CO2, 95% nitrogen. So that's the tricky part with post-combustion carbon capture: being able to remove, to separate that 5% CO2 from that 95% nitrogen. And so that was really the genesis of the Net Power thesis: if you really want to fix the power generation process, do not let nitrogen into the combustion chamber. And so that's how the process starts. You start with oxy-combustion. So what is oxy-combustion? You're removing the nitrogen and the argon, so you have a pure stream of oxygen going in. And then that reaction of the combustion of the pure oxygen with the methane, with the natural gas, creates three things: a whole lot of power, just spinning that turbine blade to generate power; it creates water, the CH4 and the O2 creates H2O; and then you end up with a pure stream of CO2. So no nitrogen blended with it. You have this pure stream of CO2 that is ready to be sequestered, right, right buried. And so there's no post-processing cost to this oxy-combustion process. But then it leads to another question: okay, well you've been able to combust, the process itself spins one turbine blade and that generates a certain amount of power. But now in a traditional power plant, you have all of this excess heat in this water. And so what you do is you have a second cycle where you use this excess heat to heat the water, that creates steam, and so you have a steam cycle. And so that's what a combined cycle plant is. The combination is the gas cycle and the steam cycle, right? That's what a combined cycle gas turbine is. But in a Net Power plant, we don't have nitrogen, which is one of those working fluids in that turbine, but we do have this fantastic thing which is a pure stream of CO2. And CO2, it's a problem if it gets into the atmosphere, but if you can actually harness it, it has some pretty cool properties. Even methane and nitrogen, as you increase the pressure, its density factor is linear, so it just shrinks in a linear factor as you increase the pressure. But with CO2, as you increase the pressure, its density factor actually starts to go exponential. So the amount of space it takes up actually becomes much, much smaller. So you can pack a whole lot more CO2 in a much smaller area. And so when we talk about CO2 being in a supercritical state, supercritical CO2 is that point at which the CO2 becomes exponentially more dense. And in that dense phase, CO2 is actually a much better working fluid to spin those turbine blades to generate power. And so that's really the magic of the Allam cycle: that spins that turbine to generate power.

Yeah, it's pretty much on the border between being a liquid and a gas. So it has the density properties of a solid but it has the viscosity of a gas. So it's very, very strong but it's very, very viscous and flexible to be able to go around those turbine blades.

Somewhere in that... and technology and obviously equipment to be able to make this happen, and it had never been done before, where you combine oxy-combustion with the supercritical CO2 power generation cycle. And so the Net Power guys, in 2016, said we need to go build one of these plants. And so they went and built their own demonstration plant in La Porte, Texas to actually prove that this oxy-combustion supercritical CO2 cycle works. And that's what is now commonly known as the Allam cycle.

Yeah, so the bar is 300 bar. For the oil and gas crowd, that's about 4,500 PSI.

Yeah, I think as we look at what does the supply chain look like to be able to manufacture these plants at scale, it really is a specialized supply chain. The nice thing is most of this equipment is off the rack, as they'd say. It's equipment that's been around for a long time. There is the combustor slash turbo expander, the turbine, and that's certainly the most specialized piece of equipment for this CO2 power cycle. And so we have Baker Hughes, spun up from GE, GE Oil & Gas, that is constructing, that is building our turbo expander. So that's the only specialized piece of equipment. And then you have other things like heat exchangers. As you look from going from one temperature to another, heat exchangers are another critical component, but again, those are pieces of equipment that have been around forever. The size and specs that we need are unique, but it's the same type of equipment. So that's kind of the beauty of this: can you get this oxy-combustion supercritical CO2 process to work? In 2016 they brought in Oxy Petroleum as a shareholder, and Oxy provided a lot of that capital along with Exelon and McDermott, Sean McDermott, to build the facility. So they built it, they commissioned it in 2018, and from 2018 to 2021 they did a bunch of science testing campaigns to actually improve and make the cycle work. And ultimately it culminated in them syncing this La Porte plant to the ERCOT grid about a year and a half ago.

So it's just our demonstration plant. It's actually very expensive to build CO2 pipelines and sequestration wells. It requires a requisite amount of volume to be able to justify that, and we certainly don't have it there at the La Porte plant. But the La Porte plant was really important in being able to demonstrate that the cycle works at the temps and pressures that a utility scale plant will be. So this demonstration plant is a 50 megawatt thermal plant, it's a five acre site. So you go there and you think this is a real industrial scale power plant, and it is. And it had to be of a certain size so that we could test out the components that will be in the utility scale design. But that's ultimately now what the company is pivoting from: proving the technology to now commercializing it. And I think that's the big thing that the company we're focused on is able to address some of the most pressing energy needs we have, which is grid scale power generation. And so that is what we're bringing to market first, and it happens this decade: this utility scale 300 megawatt power plant with this oxy-combustion supercritical CO2 process.

It's not a conversion. So the 50 Megawatt plant is a 50 megawatt thermal plant. And so it's actually 550 megawatt thermal, 300 net electric output. It's actually 284 net electric output is what we're targeting. We're targeting for that one to begin construction sometime next year, site work, all of that stuff, with intent of COD, getting to commercialization, end of 2026.

Yeah, so it's going to an Oxy hosted site in West Texas. The one thing that's really important about this plant, and hopefully we can get into it later on in this conversation, is that this is a power plant that not only generates that power, that same reliable, low cost power you would come to expect from natural gas power generation, but now we have a pure stream of CO2 that is ready for industrial use, it's ready for sequestration, it's ready for utilization. And within the United States, under the Inflation Reduction Act, I know when most people think about the Inflation Reduction Act they really think about the subsidies for wind and solar, but there's subsidies available in there for sequestration, and for our Net Power plant. So just to give people a sense of the scale, each Net Power plant will generate 280 megawatts of power, and over the course... I'm sorry to interrupt... so it's 45 million cubic feet of gas per day. And that generates that power, right? And that 45 million a day of natural gas, when that combustion process... you end up with 40 million cubic feet per day of CO2, which in a year on a tonnage basis is over 800,000 tons of CO2 per year. So if you just think about a Net Power plant replacing a coal-fired power plant of the same size, a similarly sized coal plant emits one and a half million tons of CO2 per year, right? And you have a Net Power plant that's actually capturing all 800,000 tons coming off of its process. And under that 45Q at $85 per ton, if you permanently sequester that CO2, it is a really, really critical part of being able to locate your plants in areas where you have the potential to geologically and safely sequester the CO2 forever. So in West Texas, where they've built out a massive infrastructure on CO2 pipelines that's been built since the 1970s, that's just one less risk we have as we look at really proving this technology at utility scale. So this plant will be going to an Oxy hosted site in West Texas, where we already have close access to that CO2 infrastructure network. Oxy will use a portion of that power, this clean power, for their own operations, and the rest of the power will go on to the ERCOT grid. And it's 24/7 power. So I think that's the thing that is either going to be in Andrews or it's going to be right outside of Odessa, so it's going to be in that general vicinity.

Yeah, I think that's just one of the ironies with all of this. There's a lot more CO2 going into the atmosphere than I think anybody wants, but there's not enough CO2 being harnessed and captured in that pure form for both industrial use or even to take full advantage of the sequestration potential, the geologic storage potential we have here in the United States. So there is a need for CO2. I think if you look at where that CO2 is coming from for enhanced oil recovery in the Permian, most of it is geologically occurring CO2 that's already naturally buried and has been buried for millions of years, and now we're actually unearthing it to use for EOR. And so what we would say, putting our Net Power plants in the Permian, we're putting a new source of CO2 into the system that actually displaces that geologic CO2 that shouldn't otherwise be unearthed.

Going back to the beginning, when Rodney Allam and the team at 8 Rivers invented this technology and then assigned all the IP rights into its subsidiary Net Power, so Net Power owns the intellectual property to this whole cycle. So if anybody wants to do this oxy-combustion supercritical CO2 power generation, they have to come to us for a license. And I think you know, why are we going to do this licensing model versus just build and operate these plants ourselves? I think it's a very fair question. And I think it really comes down to a couple... in the United States, but in Canada, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in Europe. It's too much for just one company to handle. And so the most appropriate way is we need to be asset light. We need to be able to license this technology. Now, this doesn't mean we're not going to have a heavy hand in ensuring that these customers can do it correctly. Just because this technology is so important that it's done responsibly, we will have a heavy hand in ensuring that we're only licensing these plants out to viable projects that we can point to and say these things are great for the environment, these things are great for the consumer, and it's great for our investors. So we're actually going to have operational ownership of serial number one. But that doesn't mean we won't be involved in originating opportunities and doing a lot of the upfront work of scoping out where these plants need to go, securing the pore space, securing the surface rights, getting into the interconnect queue, and really setting the table for utilities to own these plants. But at the end of the day, the market potential for this thing is beyond incredible. And I think as we just look at where these plants make good sense, because I think as everybody is now starting to learn the hard way, wind and solar doesn't work everywhere. You can't put nuclear everywhere. So where does Net Power make sense? Where doesn't it make sense? The first thing that we start with is just the knowledge of natural gas because it's the feedstock to this plant. So we need three things: you need access to natural gas, the lower cost the better; you need a place to store the CO2 because this thing captures a whole lot of pure CO2 that needs to be utilized and sequestered responsibly; and then you obviously need a whole lot of power demand because these are grid scale. This will power the entire city of Austin, Texas. 10 of these and you can power all of Austin. That's the scale that we're talking about with these plants. And so when you scan the world and say, find me the places in the world where there's great power demand, there's not just access to low-cost natural gas but also a place to store the CO2, the United States is the largest, most attractive market for this. Western Canada is fantastic. The Middle East is a great market for this, Southeast Asia, Europe. And thankfully, some of the most responsibly produced natural gas too, in terms of scope one emissions from operations. And that's certainly a big part of what we're really focused on at EQT is eliminating our scope one and two emissions from our operations so that the natural gas that does go into a Net Power plant, we can almost get to zero scope three emissions, which is an incredible place for fossil power generation to get to. So the United States is the biggest market for this. And just to put some size to it, I think we've been geologically blessed with the amount of oil and gas reserves we have here in the United States within the sedimentary basins. But within these sedimentary basins, there's also formations where you can inject a whole lot of CO2 and it will stay down there for millions of years. So the same type of formations that oil and gas geologists are looking for for oil and gas, we're looking for the same type of trapping features that has been proven to hold oil and gas for tens of millions of years. That's one of the other things: how can you prove that this stuff will stay down there forever?

Of years and all you have to really do is just point to some of these gas fields or any gas field in the world and say that gas was actually formed 30 million years ago and it's been trapped down there in these geologic formations for 30 million years. So if we can identify these reservoirs that right now just contain water and we can inject that CO2 into it, we know without a shadow of a doubt that CO2 is going to stay there for millions of years.

We have drawings in our slide deck from our Analyst Day presentation from a few months ago that actually map out, hey, just so everybody knows, here's where the sedimentary basins are relative to power generation demand. The most remarkable thing is close to 80% of U.S. power generation today is within either right on top of the sedimentary basins where there's the ability to store CO2 or within 40 miles of it. So we're in a place where the United States has more CO2 storage capacity than any amount of CO2 we will be able to capture or emit over the next thousand years. So we are geologically blessed with oil and gas reserves, but we're also geologically blessed with a place to safely and permanently store the CO2.

So here in the United States, the thing that's most scary to me is if you just look at the average age of our baseload power plants that really are the foundation of our low-cost reliable power that I think at times many of us take for granted. The average age of a coal plant in the United States today is 44 years old. I think nuclear is 43, and I think the average age of a natural gas plant is in the late 20s. So these are by no means young assets. These are all plants that are going to have to be replaced and retired over the course of the next 15 to 20 years. Within the United States, new U.S. domestic growth, if you look at just the electrification of everything continuing to happen, not just with electric vehicles but data centers, AI, and what that's doing to demand for more power, all of these things are really pointing to electrifying everything putting even more burden of energy onto a grid that is aging and still requires a lot of coal power generation. So the market opportunity for us here in the United States is beyond incredible. When we look at the revenue model for the business, it's that licensing approach.

Yeah, PV10 is present value. It's just the present value of a future stream of cash flows or future values that are discounted based on the time value of money. So receiving something today is worth a whole lot more than receiving the same thing in 20 years. So how do you factor in the time value of something? You have a discount rate. That license fee that Net Power earns is over the life of the plant, so you earn that $5 million per year over that 30-year life, along with the upfront piece. The present value of those cash flows for each license is around $65 million. So in the United States, we're talking about 1,300 potential Net Power plants.

If you really want to have a shot at being able to achieve net zero, this is global warming, this isn't country warming. If you try to do something without having technologies that you're developing knowing that they're exportable, you're really not going to be solving much. This is the technology we're developing here in the United States. We're going to scale it here in the United States to bring our capex down for these plants such that a Net Power plant will be more economic than the carbon-emitting alternative. We think that's what we're going to need to see, and we think we can get there. We'll be able to leverage the benefit of the Inflation Reduction Act that we have here in the country to accelerate adoption, accelerate demand. And with us being able to produce more plants each year, that's going to allow us to achieve massive economies of scale.

We need the incentives for this thing to be more economic than the carbon-emitting alternative, but we certainly need to get to that escape velocity of being able to produce these plants at scale. The real prize for us long term really is India, China. I think every country and all citizens everywhere deserve access to low-cost reliable energy first and foremost. If we can find a way to use new technologies to make it clean, that's great. That's really what we're focused on: making this low-cost and reliable. In certain markets they can afford for it to be very clean, and we're going to start here in the United States, but certainly the real prize for us is the international market long term.

So that's where we expect to get to within this first generation plant. The first plant is actually a whole lot more expensive than that. It's going to be around $900 million. That's why the owner group is going to own that one. Remarkably, with the technology and what you can do under the Inflation Reduction Act, as we look at going from that first plant to our 30th plant to our 50th plant, we just get down that cost curve and really scale up the manufacturing process. We'll see our plant costs come down tremendously over time. But people have to keep in mind, you can't compare just a Net Power capex to a combined cycle capex because a combined cycle plant or coal-fired power plant has one sort of revenue, which is power. Net Power's plant has two: it has the power and it has the CO2. CO2 is actually very valuable. For enhanced oil recovery, the oil producers are paying $30 to $35 per ton to purchase CO2. When we're in manufacturing mode, our implied cost to capture is expected to be less than $20 per ton long term. That's a pretty fantastic place to be.

For enhanced oil recovery or if it's utilized, the federal government will only pay $60 per ton. They'll pay you $85 per ton if you permanently sequester it. From our seat, we're incentivized to focus on permanent geologic sequestration because we can capture more value. But certainly there's real industrial value for EOR, for carbonation, for greenhouses, for all these other industrial applications. CO2 actually has real utility value. But the real prize for us is permanent geologic sequestration because we want to focus on how to reduce emissions from the grid and get to a clean grid that's low cost.

If we get our capex to below $500 million per plant, you're still going to have that $70 million per year CO2 profit stream per year for the first 12 years of a plant's life. The present value of just that CO2 under the 45Q is worth $500 million. So just think about that for a second. You have a power plant where you can underwrite the capex, you can underwrite the investment on just capturing the CO2 alone, and then essentially this clean 24/7 power becomes free upside. If you think about how disruptive that can be, it really forces you to think about power markets all across the United States that aren't blessed with the sunshine that California or Florida or Texas has, or the wind that Texas has. Around places like the Midwest where they just don't have these renewable resources at their disposal, I look at those states—Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Western Kentucky—and I say they have the geologic sequestration potential, they have access to natural gas, they have the power demand, they have these aging thermal plants that are emitting CO2, that are reliable and low cost, but they're getting old and not great for the environment. I see those states and I say with Net Power, we can help them.

I said I need to invest in this company, I need to join the company and help them however I can because this could be that single solution that helps us radically decarbonize power and really restore power to what it should be: a source of affordable reliable power to people everywhere.

It could be if we don't do it the right way. I think property rights are so important, and it's really important that we're very cognizant and very sensitive to landowners. We kind of learned this firsthand, it's built into our DNA having done shale development in Appalachia where you're trying to put well sites and pipelines across farmland that really is the livelihood of all these communities. You can't just run roughshod over them saying I'm going to put my pipeline here because I'm a corporation. You really need to work with the communities to locate these things in a very compatible way. One of the things that's really interesting with our power plants is going through a very exhaustive analysis of being able to locate our plants to minimize surface disruption. The other piece that's inherent to our plant is the energy density of our power generation versus anything else out there. It's beyond incredible. To give some comparison, a Net Power plant that's 300 megawatts takes up around 15 acres. If you wanted 300 megawatts of solar power generation around the clock, so you have to install batteries and all that stuff, it's going to require over 3,000 acres, over five square miles, versus a 300 by 300 foot site. That's the difference between the surface disturbance of a solar farm versus the concentrated nature of Net Power.

One of the biggest opportunities we have over the next couple decades is repowering existing sites for these aging coal, gas, and nuclear plants as they age out. A lot of them have these 200-300 acre brownfield sites. These plants are going to be decommissioned. We see opportunities to step into those and say we'll put a fleet of 10 Net Power plants, so three gigawatts of power, enough to power a city like the size of Houston, within a 250 acre plot of land in the middle of nowhere, connected to the grid, right on top of the sink.

I don't know why I've been successful. I think we've done a very good job of building, but you've done it with your brothers, which I think is interesting too. I'm a family of seven. You've been successful and you've done it with several different businesses with your siblings. How I'll ask it again, I just wanted to clarify that point. You've been successful together.

I think if you do things the same way as everybody else, you really have to hope you're in a rising market because you won't generate differentiated performance, you'll generate okay performance. For us, when we started Rice Energy, we didn't have any experience in natural gas development. We just said we have skill sets between me on the oil and gas money side, Toby as a petroleum engineer, Derek the third brother as a geologist, and the fourth brother Ryan as a petroleum engineer as well. All four of us came in saying we have the skill sets, we know how to do things, but what's the strategy going to be? As outsiders to the industry, we weren't really focused on how things had been done for the last 30 years. Our lack of experience coming in was actually a major asset to us. Things like that have been well documented in books like David and Goliath, which talks about how some of your limitations can actually be your biggest asset. Being outsiders was a massive asset because it forced us to think not just outside the box, because we didn't even know where the box was. It forced us to map out how a company like this should be run, what our strategy should be, what technology we should use, what technology we need to develop to do things the optimal way, which ended up being a much different way.

It's so important that we can demonstrate that this could be done responsibly and prudently because I think that's going to be the stepping stone to our future success.

I've been reading the EPA's proposed rules on Section 111(b)(d), the new CO2 rules that came out today. It's a very exhaustive proposed ruling. It took me a few weeks to get through it all. It was 650 or 700 pages. It was a book and a half. Credit to the EPA, it was actually pretty thoughtful, well done. Net Power was mentioned a couple times in it as one of the technologies that can actually help meet the standards. That doesn't mean whether we're supporting the rules or not, but the 90% capture they want to mandate that every power plant hits by 2035, we can hit it. That's what we're focused on building. We can hit it in our sleep because we're inherently capturing 100% of that CO2 from this oxy-combustion process. Sadly, I haven't had time to read lately, but I started reading a book, Team of Teams, by General Stanley McChrystal. It's a fantastic read.

Yeah, Salesforce for most companies is a sales tool, a CRM. We actually turned it around so it was our internal tool for all internal structured communication, all projects, a digital work environment. Everything's decentralized, everything's transparent, all communication is structured, all information structured. No email, no phone calls, everything's happening in Salesforce. When you have everything there in front of you within that Salesforce work environment, you're starting to see a lot more technology companies build things like that. This is really credit to Toby and what he was able to do at Rice on the technology side. He was the first one that took Salesforce and used it for what we thought it could be used for. Now you're starting to see a lot more companies do it. At EQT, which is the largest gas producer in North America, we're running that company with only 500 or 600 full-time employees, and we could manage a whole lot more production just because things are so well run within the Salesforce work environment. The entire company is 100% remote. We don't have an office.

Technology gives me hope. This is a wild place to be in energy. You have calls every day saying we're nowhere close to hitting our environmental goals. Emissions are still going up worldwide. How is that happening? We're trying to transition so hard to wind and solar. You have more and more calls from folks saying we need to find ways to transition off of natural gas, off of coal, and off of nuclear in some countries. Then you have the other group saying all of these baseload plants want to be decommissioned because they're aging out, and nobody wants to build new baseload power generation anymore. So you're hearing these siren calls from two different groups: one saying we're not doing enough for clean power, and the other saying we're not doing enough for affordable, reliable, baseload dispatchable power generation. Something's not working right when neither side is happy with the progress we're making. If you put those two circles in a Venn diagram of what energy solutions are out there that are both clean, reliable, and affordable, the only thing we really see that fits right in that middle is this Net Power technology. I've committed my life to the commercialization of this thing to make sure it works because we don't see a lot of other solutions out there that are able to give everybody what they want: the energy trifecta. For the last hundred years, we've only been focused on reliable, affordable energy. Now that everybody's demanding that it's clean, we need to come up with new technologies because those technologies do not exist today to get us there. Net Power is one of them. I hope to see a whole lot more. What gives me hope is there are a lot of really smart people from the energy industry who are now starting to say I want to focus my time on new energy technologies to give people the energy trifecta that everybody's calling for.

I'm going to repurpose all of these teams, all of my capital into this area to support things like Net Power, to support things like post-combustion carbon capture. You're starting to see other folks say we need to do more nuclear, and it's traditional energy folks, which is so refreshing to see. The thing that gives me hope is like when we did Rice Energy, we said we need to think outside the box. We really can't go off the playbook of how things were done for the last 30 years and hope it's going to work going forward. It forces everybody to say we need to establish a new way of doing things. That new way is to start with a blank slate and say if we had to redesign things from scratch today, how would we do it? What technologies do we need to invent?

You have the extreme ends, the ones that are pro-environmental or pro-fossil. But when you look at the middle, the middle is mostly silent. I think the middle constitutes 90% of the voices, 90% of energy demand. What everybody really wants is access to clean, affordable, low-cost power. Folks that are designing those energies agnostic of what the feedstock is, I think with us, the biggest challenge we're going to have is probably not going to be on the technology, not on the sequestration. It's going to be on public acknowledgment and public adoption of a clean source of power that originates from natural gas, that originates from a fossil fuel. That's the paradigm shift we need to get through. There's a lot of work on the advocacy side for us to be able to get people to understand clean doesn't just mean renewable. Clean means low carbon intensity. Clean doesn't mean colors, clean means carbon intensity, it means numbers. That's a lot of part of why we took Net Power public in the first place: to put a spotlight on this business because this business is going to be a vehicle to educate people on how energy works and what energy solutions we need to achieve that clean, affordable, reliable power that everybody in the world deserves. So a lot of hope, a lot of work to do.

Thanks so much, Robert. This has been really fun.