How a Humble Rock Could Transform Industry

Julia (00:00.194)
We're talking concrete and cement today, which makes me pretty cool, I gotta say, because my almost three year old thinks that like concrete mixers are the jam. And we just saw a foundation poured this week and he was screaming, jumping up and down, got to put his hand in it. So I'm celebrity status over here talking concrete today. Rafae, you must feel this way every day.

Rafae (00:18.614)
I wish, but I I can relate to your three year old because my favorite thing when I was three was also the concrete mixer. So I get to do that as a job and that's pretty cool.

Julia (00:27.758)
Brandon, are you into building things? Are you a mighty, mighty construction site guy?

Brandon (00:31.17)
I'm into building like institutions like Amped and building our political power, which by the way, New York Climate Week is already coming and we're throwing a big event. If you wanna find out more about what Boundary Stone and Overture are doing, hit me up on LinkedIn. We'll be posting some updates there.

Julia (00:55.438)
Welcome back to Political Climate, brought to you with support from ClearPath, a leading conservative advocacy organization working to accelerate American innovation to reduce global energy emissions. I'm your host, Julia Pyper, and by day I'm Vice President of Public Affairs at the sustainability-focused fintech company GoodLeap. Today we're digging into a material you probably don't think much about, despite the fact that it's probably under your feet and perhaps all around you right now as we speak. Concrete is the most used man-made material on Earth.

And cement, its key ingredient, is responsible for roughly 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. If cement were a country, it would be the third largest emitter on the planet. We'll talk about why this is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize and unpack how one US-based startup, Brimstone, is rethinking the entire cement-making process, not just to cut emissions, but to shore up America's overall supply of critical materials. That's all coming up on Political Climate.

Julia (01:50.99)
As always, I'm joined by Brandon Hurlbut, who served as Chief of Staff in President Obama's energy department and went on to found Boundary Stone Partners and Overture VC. Brandon, how are things in LA? I'm out in Canada for the summer visiting family, so how are you holding it down in our home city?

Brandon (02:03.95)
Great. It's been warm. which it doesn't get that warm on the beach usually. Yeah, absolutely. So it's been nice. Feels like real summer.

Julia (02:10.962)
If you know LA, you know that the ocean side is always like a little bit cool, chilly. I mean we're blessed in that regard 'cause here I am sitting in humidity with no air conditioning in this century old home and I'm kinda like, I miss the ocean.

Brandon (02:23.246)
Speaking of concrete, you know, concrete jungle or dreams have made of, I was jealous of the New Yorkers having the Jay Z concert recently was awesome. Beyonce, Rihanna, they were all out there. It's great.

Julia (02:35.676)
man, I don't go to concerts anymore. I need to get a life back. it'll come, it'll come once the kids are like 18. Anyway, we're also joined today by a special guest host, Rafae Ghani, program manager of advanced, program manager for advanced manufacturing at ClearPath, where he leads policy development and advocacy for American innovation in low carbon construction materials, metals, and industrial heat.

Rafae recently authored the long form piece for American Affairs called Build Like Ike: How Surface Transportation Reauthorization Can Drive America's Next Materials Revolution. It breaks down what's at stake here and how federal legislation offers a real opportunity to spark a true revolution in materials. We'll drop a link in the show notes. Rafae, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Rafae (03:16.706)
Thanks very much for having me, longtime listener, first time co host. So it's awesome to be here.

Julia (03:21.794)
We love to hear it. And I think we're gonna learn a lot from you this episode. Admittedly, building materials and industrial processes aren't how I come at these issues, more from the power sector. So I'm really curious to hear about this.

Whole body of work in this space, which is so significant. When you hear the numbers of the impact here, it's pretty stunning just, you know, how important the climate impact would be. But not only that, there's cross sections with national security, geopolitics, obviously economic development. So maybe before we dive in with our guest from Brimstone, set the scene here for our listeners. Why should they care about concrete and cement and what we're about to talk about?

Rafae (03:55.246)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think as you mentioned, cement is responsible for eight percent of global CO two emissions. It would be the third largest source of emissions. And that's because it's a key ingredient in concrete, which is all around us and our roads and our bridges and homes. And concrete is the most used man-made material on the planet. And so it's that cement being a key part of this foundational material.

That makes it such a large source of emissions. And these emissions are only gonna grow because demand for cement is gonna skyrocket in places like India and Africa. They're gonna triple by 2050. I've heard a really crazy stat over the last few years, which is we're gonna build a New York City's worth of floor space every month for the next 30 years. So, unless there's policy intervention and innovation to reduce emissions, this will continue to be a climate challenge. And I think

In the states, there's an interesting supply chain security angle as well, because we import twenty about twenty two percent of of our cement. So I think it as you said brings in a lot of implications for national security and supply chain as well.

Julia (04:59.362)
So you just mentioned there, Rafae, that we need innovation or innovation can unlock these new opportunities. Just to frame this up a little bit more. I've heard that we haven't really innovated in this space since the Roman Empire, in effect. So talk a little bit about like existing solutions and what they're trying to do to not only decarbonize but evolve the technology and where we then can really pivot into these new opportunities that are emerging from startups and entrepreneurs, like we'll hear from in a minute.

Rafae (05:24.396)
Innovation in this sector has been slow. It's a very risk averse industry for obvious reasons. Portland Cement has been I think it's celebrated its two hundredth anniversary a couple of years ago.

Julia (05:35.182)
Portland cement's like the industry standard for that cement, which is the glue of concrete, right? As I understand it.

Rafae (05:40.992)
Exactly. It's the it's the industry standard. There hasn't been a new way to make Portland cement till I think twenty nineteen when Brimstone showed up on the scene. But a lot of the existing levers that we have to cut emissions, so replacing the amount of cement in the mix with other materials, changing the fuels and combustion, or doing energy efficiency, they get us to about thirty to forty percent emissions reductions.

by the the middle of the next decade. But to get to deep decarbonization, you have to think about pretty radical changes in process chemistry, in the use of carbon capture, if possible, in in the use of how you electrify different parts of the production process. And so

Getting these technologies actually to market in a risk averse industry with commodity margins, high merchant risk, a lot of capital intensity is a really, really hard challenge. And that's where innovation from the likes of companies like Brimstone is very exciting.

Julia (06:38.434)
Perfect segue into introducing our guest for this episode, Cody Finke. Cody is the co-founder and CEO of Brimstone, an innovative US company working on one of the most impactful decarbonization solutions for the industrial sector. Brimstone's breakthrough process delivers multiple industrial materials. This includes Portland Cement, the industry standard, and smelter-grade alumina, along with

other critical materials that the Department of Energy has said are priorities for the nation to shore up their supply chains. Brimstones technology has been recognized by the International Energy Agency and Global Cleantech One Hundred, as well as fast companies, most innovative companies in energy and sustainability. Cody, lots to unpack here in this episode. Really appreciate you coming on.

Cody (07:16.588)
No, thank you. Really appreciate the time.

Julia (07:18.552)
So we're setting the scene here. Before we dive a little bit deeper into your technology and how you're solving the challenge of eight percent of global emissions coming from concrete and cement, frame up in your in your mind, you know, why you decided to to tackle this problem. Why did you launch Brimstone? I I think of entrepreneurs that I know, it's it's a lifelong like mission here. You gotta take a lot of personal risk, take things out of the lab, into the commercial space. So what was really your driver for launching Brimstone?

Cody (07:43.182)
I like to talk about my motivation in in two parts. So before I worked on Brimstone, I worked in international development. I was getting a PhD and I was working on wastewater treatment for applications in low-income countries. Because I was really passionate about the idea of how can I work on something that impacts the people who are, you know, less fortunate than me or, you know, some of the most disadvantaged people in the world, right? Maybe the poorest people in the world. And also had this simultaneous interest of how can I do something that is good for the planet. And throughout the process of sort of working on in development, I kind of realized that.

The best thing in the world for the poorest people in the world is really, really fast economic growth, right? This is what literally everyone wants, right? I spent a ton of time in India during that time, and they want to be richer and everything that comes with that, right? Better healthcare, better access transportation, you know, all all these sorts of things that that we enjoy in high-income countries. And they also want, right, cleaner air, right? If if you ever spent any time in India or in many low-income countries, this is sort of a big issue. I said, okay, how can I work on something that is both an environmental issue?

And also could drive economic growth. I looked at a few industries and I had a couple metrics. The first was marginal impact. That is to say, what are industries that are really not being invested in? It was true then, and I actually just saw a study recently, and it's also true now that cement, steel, aluminum heavy industry gets the fewest dollars of investment per ton of CO2 emissions of anything in the world. Right. So that was really interesting. It was like, okay.

This is a place that I could be impactful. But the other part that was really interesting to me is that there are only a few things that actually could drive multiple percentage points of economic growth in countries. So if you want to if you want to think about capitalism as an anti-poverty machine and lifting people out of poverty, then what you really need to do when it comes down to it is add two percent economic growth to their economy or add three percent economic growth to their economy. And it turns out that there are only

Six things that as a single product are multiple percentage points of any country's GDP. And none of those six things are software, right? There's no country on earth where a single product like Instagram or Microsoft Word or you know whatever is multiple percentage points of a country's GDP. The only six things where single product is multiple percentage points of global GDP are coal, natural gas, electricity, oil, steel, cement. Those are the six. And if you think about statistics, right, you want to add multiple percentage points of economic growth, then

Cody (10:07.03)
You need innovation. And it's a lot statistically easier to think of one innovation happening than multiple innovations. And that's why when you look back in history, in almost all cases when we've seen industrial revolutions, is which is what we call periods of, you know, multiple percentage points, increase of economic growth, they're always related to one of those six products. It was simultaneously very, very exciting for me to think about working in cement because of the marginal impact it can have on CO2 emissions, but also working in cement and as it turns out, other heavy industrial materials based on the solution that we came up with.

Because I'm working in one of the only products that could have that step change in economic growth and really be, you know, a driver for lifting people out of poverty. It's very, very, very cool. And to add to that, in low income countries, the fraction of the economy that is due to cement and steel is even larger, right? They're dis disproportionately, right? Because they're sort of in a building phase, you can imagine, right? It's quite common for cement as a fraction of a low income country's economy to be five percent of GDP or even higher. So

Julia (11:05.442)
Stats I did not know. Amazing. Well, obviously there's implications here in the US too, in terms of build it here, develop it here, deploy it around the world. It's we can really own, I imagine, more and more of the supply chain by scaling up innovations like yours. So tell us about Brimstone. What can you say about the way that you are innovating in this centuries-old space where there hasn't been much evolution until apparently 2019 or sometime recently? Frame up how you're tackling this problem.

Cody (11:30.882)
So what Brimstone is really building is a refinery. And so we are taking the most abundant rock on the surface of the earth and we are mining it and turning everything that we mine into revenue. What that ultimately means is we'll make three key products cement, steel, and aluminum, but also ultimately dozens or even hundreds of products, which happy to get into later. And by introducing what we call co-production or a refinery model, you can share CapEx, share OpEx, use energy and mass more efficiently and become substantially lower cost.

The best way that I actually like to frame this up is take an analogy to the oil industry. In the early days of the oil industry, we are looking for a new source of something like kerosene for oil lamps. And we found rock oil and we figured out how to extract kerosene from rock oil.

Julia (12:14.594)
Because before it was from whales, right? Whaling got a little bit challenging, not the ideal solution. Yeah, limited resource.

Cody (12:16.62)
Right, yeah, exactly. Before it was from W whales.

Rafae (12:22.51)
Renewable resource.

Cody (12:25.1)
You know, a friend of mine, Rebecca Dell, has said to me that while the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stone, the whale oil age did end because we ran out of whales. We o overfished whales to the point where it was very challenging. Yes. Well this I this is one of the great things this is one of the greatest things that the oil industry has ever done, right? Which is the oil industry saved the whales, right? the

Julia (12:36.878)
Save the whales.

Julia (12:47.096)
Yeah.

Cody (12:48.846)
You don't and they deserve some credit for it. So it's in the early days of the oil industry, we would mine oil and you'd extract kerosene from it. Now kerosene or straight run kerosene is only about ten, maybe fifteen percent of a barrel of oil. So ninety percent or so of the barrel of oil you'd literally just throw into the river. You'd say, That's garbage, we can't use it.

Brandon (13:07.874)
That probably didn't help the the whales if they were throwing it the ocean, right?

Cody (13:11.266)
Well the ocean they were the most it was inland Pennsylvania where they were mining it. So they it i and oil's not doesn't flow very far, right? So improved no whales in the river. It didn't didn't help the trout. You know, so mix mixed track record on on on aquatic critters from from from the oil industry, to be sure. And today, of course, we don't do that, right? The oil industry

Julia (13:19.182)
Rivers.

Brandon (13:24.11)
That's correct.

Cody (13:38.282)
Make money off of everything that we mine. We make gasoline and diesel and jet fuel and pet coke and bunker fuel and benzene and plastics and vinyl chloride monomer and hundreds of products all come out of a barrel of oil. And that's because by sharing equipment and sharing energy, it's a lot more capital efficient to make all of those things from one barrel of oil than just kerosene and throw out 90% of what you mine. Today in the mining industry, we're sort of doing what the oil industry was doing back in the late 1800s. We mine rock.

And we only use a small fraction of it. So in cement, we mine two tons of rock and make one ton of product. In steel, we mine 30 tons of rock and make one ton of product. And in aluminum, we mine about 10 tons of rock and make one ton of product. For Brimstone, right, cement is especially interesting because cement, the 50% of the rock that we mine that we don't turn into product, is CO2. Because the rock that we choose to mine is limestone, and limestone is half calcium oxide by mass, which we use to produce cement, and half CO2 by mass.

Which we use to pollute our atmosphere. And what Brimstone said is hey, why waste money on mining CO two when we could mine something of value? It turns out that the most abundant rock on the surface of the earth is made up of the things that you need to make cement, steel, and aluminum. Let's make those things. And so instead of mining two tons of rock to make one ton of product or three tons of rock to make one ton of product, we are mining one ton of rock to make one ton of product. We're avoiding the CO two emissions that's in the rock. And by sharing capex and also sharing energy, being more energy efficient and more capital efficient, have a substantially better cost profile.

Julia (15:06.786)
What is that rock? I gotta know. What what is it?

Cody (15:09.838)
It's nothing really secret, right? These are calcium bearing silicates is what we like to call them. So so the one that probably most listeners have heard of is basalt, but there are are many, many other types of rocks. So gabbro, which is actually the same rock as basalt, it's just intrusive instead of extrusive, is another one, but there are dozens of rocks in this category.

Julia (15:29.642)
So I guess to tie it into the beginning, limestone was the original input here. The historic, you know, supply chain centered on that, but the byproduct is CO2. Hence why Rafae, you're talking about carbon capture sequestration is part of the solution to decarbonizing this sector with the traditional processes. So we sort of park that though, and you get into these other innovative chemistries and processes. And this is where you can have different inputs, but also get the benefits of other products. Is that right?

Rafae (15:55.694)
Yeah, absolutely. Carbon capture gets at that process chemistry problem, right? Which is sixty percent of the emissions from calcination. But carbon capture is a added cost, added capex, and persistently added opex to any operation. I think what Brimstone is trying to do is to derive economic value by changing the actual process, right? Through different value streams as well as a sharing capex and ops.

Cody (16:18.99)
That's exactly right. Instead of wasting energy mining CO2, something that you can sell instead, have an economic advantage. And what I like to like if you do carbon capture and sequestration, it's great, it solves the problem. The unfortunate thing is it adds cost. And I am yet to meet someone who wants to spend more to buy Portland cement. If any of you know anyone who does, please introduce them to me. I would love to talk to them.

Julia (16:38.094)
Commodity margins as we're learning. Well, just quickly, and I want to get Brandon's thoughts here as an investor in a lot of clean tech, but Cody, you guys really just came out of stealth mode on this co-production model. I think just at the end of 2025. So flash forward six or so months, you've really kind of gone public with this model. Just take another beat on the evolution here. So, you know, you filed patents at one point, you really targeted Cement from the outset, but now you've

Rafae (16:40.686)
Yeah.

Julia (17:03.96)
really just rolled out this broader strategy. So what does that mean for you as a company to think in this way? And what's what's sort of been the response?

Cody (17:10.862)
Yeah, it's a good question. Did you give a little bit of history, right? We also take what we call like a first principles approach. So our view is that commodities cost things because of how much mass and energy you consume. That's really different from, say, art, which is the value of art is somewhat unrelated to the cost of the raw materials. In commodities where everyone makes them the same way, they're always the same product, you know, very unlike art, you really can look at capex, mass.

Energy, labor, maintenance, right? Like those are the things that use cost. And all of those can be outcomes of the laws of physics. CapEx is geometric scaling relationships. If you use a catalyst, your capex scales proportional to the catalyst, so in two dimensions. Whereas if you don't use a catalyst, your capex scales proportional to the volume of the reactor, which is in three dimensions. So you have better scaling relationships when you don't use a catalyst, for example. And you can look at energy costs and mass cost, you know, you less use less mass, use less energy, use less expensive energy. All of these sorts of things are ways to get cheaper.

And all of these things have speed limits, right? Take mass and energy, right? The first law of thermodynamics tells us we can't make more than one ton of product from one ton of starting materials, right? That then we'd have to create mass in order to do so. We can't do better than one ton for one ton. The industry's doing far worse, so there's lots of room to improve there. Same with energy, right? The speed limit there is called enthalpy, also dictated by the first law of thermodynamics. You know, for any chemical reaction, there's a minimum amount of energy that that has to take.

For cement, you're actually very, very close to the minimum amount of energy that chemical reaction can consume. It's quite challenging to think of if you're just making cement to make actually a cheaper process to make cement. In the very earliest days, right back when I was in a PhD student in 2018, I said, Yeah, you can't really make cement cheaper by just making cement. You have to co-produce something. We know we need to make the exact same cement because we know that if you make a different cement, there's a risk premium and added cost and all these sorts of things. We know that cement is made out of calcium.

Where's all the calcium in the world? And it turns out it's in it's in three places. It's in limestone, it's to a small extent in gypsum, and then it's to in calcium-bearing silicates. And limestone doesn't work because it that's what we use today, that's with CO2. Gypsum doesn't work because it co-produces sulfuric acid, and the sulfuric acid market does not scale with the cement market. Although there are cement plants operating today that use gypsum and they do co-produce sulfuric acid. It's a good way to make cement. Then the third thing is calcium-bearing silicates. And

Cody (19:24.566)
That has the silicon and the iron that can be used to make the supplementary cementitious materials and the steel that do scale with cement. So from the beginning, we said, okay, we need to do co-production. That's how we're gonna be cheaper. We're gonna get a substantial mass and energy advantage and also capex advantage by doing that co-production. So we can be substantially higher profit. And then the question is, what do we do first? Right? There's a hundred products we can make. Which ones do we make first? And we looked at the economics and we realized that that.

Our world is very similar to oil refining. Oil refining has three what is typically known as liquid products, which every single refinery in the world makes. That's gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. If you don't make gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, your refinery is not economic, right? And then different refineries make different things on top of those. Some of them make benzene, some of them make cumene, some of them make vinyl chloride monomers, so you know, some make propylene, some of them make butane, but not all of them make all of these things.

And that's because the oils they're taking in are different. They've created some geographic strategy to ship raw materials to different refineries so they can get scale with the smaller things. There's lots of reasons. But every single refinery, in order to be economic, needs to make the three liquid products. Well, Brimstone is the same. Brimstone has two quote unquote liquid products, right? Ordinary Portland cement and supplementary cementitious materials. Every refinery in the world needed to make those. We didn't think it was advantageous to our strategy to go public with our big refinery story back in 2019.

So we said, great, we're co-producing Portland cement and supplementary cementitious materials, right? That's what we became public about in 2019. We knew from the beginning that we wanted access to large buckets of capital. And in order to get access to large buckets of capital, you need to have a low risk profile. The way you have a low risk profile is you use equipment that is fully off the shelf, right? Very small technical risk associated with your process. And there is an additional product that we could actually make doing that, which is smelter-grade alumina.

So we also knew from the beginning that our first plant was actually going to make Portland cement supplementary cementitious material in smelter-grade alumina. We became public about that once it sort of became impossible not to. And we said, hey, look, we also make smelter-grade alumina. And smelter-grade alumina has a lot of advantages, right? It's a critical material that has long-term off-take agreements associated with it, which cement does not. So you can get financing and that sort of thing. Eventually, as the shine of quote unquote climate tech was wearing off in the market and the shine of critical materials was

Cody (21:44.202)
Shrine being put on, we said it is now advantageous for us to come out of stealth on this refinery. So in addition to the critical material smelter-grade alumina, in Brimstone's development pathway, there's actually seven critical materials that we'll be able to make, and then also materials of special interest like steel. People were sort of surprised, which I always like to which I always sort of revel in, right? If they had read our patents, they wouldn't have been surprised. So the stealth worked. We're getting a lot of reactions like, wow.

That makes sense how you're economic now. It never quite made sense to us how you're gonna mine a rock with less calcium in it and be economic, make Portland cement. I get it now. It's like, great.

Brandon (22:15.982)
I just have to say, thank God Rafae is on this show and not Neil, because Neil would have only understood 25% of what you said. I think I got most of it, but let me ask a few clarifying questions. So on just the Portland cement product, you're selling that at the same cost as a traditional Portland cement maker. Is that right? Okay. And then how are you financing all of this? Is there project finance for the refinery? Your revenue model is just a sell.

Cody (22:35.886)
Right.

Brandon (22:45.73)
These commodities. Walk me through a little bit of that.

Cody (22:48.386)
Our refinery will be the most profitable plant that makes any of these products ever to be built. Because of the co-production, and fundamentally from first principles, it's because for let's let's talk about just our first plant to start with, right? It makes ordinary Portland cement, supplementary cementitious material, and smelter-grade alumina. We mine one seventh the amount of rock per ton of product we produce. No matter what you do, right? If you have to process more rock, mine more rock, it's all more expensive.

Brandon (22:52.674)
Why is that?

Brandon (23:13.654)
Is your competition domestic, or is it like China?

Cody (23:17.014)
Depends on the product, right? So for smelter-grade alumina, the competition is basically exclusively China and other countries, right? And that's why that's a critical material.

Brandon (23:25.004)
And you're saying you can make it for the same price or cheaper?

Cody (23:27.502)
So we have a tier one engineering firm that has taken our plant data and modeled a full-scale plant. According to their estimate, we are literally the cheapest process. We will be the cheapest process in the world to produce smelter-grade alumina. Okay. At one third the median price. So selling at market rate will be by far the most profitable smelter-grade alumina facility ever built. If China were to try to subsidize out of the market, it would first have to put literally

Everyone else in the world out of business, which they haven't done so far. What we like to say is the United States has some of the least cost production processes in terms of oil and oil refining in the world. And that's why that heavy industrial process has staying power. That's why it has not been able to be put out of business by China. And if you make other processes that make other commodities that have that same cost advantage, then you can have the exact same

Brandon (24:14.076)
So is your IP in the process?

Cody (24:15.992)
That's correct. Or IP both pairing the rock that we use to the products we can make, but also the process.

Brandon (24:21.376)
Okay. And then how do you finance and these refineries are capital intensive? How are you gonna finance those?

Cody (24:26.176)
The full scale commercial refinery, we expect to be financed with a combination of equity and project finance. Okay. Based on our risk profile, we expect to get about 50% project finance, 50% equity. That equity of course will come from a combination of private investors or either through an IPO or through a private round.

Brandon (24:42.338)
And you had a grant from the DOE, right? A hundred and eighty nine million dollar grant that was supposed to help with this. What happened there? They clawed it back and but you were able to move on. I'm I'm curious about that as well.

Cody (24:51.394)
That's right. So so we had a hundred nine million dollar federal cost share award around building these facilities. And then that was clawed back pending review. And I just should say that you know, we've had a number of productive conversations with the current administration, and we're fairly optimistic about the trajectory.

Brandon (25:08.771)
So you weren't cancelled, you're just in purgatory and now you're trying to get out. That's right. Okay.

Julia (25:12.628)
Which when we had Alec Fitzsimmons at the DOE on the podcast, he sort of explained the thinking there as a new administration comes in, they want to pause, they want to vet, they want to review, and they're now kind of going through and reevaluating. So it sounds like this might be in that bucket.

Cody (25:26.19)
Yeah. That's right. And as you know, the administration is quite focused on critical materials. Literally half of our first plant's revenue is from a critical material. There's quite a bit of alignment with both the carbon and critical material.

Rafae (25:36.462)
And there's a security premium context there as well. So we are we import more than 75% of our alumina, and we import roughly the same, if not more, of the bauxite, which is the rock that gets turned into alumina, which then gets turned into aluminum. There is a single point of failure in the United States right now. There's only one alumina refinery in Louisiana. And so with the rock refinery here, you have the potential to derive alumina from domestically available rock for your aluminum industry.

And so there's that security premium as well above the competing on commodity economics as

Cody (26:11.138)
That's exactly right. And and in fact, the United States doesn't actually have the rock exact that is is needed to make smelter-grade alumina, which is why it's a critical material, right? And most of the items on the critical materials list are just a list of things that the United States wasn't lucky with geology.

Julia (26:24.898)
Which the DOE recently you know re upped and shared as a priority for this administration to address, which was interesting to see. As a long list

Cody (26:31.694)
It is, yeah. And and smelter-grade alumina, of course, is the most economically important one except for coal, which was recently added. And smelter-grade alumina, like Rafae said, we have one refinery that makes it in the United States. It's in Louisiana. That refinery imports bauxite primarily from Jamaica, right? And and then we wholly depend on imports for that entire industry. Brimstone

recently became the first and only company ever to make modern on spec smelter-grade alumina from a rock core in the United States, opening up the most economic pathway in the world and also the only pathway in the world for mine to metal aluminum production in the United States.

Julia (27:04.418)
Brandon, I'm curious to get your thoughts as an investor when you hear about not just Brimstone. I know you've worked and looked at other companies in the industrial decarb space. Like, what are the questions that you ask or what excites you about this space? I'm just curious how you think about it as an investor. Because Cody mentioned earlier that the investment dollars don't match the impact potential in this space. So I'm wondering if we're just catching up or are there like inherent challenges you see from an investor perspective? What are your thoughts?

Brandon (27:30.208)
We think a lot about the total addressable market. So what Cody's doing, there's a massive TAM, is you know how we we think about it. So that's an exciting, you know, space to be in. There's not a lot of appetite right now for the green premium. So the fact that Cody can compete on cost is very important.

We also think about as a early stage venture capital investor, like the capital intensity. So that's why I was very curious about how Cody's thinking about financing these projects because it's highly capital intensive. And that's where early venture money can get crammed down and it's hard to, you know, make money on that. So really like how he's approaching this. I'm really curious your story with the DOE, because this also is from an investment perspective, this is what we've been talking about with things like AMPT on the show. And when we had a senator on talking about permitting.

This like build it then kill it is a problem for Cody and also very hard to like underwrite as an investor. Like a hundred and eighty-nine million dollar grant, that's really meaningful, right? And so the fact that like Cody's in limbo, and I'm curious, Cody, how you're thinking about the story, because the story of like, can you build this without the hundred and eighty-nine million dollars? That would be very attractive to investors. They'd be like, you could stand alone, you know? And in that case, maybe it makes you more attractive to the DOE because you can stand on your own. But then they're like,

Well, maybe you don't need our money, but then if you do need the money, there is sort of this green premium and subsidy associated with it. So that's sort of complicated. I'm curious how you walk that fine line.

Cody (28:53.35)
Yeah. So so Brimstone is all a great question and really great points. And it's sort of exactly how we think about these things too. Our view is that if you'd require subsidy in order to scale, it's not going to be relevant. Right. And you can think of that both from impact perspective or from an economic perspective. If you want to solve CO2 emissions, if you want to solve critical materials, if you want to access a hundred percent of that TAM,

Then you need to be lower cost. Because no one wants to spend more, or maybe a few people want to spend more on commodities, but in general, no one cares about climate or CO2 or American made or anything. They just care about the price tag. So if we can be more profitable selling at a lower cost, then we can capture the entire TAM. And if we can't, then we can't. And if we can capture the entire TAM, then we can get venture returns for folks like y'all. Because

The size of the market is big enough to justify the capital intensity. And if we can't capture the entire TAM, then we can't. So it is an imperative, it has been from the beginning, that we need to be able to capture the entire TAM, which is why being a third of the production cost of the median and the lowest cost in the world of the median smelter grade aluminum facility is exactly what we're looking for. But how do we think about capital irrigation, right? Because even still, right, it's still capital intensive. So we've been very, very deliberate about this, you know, from the beginning, right? We said, okay, there's a thousand different products we can make, but we know.

That investors for a first of kind facility where you don't have collateral of any kind, you need to have a risk profile that meets investors where they are. We start by hiring folks that had done this before, right? That's a strategy with a primstone. We always want to hire people who have done a harder thing before. Our VP of engineering has built billion dollar facilities, he's scaled novel technology to commercialization, he's done diligence for project finance deals in the mining and material space. He's very geared towards that.

Our CFO has raised about $15 billion of capital across his career, everything from taking oil refineries public to raising $800 million in the startup world. And he's been doing project finance deals since the mid 90s. He's done about a half dozen of them in his career. What we look at, right, there's sort of three risks, right? There's offtake risk, technology risk, and then there is execution risk. All of those need to be addressed.

Brandon (30:53.838)
I would also argue there's policy risk and I wanna get to that as well.

Cody (30:57.866)
We didn't get to that yet. That's kind of an orthogonal one. So starting with technology risk. Technology risk must be low, right? So we have been deliberate to choose the products that we're using for our first refinery to be able to figure out a process that can use unit operations that we can literally point to an operating plant doing the same chemistry in that unit operation somewhere in the world today at the scale that we need to build it at. So basically we can say, wait.

Project finance diligents person. We see that working at scale, doing the same chemistry right there. Where's the risk? You got a proven record of being able to get project finance like that level of tech risk. The second thing on revenue risk, being very deliberate in choosing products where we know what the price is, we're making them fully on spec, so it's a commodity market. We know that we can sell them, and also making sure that we can get appropriate debt service coverage ratio for an entire plant with a product you can actually get long term offtake agreements for.

As some folks who follow this stuff it may have seen the news a couple months ago we announced that that Century Aluminum signed a MOU, which is basically a term sheet for offtake for a substantial fraction of our facility. It's a big deal. And that's sort of the first step towards binding offtake, right? And that's why we do that. That doesn't exist in cement, that doesn't exist in alumina. We can get the debt service coverage ratios that we need from the alumina side. The final piece is execution risk. There's companies out there, you know.

New energy risk is one, meet a gree is another, OakRey is another, that that sort of will wrap these technology projects based on technology risk, like I'm talking about, where we can use fully scaled unit operations. So Brimstone has been very, very intentional in designing our process from the beginning in order to be able to access those large pots of capital. So it's a smaller lift for venture capitalists to be able to invest in and scale the process. And none of that needs debt, right? We are, like I mentioned, again, take smelter-grade alumina, the critical material, that by itself.

About a sixty billion dollar market, if we're producing the material for a third of the median cost, our returns are incredible, right? And that is a you know fundamentally investable thesis that does not require any government intervention. Now we're not dumb. We're gonna take government money if it's available to us, that'll you know, just make the returns for venture capitalists and for for ourselves sweeter, but you know, only when it's aligned.

Julia (33:05.026)
potentially scale faster, right? Because we have this speed game we talk about, I have to imagine. I mean, maybe I'm projecting here, but we talk a lot on this podcast about American competitiveness and the race against China and build it here, deploy it abroad. We want to like use our innovation and our entrepreneurs, folks like you, who have invented these things and actually benefit for years to come. We exported so much of our IP in many ways to China on manufacturing. This is one of the areas I think on a bipartisan basis.

Bring things back home, right? I think that's again a universal thing that the Biden administration led on and now Trump.

Brandon (33:39.392)
It's such a good point because my understanding, Cody, is that China is trying to do in your space what they did with solar and batteries and wind and EVEs and drones, which is like they see where this is going and they're building these industrial parks where they're moving all the supply chain around each other and putting money into this to dominate this market. Is that what you're seeing? And how do you compete with that?

Cody (34:03.99)
Yeah, so when I think about China, I like to look at the success stories. What are the things that have not been able to move to China and why? Take three examples. Oil refining has not been able to move to China, cement production has by and large not been able to move to China. And recycled steel, not primary produced steel, recycled steel has not been able to move to China. And the question is why? When you look at the cost of production, the cost of producing those things domestically is far cheaper than producing in China. And we'll talk about why that is in a second. And

The added premium of shipping those materials across the ocean into the United States makes it never economic for those products. Now, for EVs and for batteries and all these sorts of things, that's not actually true. So right now, those are exposed to Chinese production. Can we make it so that production of smelter-grade alumina looks a lot more like oil and recycled steel and cement and a lot less like EVs?

How do you do that? And the answer is simple. It's it's fairly simple math and simple economics. Now the execution is the complicated part. It is how can you make the price point such that it does not make economic sense to ship it across an ocean? How can you make it so that the cost advantage, if there is a cost advantage of producing in China, is less than the penalty for shipping across the ocean and therefore it's just permanently a money loser.

Rafae (35:18.402)
Just want to add here, shout out, a great piece from Breakthrough Energy on critical minerals, tying it back to why we should care about cement, which is when you try to find new ways of making an industrial commodity like cement, you're

Often finding a new way to produce several strategic commodities, right? Like Brimstone has done. And so you're driving improvements in unit cost, in yield, and productivity. And you're also driving this security of the supply chain. And we're gonna have to rely on these kind of step change improvements in productivity, unit cost, capital intensity to be able to compete against the industrial juggernaut that's on the other side, where you have state back financing, state back energy rebates. You're not gonna be able to subsidize your way out of.

that but you can be able to innovate your way out of it.

Cody (36:03.758)
Hundred percent.

Julia (36:04.482)
To put a finer point on it, is the US uniquely positioned to lead in this area? And Rafae, let's stick with you for a minute. We've talked about some of the ways that policy can be harnessed here. Again, it doesn't have to be from the sounds of it. Of course, the private sector can do what the private sector does, but we know there's valleys of death in getting to scale. We know that Cody, you guys are trying to get to commercial scale by 2030, I think is when you slated for your plant to be operational. There's a lot that has to happen there in the execution frontier point. And this is where

In my experience being a reporter now working in the industry, policy can be a catalyst. Policy can also bring up the next level of innovation and entrepreneurs in the sector, and we improve and improve and improve. But Rafae, sounds like we've got some of the talent here. How else can the United States be the leader then? Sounds like maybe we've got some some historical industries we can draw learnings from, but how do we then map that onto this new sector we're talking

Rafae (36:54.88)
Yeah, so I think we have a couple of strengths that we can rely on, right? Beyond the talent pool and the historical kind of standouts in heavy industrial manufacturing. The first is to keep investing in our innovation ecosystem. And that's why we're leading in the new technologies and novel processes, right? In terms of co-production, we have Brimstone, alter alternative feedstocks and chemistries, we have Sublime Systems, CO2 innovation, you have Fortera.

Things like thermal storage to deal with combustion emissions. You have companies like Rondo and Antora. They've all come out of the innovation ecosystem. I believe Brimstone, Sublime, and Antora all received ARPA-E funding and then subsequent DOE funding. So continue to invest in that pipeline of innovation is a key strength of ours and we're gonna need to keep doing that.

The second is tap into some of the kind of leading industries that are already getting behind this. So the hyperscalers, in some shape and form, are also trying to boost commercialization and bring these technologies to market faster, right? So I believe Microsoft and Amazon have committed to off-take agreements with different technologies. Meta is also involved in like collective procurement as part of, I think the Rocky Mountain Institute has a collective procurement platform called Scoba. Meta's also released like an AI model to look at.

Producing new low emissions, concrete mixes. So that's another strength that we can draw on. I also think the existing industry, you know, incumbents like Amrize and Cemex, they're also trying to invest in innovation and partner with new technologies. And they continue to look at innovation not just for sustainability, but as a way to cut costs and actually secure supply chains and drive differentiation in their products to the extent that they can. I also think from the carbon management perspective, we still have a lot of CO2 storage. We have Class VI primacy.

In in six states, so you have that regulatory streamlining and you have forty five Q as an incentive. So you have that foundation there as well.

Rafae (38:48.364)
What we still need from an innovation perspective is regulatory reform in terms of specifications and in terms of permitting so we can build faster and more certainty. And I think in terms of de-risking, right? So even a company like Brimstone, where they're producing on spec materials, they're using off-the-shelf equipment, investors are still wary of doing something, you know, investing something that's never been done before. So this is where that public backstop in de-risking these first of a kind manufacturing projects is absolutely essential, right? And and bring

Bringing that muscle back in is a way to actually allow the US to be competitive.

Brandon (39:22.862)
Those are some really good points. Cody, we have a lot of founders that listen to political climate. How do you think about as a founder for what a series B company, where are you at right now? Exactly.

Cody (39:33.698)
We race our series A, we're working on series B. How

Brandon (39:36.344)
How do you think about policy in the government? Like how do you structure your team? How do you engage? How do you use your time on it? How do you think about trade associations, lobbying? How do you approach this as a Series B founder?

Cody (39:49.73)
There is no one size fits all. But the way I look at it is it's all upside, right? It's all opportunity. And the magnitude of how much time you should spend on it, I think depends on your industry. For us, right, half of our plant's revenue comes from cement products. The government purchases about half of all cement products. Just that magnitude alone tells us that we should probably spend some serious time.

working with the government. The other half of our revenue of the plant comes from smelter-grade alumina, which is a critical material. That tells us absolutely we should be spending a lot of time. So one of the first hires we made after our Series A was a VP of policy for that reason. Because we have structural building materials, we want to make sure that our materials understood as the exact same products as conventional. We also want to see, like Rafae was talking about, would it be possible to get offtake agreements from our cement products from the government?

Would it be possible to get federal support? Like you mentioned, we started with an ARPA-E grant for the first Trump administration, as well as money from the Department of Energy's advanced manufacturing office. And then from there we've gone on to get some NSF money and some more DOE money. Because there's these materials of special interest, these critical materials or the CO two benefit, there's substantial opportunity to come from the government. And I think that's appropriate, right? I like again, when you look at at the the things that literally underpin our economy.

You know, steel aluminum, for example, those are such a large fraction of the United States GDP. And China has quartered those markets so completely with sixty or so, sixty to seventy percent of the world's production in that country. If they were to shut off exports, then the price could easily quadruple. And we know that because we saw the price of aluminum

doubl just from ten percent of exports being shut off in the Strait of Hormuz, right? So if seventy percent of the world's product got shut off, we could easily see a quadrupling of prices. If that were to happen, that would be a two percent hit on the United States economy. Another way to say that is that would halt economic growth in the United States. It's an enormous risk.

Cody (41:32.984)
So the United States like literally can't afford to not have an industrial policy. United States needs to make sure that our base manufacturing of these base materials, cement, seal, aluminum, are the cheapest in the world, and that we are not, therefore, subject to sort of the whims of adver adversarial nations. One of the best ways to do that is permitting reform. No strings attached, financing support, right? So don't hamstring these companies in any way. Give us money to scale faster, right? That's what's in the national interest. And offtake agreements in order to support and speed up.

private capital that can be hesitant to invest in new technologies, especially since the States doesn't have a a strong track record of investing in industry. So there are not a lot of folks out there with expertise in investing in industry and therefore it can be a y can be slower.

Rafae (42:13.134)
I'm glad you talked about steel and aluminum import. I just want to highlight that cement kind of gets overlooked, but our import reliance has tripled in the last ten years. Used to be seven percent, it's now twenty-two percent, and it's only gonna grow as we build out more infrastructure, more data centers. And part of the reason it's grown is because one of the supplementary cementitious materials that we've used.

For a long time comes from coal fly ash. That's dwindling as coal plants have just through sheer economics gone out of business. Blast furnace slag is another SCM. Those supplies are declining as we use less blast furnace steel. And so that's another reason you need innovation, not just for economics, but to actually use domestic feedstocks. So you have to import less cement. And that's, I think, a story that people don't often think about. I think they're familiar with steel and aluminum, but not so much with cement.

Cody (43:01.71)
That's right. Yeah. It's staggering to look at a hundred percent imports of alumina, but it is a very concerning trend to move from seven percent to twenty two percent import reliance on cement. And part of that is the purpose story. You know, we have plenty of domestic resources to produce cement, but if we continue down a pathway of allowing the NIMBY folks or whoever to

prevent building, then it's going to be very challenging to put new products. Brimstone has also thought hard about how to avoid this though. One of the things that is important for Brimstone is that we use the most abundant rock of the surface of the earth. In our site selection, we prioritize locations that have relatively easy permitting regimes. This can be attacked through policy, it can also be attacked through technology and you really need both.

Julia (43:37.324)
So to close out here, Rafae, I want to go to you on talking about what we think policymakers could do in this space. I know there's already action on Congress. We've got bicameral, bipartisan momentum here. The Senate has the Concrete and Asphalt Innovation Act, and then there are companion bills in the House. I understand these bills focus heavily on tools like innovative procurement mechanisms, and that hits at something Cody touched on as a pain point and trying to get deals flowing there. And then there's also the shift toward performance-based.

specifications. This would be over the prescriptive style rules that departments of transportation use today. Unpack what exactly that means and how Congress could act here to get at some of those pain points.

Rafae (44:15.782)
You know, we have the reauthorization of surface transportation, also known as the highway bill. Unclear whether that's gonna happen this Congress, but even if it happens next Congress, that's a massive opportunity to drive innovation and actually address some of the things we've been talking about today. These bills they seem to essentially target both the innovation lifecycle as well as some of the deployment barriers that Cody has mentioned to make it more investable for folks like Brandon as well as later project finance. And so the Senate bill.

Which is mirrored by two bills in the House, that kind of has the full suite of policies. There's a concerted, I think, innovation angle there where it creates a dedicated RDD program for innovative cement, concrete, and asphalt. That's just to keep that innovation pipeline going and produce breakthroughs, not just in emissions, but also performance, durability, and the use of local feedstock. There's a five year strategic plan just to make sure that we're actually hitting cost and performance targets. And then there's a creating of a public private test.

Through a manufacturing USA Institute, which has been used in a lot of other industrial and manufacturing sectors to get academia and the private sector use to new technologies. Where I think it focuses on deployment and this gets to making it more investable, are the performance standards and then the advanced market commitment. And I'll kind of tackle them one by one.

The bills have a provision to help state DOTs shift to performance standards in a completely voluntary way by giving them the resources, the funding to actually do this. But why is this important? So, as Cody mentioned, state DOTs usually buy 50% of all cement by extension, concrete, and asphalt, right? So they're the biggest buyers in the market. They're also massive technical validators. They have the hardest specifications. So if they accept your material, that's a signal to the private market that your material is good to use. However, and ClearPath did

A study on this a few years ago. We looked at, you know, every state's specification manual, its riveting reading, it's fifteen hundred pages of technical requirements.

Julia (46:12.438)
Your summer holiday, just dig into that on the beach. Yep.

Rafae (46:15.674)
Yeah, just easy reading.

Overwhelmingly, state DOTs use prescriptive specifications, which are basically just chemistry-based recipes, saying you must use this material with this much cement or this much ratio of water to cementitious material. And even if your material performs just as well, meets all the engineering requirements, you're not able to be used by the state and you're starved of that revenue because you don't meet that chemical recipe. And so this blocks market access for innovative materials. Shifting to performance-based specifications is just simply saying,

I don't care what you put in your cake mix. I don't care what you put in that material. I just want you to meet specific engineering requirements. And this gives the private sector, including incumbents, is this gives new companies the ability to just meet engineering standards and sell into the most important market. If you look at the industry, it's hard for state DOTs to do this overnight. So what I think the bill is trying to get at is to give them the resources to actually make this shift. And then finally, the bill has a government mechanism through an advanced market commitment.

And it authorizes state DOTs to use an existing highway program and that pool of money called the Block Grant Program to use that part of money to provide advanced market commitments. These are financial instruments that have been used previously to bring new technologies to market. It effectively provides bankable offtake from a credible counterparty like a state.

that a company that receives that commitment can take to the capital markets and say, Hey, can you finance me against this offtake? And that's again going back to making these new technologies and their first of a kind manufacturing more investable and de-risking that risk profile.

Cody (47:50.574)
I do feel compelled to add that while we're supportive of performance-based standards being changed, Brimstone is totally compatible with prescriptive standards. The chemistry is exactly the same. We're chemically and physically identical to conventionally produced cement. One of our advantages is we do not need this or any regulatory thing to be changed in order for Brimstone to access the market. And that's been key to our strategy from the beginning, so that we can get offtakes, so that we can, you know, move quickly.

Julia (48:13.934)
So close us out here, Cody. What does the next three to five years look like for you? Where are you gonna be spending your time? I can imagine there's a lot to do. That sounds really exciting. I know you're trying to get to that commercial scale plant we talked about by 2030. So frame up here what we should be on the lookout for from Brimstone.

Brandon (48:30.252)
And I'd be curious just to build on that question, Cody, if you can weave in how do you use AI in your company? Does that help you accelerate anything you're doing?

Cody (48:37.666)
We're actually an AI company now.

Julia (48:45.198)
Yeah, company now, that's the best one. I'm gonna use that at all.

Cody (48:50.902)
That's right.

Julia (48:52.766)
AI now. I don't even do this podcast anymore. It's just my AI.

Cody (48:55.726)
Here. I don't even know where I am. One of the things that I always like to point out is the entire software industry, the hundreds of thousands of products that make up the entire world software industry, add up to $800 billion. Concrete, 1.4 trillion. Steel, 1.8 trillion, right? One product, right? Larger than the entire world software industry. That aside, we are glad that we're not a software company. While Venture Capital strong hasn't figured out to make money off of software, the most money has always been made off of hardware.

And you can see that with Tesla, you can see that with SpaceX, you can see that with Exxon or standard oil from the early days, right? That that's always been the case. And it's always worked when there's a fundamental economic advantage. That's what Brimstone has. what you should look for the next three or five years is scale, right? Brimstone has a de-risk process and we're scaling it up. There'll be capital raises, there'll be off day agreements, there'll be ribbon cuttings on plant operating. So you will see scale. The next thing, how we use AI in our business, right? So this is a little bit of a nascent space. Brimstone actually, since 2020.

Has been building digital twins. For those who don't know, right? That's a basically a software model of a physical plant. And Brimstone takes the takes a strategy where we build a digital twin before we actually build the full scale plant. Then we train that digital twin off of the data from the previous scale. So we trained our pilot digital twin off of lab scale data. And then we will train our demonstration digital twin off of full scale data. We say

Training, right? For the pilot, AI didn't exist yet. So that was a statistical training. We could not yet get to the level of statistics that AI is. Now that we have AI, we are looking into figuring out how to predict startup based on training with pilot data. The advantage that Brimstone also has is because we use TRL 9 unit operations where the chemistry has scaled up to the full scale, we have the opportunity to train our AI off of the combination of pilot data and full-scale engineered.

Data from third parties. So we see that there could be an opportunity to reduce startup time based on that from maybe a year to let's say three months. There's some early studies that indicate that this type of thing is possible. The next thing, which is even more speculative, but we're also very, very excited about, is compressing engineering time. If indeed that digital twin can be as accurate as we think it can be.

Cody (51:05.282)
then we can actually do our engineering or our full scale plant without actually building the demonstration plant. Now we still have to build this commercial demonstration plant because project financers, you they're not gonna trust AI yet. They need it, but we can pull an engineering study forward. And that could lead to maybe another year of acceleration.

So there's enormous opportunity. And I think it's unique to companies like Brimstone that can pull on a much larger training data set, right? Because we not only have pilot data, which probably isn't enough data to train in AI by itself, but you have the whole world of operating plants from third parties because you use TL9 unit operations. There probably is enough training data. So we're pretty excited what AI can bring. And you know, that's another thing to look for updates on in the next three or five years.

Brandon (51:45.004)
That's so cool.

Julia (51:46.668)
Brandon, did you know he was gonna have such a holistic answer? That's that was that was impressive. No.

Brandon (51:51.896)
I think, you know, we talk a lot on this show about the you know, sort of populist rage against data centers and the energy needs of data centers and and I think it's the other side of the story of like the benefits of AI aren't really getting out there yet. And so how it impacts a company like Cody's, you know, where like we might be able to get to a carbon free, cheap cement faster because of this is pretty cool. Yeah.

Julia (52:18.402)
That's such a good point. I mean, I was looking at some of the, you know, hyperscalers sustainability reports and they're trying to be honest about, you know, the energy needs that this sector has and that's net new demand. And for sure we have to find a way to power it.

as cleanly as possible. But don't forget the other side of the equation to your point that all the efficiencies that that AI technology is unlocking. Someone will eventually do a life cycle study of all the CO2 and what it looks like as we scale these AI solutions. But it's definitely a ripe area for innovation. And Cody, speaking of innovation, kudos to you guys. I'm convinced I'm looking at your open roles right now. Looks like you're hiring. I'm sure folks would want to get on board with everything you're doing. It sounds like a really exciting time for you guys. So appreciate you taking some time to talk to us.

Cody (53:01.846)
Thank you, Julia. Appreciate it.

Julia (53:03.512)
Rafae, we'll give you the closing word here. Thank you so much for coming on. Now that you've been part of political climate, is this like a don't meet your heroes thing? Like do we just destroy all your concept of us?

Rafae (53:13.848)
Absolutely not. It reinforces the value of shows in spaces like this where people can come together, discuss amazing innovations like the stuff that Cody's working on and understand how policy can drive it forward.

This is a cool moment for me. I used to listen to Political Climate during the pandemic as I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and break into climate. And so it's a very cool, full circle moment to actually be on the show, co-host it with two amazing hosts and and Cody as well, who was a friend and who's been a driving truly not just innovation in how we make cement, but how we're gonna create the future of our industrial system. So really awesome to be here.

Brandon (53:51.68)
Rafael, maybe I can take it down a notch and destroy your your your your your confidence in the co-host. When Cody talked about basalt, is that the rock, Cody? I wanted to ask, you know, is that what the Mandalorian use for like their armor? And then I thought Neil and I, if Neil was here, we would have gone down like a Mandalorian of Star Wars, you know. you know, keep it out.

Cody (54:03.414)
That's example, that's a great one.

Brandon (54:21.39)
Okay, is it true? Is that basalt? Is that what he uses for the armor?

Rafae (54:24.782)
I haven't seen it so I would have been even more useless. So nobody's building your company.

Brandon (54:30.246)
Maybe Cody is making cheaper armor for the Mandalorian, we don't even know.

Cody (54:35.182)
The entire West Coast United States.

Julia (54:36.95)
made a position all the additional value stream he's getting out. With that, we will leave it there. That is our episode. As always, please make sure to like, follow, and subscribe to Political Climate on your favorite podcast app and social media platforms. It's the best way to stay on top of everything that we're up to. Also head on over to political climatepodcast.com. You can catch all of our latest episodes and updates there. We also recently relaunched our newsletter. Share your email with us. We'll share additional highlights and insights. So look out for another one hitting your inbox soon.

Of course you can subscribe to Political Climate on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Beyond, or on X @Poli_Climate and LinkedIn at political climate. I am Julia Pyper, your host, Bruno Falcon is our producer. Thank you, Bruno, and thanks everyone so much for listening.