Transcriber: Marcela Lodi Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
First, let me ask you to close your eyes.
Yes, close your eyes, please.
And let’s imagine: where will you be in April 2015?
Maybe traveling the world in one of those paradisiacal islands
or running your own business, your own company
in one of those megacities
or playing with your kids and, for some of you, your grandkids
in your garden,
or just enjoying a nice drink in front of a fantastic sunset beach.
Now, open your eyes. It may certainly look like this,
due to the climate drift we have started.
Yes, climate drift.
But don’t get me wrong - I’m not here to scare you.
I'm here because I believe we have a solution.
We just need to take out the excess of carbon dioxide,
the famous CO2, that we put out in the atmosphere.
So, my name is Nourdine Bihmane, and I’m heading the decarbonization unit
for my company.
With my team, we are leveraging our knowledge of technology
to reduce the carbon emission of our customers.
I have been passionate about climate and technology,
but now I have been able to make it part of my day-to-day job.
CO2 is one of the main gases in the atmosphere that traps heat
and generate the greenhouse gas effect.
This is the condition for human beings to live on Earth.
Without that,
the temperature on the planet
will be reaching the freezing minus 30 degrees Celsius.
And believe me, from a guy coming from the South
that has spent five years in Princeton, New Jersey,
I cannot even stand the -10 degrees Celsius over there.
So, greenhouse gas effect is good by design.
We just screwed it.
Yes, we screwed it.
And let me explain to you why.
Every year, the planet -
Every year, the planet
is releasing 730 million gigatonnes
of CO2,
the CO2 which is underground,
in the rocks, with the animals.
On the opposite side,
every year,
naturally,
the planet is capturing 700 gigatonnes of CO2
from the ocean,
the forest,
the photosynthesis of a plant.
So when you look at it, it seems balanced.
We capture more than what we released,
so greenhouse gases’ effects are in check.
Yes, but no.
Since the Industrial Revolution
200 years ago,
we have been adding an excess of CO2 into the atmosphere.
And as of today,
we have reached a 40 gigatonnes related to human activities -
40 gigatonnes.
So now, we have unbalanced that equilibrium,
we are releasing more than what we are capturing.
So you see where I’m going.
We have an issue.
And we have an issue of 20 gigatonnes in excess every year -
20 gigatonnes.
To make it concrete,
it represents China, the US, Japan,
and India’s carbon emission cumulated -
the most carbon intensive economies on the planet.
So every year,
we add that volume into the excess of CO2 we have in the atmosphere
And you know that you need almost 10 centuries
to reduce that excess of carbon by 80 percent.
So we are stuck with it.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
we will need to remove between 500 and 1000 gigatonnes of CO2
over the 21st century
to even dream about mitigating the climate drift that we have started.
So, yes.
One thousand gigatonnes, that’s the size of the issue.
So indeed, the net zero race is a great thing.
By the way, you know what is net zero?
Basically,
for every molecule of greenhouse gas you put in the atmosphere,
you take one out, making the sum zero.
That’s it.
So companies and countries that are racing to that net zero,
that’s fantastic.
Like my company will be net zero by 2028 - fantastic.
But it is not enough.
It is only addressing that piece.
We need to address that piece.
And we need to address it, not with the current setup;
we need to be ready for a new revolution.
You all have seen those charts
that are showing you the correlation between CO2 and temperature,
putting us in a fantastic trajectory
to get cities like New York, Manila, Casablanca
or countries like Ireland, Madagascar
under the sea level
in 80 years from now.
So we are facing a global nightmare.
It doesn’t look at nationality, culture or religion.
Yes, it may not kill you and I,
but it may certainly kill the next generation.
So we need to address that excess of CO2,
we need to bring it to zero, that’s the net zero race.
But then, we need to get negative.
We need to take out that excess that we put in the last 200 years
in the atmosphere.
We need to take it out.
And let me clarify one point.
I heard many times this is about saving the planet.
No, it is not about saving the planet.
The planet doesn't need us.
The planet has been here for billions of years.
It is about saving the human race, our kids, the next generation.
So let’s talk about solution.
Natural carbon removal exists, for sure,
we are planting trees, protecting forests,
improving carbon capture into the soil.
My company is investing in mangrove forests,
you know, that tropical tree?
It has a 10 times higher carbon capture ratio
than any Amazon trees.
But those natural solution have been heavily impacted by human activity
and have been impacted their efficiency and capacity, unfortunately.
So, it is not enough.
Have you heard also about blue carbon of a sea water capture?
By the way, do you know that the oceans are the largest carbon sink on the planet?
The flip side here:
the more CO2 we capture inside the ocean,
the more acidity we create,
and we put at risk all the fragile ecosystem
that are here to help us recycling that CO2.
However, some scientists have been starting some research
and trying to see how they could scrub the CO2 out of the ocean.
And it has a fantastic potential
because the density of CO2 in the ocean is much higher than in the air.
So pretty interesting, but at an early stage.
So still, not enough.
Looking at an interesting engineering solution:
Direct Air Capture.
Basically, it takes the air,
separates the molecules of carbon out of it
and makes it in liquid.
It’s still an expensive solution,
really expensive solution,
almost 50 times more than any natural carbon solution.
And it’s also still energy intensive,
which means the amount of energy you need to do it
is almost keeping the equation neutral.
The largest DAC installation, that will be operational in 2024,
will be able to capture 1,000,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
We are starting reaching a pretty good scale here.
It represents almost 250,000 cars off the road.
Good, interesting, but still not enough.
So, why not thinking differently?
Why not, for example,
putting a molecule up in the air - let’s call it an adsorbent -
and that molecule will be able to trap the CO2 directly in the air
and help us bringing it down to Earth.
I know, I know, some of you will push back and tell me,
’The amount of energy you need to separate the atoms of carbon and oxygen
is gigantic.
You cannot do it.′
Guess what?
We are working on it.
With several partners,
we are working on the chemical and physical materials
that will enable us to do that.
Unfortunately, here,
we are reaching also the limit of the conventional technology,
the conventional supercomputer,
and we need to rely on quantum algorithm and quantum learning machine
to be able to modelize those new molecules.
But it's a pretty promising solution.
And if it works,
it could be finally a solution
to address industrially, at scale, our 1,000-gigatonne issue.
A lot of companies have been interested
and investing much more into those solutions,
like Microsoft, for example,
who announced recently the creation of a one-billion-dollar fund
to support those carbon removal technology.
Our survival will go
through finding the right solution for carbon capture and sequestration.
And I know it’s hard for human beings
to react on something that will happen in 30 or 50 years from now,
but we need to step up.
We don’t have any other choice.
So, what we need to do?
We need to continue doing everything we are doing all together
to get to net zero.
we need to compensate all the human being activities
and get them to zero.
However, we need to raise our ambition.
We cannot target only that net zero.
We need to be able to target the excess of carbon dioxide,
which is already out there, the 1,000 gigatons.
We need to invest much more, attract and train talent.
We need many more people engaging into that global challenge.
We need also to align policies.
Today, they are incentivizing carbon emission reduction.
We need to put the same skin on carbon emission removal.
And last but not least, it will not be one solution,
as you could imagine.
It will be the sum of all of them leveraging our technology.
So the solution and trajectory are simple.
However,
the resource mobilization and the execution
in the coming years will be critical.
We have been already facing global challenges like that:
Covid last year, a global pandemic.
In less than 12 months,
we developed and started rolling out to many countries a new vaccine.
I remember, in 2002,
a guy named Elon Musk created SpaceX
with a dream of sending human beings on Mars.
And guess what?
He just confirmed by 2026, he will be able to do it,
24 years after setting up the ambition.
So why not, together, taking a bet today?
And taking the bet of launching the project
with the government and the private sector
to remove 1,000 gigatonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere by 2050?
Thank you.
(Applause)