https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-09/inside-america-s-race-to-scale-carbon-capture-technology?cmpid=BBD040921_GREENDAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=210409&utm_campaign=greendaily
In 2010, as an economics professor at Columbia, Chichilnisky co-founded Global Thermostat with physicist Peter Eisenberger. The core idea was as simple as the startup’s name: If you can control the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, you can manage the Earth’s temperature. During a series of interviews with Bloomberg Green beginning in early 2020, Chichilnisky repeatedly stressed that the company would soon be able to make a material impact. In a statement published on Global Thermostat’s website last year, she said, “I am very close to reversing climate change.”
Propelled by Chichilnisky’s vision, Eisenberger’s science, and some very wealthy benefactors, Global Thermostat says it’s raised about $70 million from investors, and it’s announced commercial partnerships with Fortune 500 companies. Most of these deals involve supplying captured CO₂ to businesses that can use it, including Air Liquide SA (which sells industrial gases) and Coca-Cola Co. (which needs to carbonate sodas). The partner that’s done perhaps the most to raise Global Thermostat’s profile is Exxon Mobil Corp., which said a year ago it was expanding an initial agreement to help scale up the carbon-capture company’s technology. Chichilnisky says the oil giant supplied Global Thermostat with $15 million in 2020.
Exxon wouldn’t confirm that figure but pointed to Global Thermostat as a prime example of its commitment to mitigating the environmental consequences of drilling and refining. “We like what we see in the Global Thermostat approach, from materials to engineering,” Exxon said in a statement. The company has pledged to invest $3 billion in various carbon-capture technologies, and Chichilnisky’s startup has featured prominently in its commercials on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
But Global Thermostat’s achievements haven’t matched its promise. For one thing, the prototype in Huntsville never reached 4,000 tons of captured CO₂ and isn’t even running today....That contractor has since sued Global Thermostat for about $600,000 in unpaid bills, damages, and interest. Another prototype plant being built in Tulsa is at least a year behind schedule, according to Ron Key, the chief technology officer of GasTech Engineering LLC, the firm contracted to build it.
Interviews with a dozen current and former Global Thermostat employees, as well as investors and other business partners, make clear that the company hasn’t met its goals—and its problems didn’t start in Tulsa or Huntsville. Most of these people spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, many citing nondisclosure agreements. But together, their accounts suggest the company has been stymied by setbacks and mismanagement since almost the very beginning and has made little progress in deployment over the past decade. They say its biggest accomplishments, including the deals with blue-chip companies, amounted to less than advertised and in some cases have yet to produce anything. Colleagues describe emotional strain and a chaotic intermixing of company business with Chichilnisky’s personal life. “She kept driving people away,” says one former senior executive. “No one could deal with her lack of ability to separate the personal from the professional.”...
Chichilnisky was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Argentina shortly after World War II. She emigrated to the U.S. after Argentina’s military coup, and proved so capable among a pool of refugee students that she won entry, without a college degree, to graduate school at MIT. She says earning dual Ph.D.s in math and economics by the age of 30 was the most difficult thing she’s ever done, especially while raising her son E.J., who’s now a Stanford neurosurgery professor. After finishing the Ph.D.s, she took the job at Columbia, and won tenure in just two years....
The heir, Ben Bronfman, is in the fourth generation of the Seagram liquor fortune, a son and grandson of Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Sr. He dropped out of college, toured for years with a rock band, then turned up at Columbia to learn about climate change after being inspired by An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s film. At Columbia, Bronfman found Chichilnisky and Eisenberger, whom he describes now as mentors and “extraordinary geniuses.” He also attended a lecture by climate scientist Klaus Lackner, who was the first to theorize that direct-air capture might be feasible....
Bronfman brought Chichilnisky and Eisenberger to his father and grandfather, who agreed to invest millions of dollars in 2010. The other early investors, he says, included leveraged-buyout king Henry Kravis and David Elenowitz, president of investment firm Zero Carbon Partners LLC. Kravis declined to comment, and Elenowitz didn’t respond to requests for comment....
Current and former employees who spoke with Bloomberg Green describe Chichilnisky’s accomplishments at Global Thermostat as a series of mostly empty announcements, such as the company’s supposed partnership with Coca-Cola. When pressed over the course of several interviews, the CEO’s account of that partnership shifted significantly....
Global Thermostat’s staff generally totals fewer than a dozen people, and everyone at its headquarters sits together in one large room, with daily dysfunction on open display. The accounts of current and former employees range widely across the company’s history, but they consistently depict Chichilnisky as a difficult boss who could be Global Thermostat’s own worst enemy, while Eisenberger defers to her and the Bronfmans stay out of day-to-day affairs. “We used to joke about pitching it as a reality series,” one staffer recalls....
Current and former employees say Chichilnisky has routinely berated business partners and subordinates at all levels, including Eisenberger. Her expectations frequently shift on the fly, they say, and intense anger often follows. “Multiple times we had to replace the phone because she would slam the headset onto the cradle,” breaking it, says a former senior executive.
Another common complaint is that, regardless of their role, any staffer could be treated like Chichilnisky’s personal assistant. Former employees recall spending most of their time handling errands that were clearly unrelated to Global Thermostat, from grading papers written by Chichilnisky’s Columbia students to filling out paperwork for her medical appointments. “I spent 10% of the time on my stated job, 40% of my time on Columbia, and 50% managing Graciela,” says one staffer.
One symptom of the turmoil inside Global Thermostat has been rapid turnover. Anyone who lasted six months was considered a veteran, according to one former senior executive who left in 2019. Another who left that year puts the standard tenure at four months. A former senior executive who spent less than two years at the company says Chichilnisky went through 10 assistants in that span. A Global Thermostat spokesperson says its turnover rate for full-time staff is on par with the national average...
Global Thermostat is still drawing in partners. In final interviews, Chichilnisky emphasized a deal struck in February with HIF, a Chilean company. Siemens Energy AG will use Global Thermostat’s designs to help HIF build a plant that aims to use captured CO₂ in synthetic fuel for Porsche AG. “We spent the last two years with Siemens making a very detailed technical assessment of all the technologies, and Graciela’s made the most sense,” says HIF President Cesar Norton. Asked how HIF had evaluated Global Thermostat’s technology without an operational demonstration plant, Norton says it evaluated the company’s designs. Construction has yet to begin...
Current and former staffers say it’s unclear exactly what Exxon is doing with Global Thermostat besides advertising it heavily. Exxon says it’s focused on advancing the technology and reducing costs. “During our relationship with Global Thermostat, we have seen progress in their research and development of carbon-capture materials, and we are providing our expertise to evaluate the potential of bringing these materials to commercial scale,” the company said in a statement. It declined to specify a timetable for billion-ton scale, however: “We don’t take issue with that as an aspiration, but there is a lot of work to be done to reach that.”