Volts podcast: Rebecca Dell on decarbonizing heavy industry

In this episode, Rebecca Dell, who runs the industry program at
the ClimateWorks Foundation, offers a comprehensive overview of
the problems of industrial decarbonization, the most promising
technological solutions in steel, cement, and chemicals, and the
kinds of policies that could accelerate progress. Incredibly
informative.


Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Rebecca Dell, February
11, 2022


(PDF version)


David Roberts:


For most of the carbon-intensive sectors of the economy —
electricity, transportation, buildings — we have a pretty good
sense of how to eliminate carbon emissions. None of those sectors
will be easy to decarbonize. Every one is an enormous practical
challenge. But in each case, the basic path to zero is clear, and
it mostly involves switching out fossil-fueled machines with
machines that generate or run on clean electricity.


Then there’s that other wedge on the pie chart, the one that gets
less attention: industry. Manufacturing, mining, construction,
and waste processing are responsible for about a third of global
carbon emissions (about a quarter of US emissions).


The path to zero emissions in heavy industry is much murkier than
it is for other sectors. Low-carbon alternatives are early in
development and commercialization; in some cases, there are no
alternatives except to capture and bury the carbon when it’s
emitted.


In future pods, I might get deeper into some specific industries
(like steel). But for this one, I wanted to attempt a broad
overview: What You Need to Know About Decarbonizing Industry.


Nobody knows the sector and its challenges better than Rebecca
Dell, who runs the industry program at the ClimateWorks
Foundation. Dell previously worked at the Department of Energy,
where she helped coordinate Obama’s climate action plan, and
before that was a research scientist at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography. She’s a researcher, author, and, as more attention
turns to industry, an increasingly frequent podcast guest. (She
was on Canary’s Catalyst pod last month.)


It takes a while — okay, almost two hours — but Dell and I manage
to cover all the big industrial sectors, why they emit so much,
prospects for reducing emissions, and the policies that could
make it happen. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shopping primer
on industry and climate, this is for you.


Without further ado, Rebecca Dell, welcome to Volts.


Rebecca Dell:  


Thanks so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.


David Roberts:


I'm excited for this. We are going to attempt to cover a lot of
ground. I want to try to give a 30,000-foot overview of industry
and decarbonization; obviously any of the subtopics could be
podcasts of their own. 


Among the Volts audience, people are probably basically familiar
with the famous Energy Information Administration pie chart of
where US greenhouse gases come from. There are wedges for
transportation, electricity, buildings, agriculture — I think
people mostly have their heads around how to decarbonize
those. 


Then there's that big wedge that just says “industry.” My sense
is that, to a lot of people, that is a bit of a black box — it’s
not clear what's in it or how to approach decarbonizing it.
Historically, that has been the neglected stepchild of the
decarbonization conversation. But am I right in saying that
attention on that little wedge has rapidly increased in recent
years?


Rebecca Dell:  


Yes, and for people who work on this area, it's been exciting to
see how much new interest has come in the last year or two. 


David Roberts:


Do you have an explanation for why?


Rebecca Dell:


The phenomenon that is more in need of explanation is why so few
people were looking at this area until the last year or so,
considering that the industrial sector globally, under the most
parsimonious accounting, is responsible for a quarter of all
greenhouse gas emissions, and under a broader definition, it's
responsible for more than a third.


David Roberts:   


Does that roughly echo the US pie chart? Or is the US different
because we have deindustrialized a little bit?


Rebecca Dell:  


The US is a little lower in terms of the portion of our emissions
that come from the industrial sector. But if you add back in the
greenhouse gas emissions that come from manufacturing products in
other countries that will be consumed in the United States — you
can think of those as our imported emissions — then you get back
to something pretty close to the global average.


David Roberts:   


So let's say about a third — that's a lot of emissions to neglect
for this long. When we say industry, what do we mean by that?
What does that category inclue? What are the boundaries? And
what, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, are the top line
items?


Rebecca Dell:  


That's a really important question, because when we talk about
“industry” in the climate community, it’s a piece of stealth
jargon. It’s the worst kind of jargon: it's a word that sounds
like a normal word, but it actually is a jargon word. 


Basically, what we're talking about when we talk about industry
is everything that's not agriculture or energy, which is to say,
it's the material economy. It’s mining, manufacturing,
construction, waste processing. It's physical stuff, as opposed
to energy. 


As you might imagine, there are a lot of fields of human endeavor
that are included in that very broad set of activities. It's a
very heterogeneous sector. But for all of the millions of
different types of activities that are included in the industrial
sector, there's an astonishingly short list that are responsible
for the overwhelming majority of the greenhouse gas emissions.


David Roberts:   


That's very useful for our podcast purposes.


Rebecca Dell:  


It is. It allows one to simplify one's focus considerably. There
are three real standouts here: steel, cement, and commodity
chemicals. 


The chemical industry itself is, again, varied and heterogeneous;
they produce a lot of different products. But there are about 10
chemicals that are basically the precursors for two products —
plastic and fertilizer — that dominate those emissions. You can
think of this in four product categories: cement, steel, plastic,
and fertilizer. Just making those materials is responsible for
two-thirds of all the greenhouse gas emissions from the entire
industrial sector.


David Roberts:   


Insofar as you figure out how to decarbonize those, will those
lessons be transferable to all those other varied applications?
Or are they so heterogenous that you have to do it one by one?


Rebecca Dell:  


The sources of greenhouse gas emissions are different in other
areas. For example, a lot of the emissions in the waste
processing area are what's called landfill gas: anaerobic
digestion of poorly sorted solid waste trash leads to methane
emissions. So that's in the one-third that's not accounted
for. 


But a lot of it is manufacturing. It’s from lighter manufacturing
activities: lower temperature processes, electric drive
processes, cooling, motors, that sort of thing. A lot of that
will be taken care of as the grid gets cleaner and as things that
are relatively easy to electrify become more electrified.


David Roberts:   


If tomorrow, by magic, all electricity became clean, how much of
that one-third of emissions would vanish?


Rebecca Dell:  


That's pretty much the difference between the one-quarter and the
one-third numbers that I cited. For the one-quarter, the more
parsimonious definition is “we are only looking at greenhouse
gases that are coming out of smokestacks at factories,” what are
called direct emissions. If you add in the greenhouse gas
emissions from generating electricity that is consumed at
industrial facilities, that gets you from a quarter up to over a
third.


David Roberts:   


In terms of that quarter, how much of industry is devoted to
fossil fuels themselves: mining, drilling, processing,
transporting, refining, etc.? If we shift away from fossil fuels
over time, how much of a chunk does that take out of the industry
pie?


Rebecca Dell:  


None. 


The numbers I cited to you, the quarter and the third, those are
global numbers. Here in the United States, we have a very unusual
convention of including the fossil-fuel extraction industries as
industrial activities. In the whole rest of the world, when
people are doing their greenhouse gas inventories, they don't
count that as an industrial activity; they count that as an
energy transformation activity, so they lump those emissions in
with power generation. 


If you look at that pie chart from EIA, or EPA — if you look at a
strictly US source — that will include your refining and
fossil-fuel extraction emissions, but global numbers don't
include any.


David Roberts:   


That seems like a complication in comparing across countries,
doesn't it? It's kind of a big chunk to have misfiled in one
place or the other.


Rebecca Dell:  


Yeah, but we're America, and we like to do things our way.


David Roberts:   


Why do steel, cement, plastic, and fertilizer produce so many
GHGs? 


Rebecca Dell:  


First, because we make them in larger quantities than we make
anything else. These are the materials that we make other things
out of. We make steel and cement in increments of billions of
tons per year. We make commodity chemicals in increments of
hundreds of millions of tons per year. These are the only
products that we make in those volumes, so of course these are
the products that have the biggest greenhouse gas impact. 


Second, all of these industries are a variation on the following
theme: you dig something out of the ground and the first thing
you do with it transforms a raw material into a useful molecule;
everything that's downstream of that in your supply chain is
arranging your useful molecules in different combinations and
sizes and ratios. But all of that rearranging takes a lot less
energy and emits a lot less greenhouse gas than making the useful
molecule in the first place.


All of these industries are what we call primary commodity
processing industries. In fact, if the big three that we talked
about — steel, cement, chemicals — are the highest emitting
industries, four through seven or eight are also primary
commodity processing, just smaller ones. They're things like
aluminum.


David Roberts:   


Let's look at those four: steel, cement, plastic, and fertilizer.
Why does making steel specifically produce so much greenhouse
gas? What is the traditional steel-making process?


Rebecca Dell:  


Steel emissions are so big because we make 2 billion tons of it
per year. That's the best part of a thousand pounds of steel for
every human being on Earth, every year. It sounds insane until
you look at a suspension bridge, or a runway, or anything in our
built environment. Then you have to think, oh yeah, I guess we do
use an incredibly large amount of steel. We make everything out
of it.


David Roberts:   


What is the raw material, and what is the processing that sends
off so much greenhouse gas?


Rebecca Dell:  


With steel, we start with iron ore. Iron ore is iron oxide — iron
atoms chemically bonded to oxygen atoms. Your audience may be
more familiar with iron oxide by its common name, which is
rust. 


Everybody knows that rust does not have the valuable material
properties that steel has, so what we're doing when we make steel
is stripping off those oxygen atoms and turning it into metallic
iron, with a little bit of other elements mixed in to improve its
properties. Steel is almost all iron by weight.


The main way we do that chemical reaction today is to use coal.
We combine the iron ore and the coal together in a reactor called
a blast furnace. We use metallurgical coal, which is also called
coking coal. It's a special kind of coal, but it's still a lump
of carbon. 


In the blast furnace, part of the coal gets burned for thermal
energy to help the reaction go faster. All of those carbon atoms
are a more attractive place for the oxygen atoms to go, so the
oxygen atoms move from the iron oxide over to the carbon, and we
get carbon dioxide. So we're getting carbon dioxide from two
different sources. 


This is another theme that we'll see throughout the industrial
sector: you have the energy emissions — the coal that you burn to
get your reactor hot to make the chemical reaction go — but you
also have a set of chemical reactions that are going on in there
that are not combustion reactions. They're a different kind of
chemical reaction that's also producing greenhouse gases. That’s
what we call process emissions: any greenhouse gas emission that
comes from doing anything except combustion.


David Roberts:   


My intuition tells me that energy emissions are going to be the
easier ones to eliminate, because we have alternative sources of
energy that don't emit greenhouse gases. Is that accurate?


Rebecca Dell:  


In many cases, yes.


It would be useful at this point to give a typology of solutions
that applies across industries. There are a few buckets of
decarbonization pathways that we can use across all of these
industries. 


Bucket number one is material efficiency. We can just use less of
this material in order to make the products and deliver the
services that we want. 


David Roberts:   


Traditionally that's the cheapest, right? It's just changing your
behavior, changing your processes, changing design.


Rebecca Dell:  


Yeah, that's a big one. The barriers there are typically not
technical. They're barriers that have to do with incentives and
social systems and cultural norms. That's very important, and we
should definitely do it. 


Bucket number two, carbon capture and storage. You keep doing
pretty much what you're doing now, but you figure out a way to
collect all the carbon dioxide and put it underground. You don't
have to like it, but you have to acknowledge that it exists and
is a possibility.


David Roberts:   


I'm very familiar with capturing carbon dioxide off of
combustion; that's the standard CCS model. Is capturing the
carbon dioxide off of process emissions notably different or more
difficult?


Rebecca Dell:  


There's a dumb version of carbon capture where you just take your
flue gases at the end of the pipe and put them through some
scrubbers and then put them through some amine sorbents, and you
can do that on any flue gas. You could imagine doing that on the
end of almost any pipe, but each industry has its own version of
smarter carbon capture that is engineered to optimize for this
industrial process. That varies a lot. 


Bucket three is hydrogen. As your recent guest Panama Bartholomy
said, it is the answer to every question in energy before it has
even been asked. 


Bucket number four is direct electrification. 


Bucket number five is bioenergy. 


Those are your five buckets across all of these industries.


David Roberts:   


Is there significance to the order you put them in?


Rebecca Dell:  


No. Well, I suppose I put bioenergy last because bioenergy cannot
ever be more than a small part of the solution. There’s no way to
provide enough biomass to do a large portion of the
decarbonization in these industries. The IEA estimates that our
current total biomass available for energy use on Earth is
something like 55 or 60 exajoules of energy. The chemical
industry today uses almost 50 exajoules of energy. The steel
industry uses another 30 exajoules of energy. There’s just not
enough to go around. Bioenergy might show up here or there, but
it can't be the bulk solution, because there just aren’t enough
joules there.


David Roberts:   


Bucket number one, material efficiency, applied to steel: I can
imagine us using less steel. 


Rebecca Dell:  


One point on that: in the United States and in other high-income
countries, we already use less steel. As countries get richer,
their demand for steel tends to tail off. 


The reason for that is that as you become a middle-income
country, that's when you build out an electric transmission and
distribution system that actually gets to every house; you move
your entire population into modern housing; people start having
private vehicles for the first time in significant numbers; you
build sanitation systems and aqueducts that bring clean water and
public health to people. Once you've done that, your demand for
steel is largely a function of population growth and replacing
things as they wear out. 


We in high-income countries might have a lot of opportunities to
reduce our demand for steel in order to be more
material-efficient in our use of it, but there's this huge latent
demand for more steel that is represented by the couple billion
people on Earth who are still in poverty and have an entirely
legitimate desire to have modern housing and sanitation and all
of those things.


The other thing about steel, though, is that it's quite
recyclable. As you have a lot of stuff for a long time, you
develop a stock of steel that you can recycle. If current trends
continue, all of the additional demand for steel that's going to
come from countries emerging out of poverty can probably be met
with recycled steel. The current volume of new steel production
probably doesn't have to go up in order to continue to meet
global needs, but it probably doesn't have to go down either.


David Roberts:   


Are we currently on a trajectory to hold it steady?


Rebecca Dell:  


If current trends continue. But I don't think I've actually said
out loud yet in this interview how much greenhouse gas is emitted
by the global steel industry. It’s 3.5 billion tons of carbon
dioxide equivalent per year. It's more greenhouse gases than are
emitted by any entire nation except the United States and China.
Even if we're just holding current production constant, that's
still an enormous problem to solve.


David Roberts:


By the same token, if you reduce it by even a small fraction, you
are reducing a lot of tons.


Rebecca Dell:


Yes.


David Roberts:


What does smart carbon capture look like in steel? 


Rebecca Dell:


Frankly, there's not a lot of interest in steel CCS around the
world right now. I'm happy to explain how it might work and why
it would be hard. 


David Roberts:   


My attitude toward CCS is, don't do it unless you have to. If
you're telling me you don't have to, I'm happy to put it out of
my mind. 


Rebecca Dell:  


I think we can confidently walk past. Let’s move on to hydrogen.
Hydrogen is where a lot of the excitement in the steel industry
is right now. In my mind, the best argument for hydrogen is that
making steel using hydrogen is the smallest increment of
technology that we need to get to zero-greenhouse-gas steel.


David Roberts:   


Can you just substitute hydrogen into existing refining
processes, or there's more to it than that?


Rebecca Dell:  


No. Today, more than 90 percent of what we call primary steel —
steel that's made from iron ore, not recycled — is made with a
blast furnace using coal. There's not a lot you can do about the
blast furnace on the hydrogen front. 


But about 7 percent is made with an alternative process called
direct reduction that uses methane instead of coal. We think that
the hydrogen process might be quite similar to direct reduction
and use quite similar equipment, so we don't have to start from
zero.


This direct reduction process is only 7 percent of global
production, but that still makes this a fully commercial, mature
technology. You can call up the Midrex Corporation and say,
“hello, I would like to buy a shaft furnace,” and they will make
you one. 


Basically what we're talking about is reengineering this existing
technology of the shaft furnace to use only hydrogen instead of
what it currently uses, which is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon
monoxide. If we're going to do that as our main route, we're
going to have to build a lot more shaft furnaces. 


So the next option — direct electrification.


David Roberts:   


My favorite.


Rebecca Dell:  


There are a few different ways to do this. The one that's most
advanced is something called molten oxide electrolysis, which is
pretty much what it sounds like. You take your oxide (iron ore),
you heat it up enough to melt it, you put a giant electric field
across it, and the electric field is strong enough that it pulls
apart the iron and the oxygen. 


This is pretty similar to how we currently make aluminum, so it's
not crazy. It's a thing that should be able to be made to work.
It's a pre-commercial technology, though — it's not ready for
primetime yet. There are some companies that are working on it,
it might be ready soon.


David Roberts:   


Are we to a demonstration project yet? Is it happening somewhere?


Rebecca Dell:  


Give it a year and there may be something exciting to announce.


David Roberts:   


Is that the cheapest form of direct electrification, or the most
practical?


Rebecca Dell:  


That’s the one that’s closest to being ready to do. People are
also thinking about low-temperature forms of electrolysis that
you can do without having to melt the iron oxide first, but the
one that I just described is the most mature. 


The biggest advantage of the hydrogen route is that it is the
smallest increment of technology to get us to truly green steel.
The biggest advantage of the direct electrification route is that
it will require the least energy. If you are using green hydrogen
— taking electricity and converting that into hydrogen — and then
using that hydrogen to convert your iron ore into iron, you lose
a lot of energy in that extra conversion. If you can just use the
electricity directly, you get to keep another third of the
energy.


The amount of energy that's involved is enormous. This industry
uses a similar amount of global energy to its portion of global
greenhouse gases, which is 7 or 8 percent.


David Roberts:   


None of these, except for carbon capture, seem to address
existing blast furnace steel production facilities.


Rebecca Dell:  


Yeah, and this is incredibly important for the politics. In the
steel industry, as in a lot of these industries, the reason why
the facilities that we have today were built in the places that
they were built is because they had the best access to raw
materials and energy. Why did we put the steel mill there?
Because we could get metallurgical coal to that place really
cheaply. 


Also like a lot of these industries, most of the production is
done at a relatively small number of very large facilities. I've
visited a lot of steel mills over the years, and it's not unusual
for a steel mill to have 10,000 employees. The biggest one I ever
went to had 48,000 employees at one facility. It's the size of a
city. 


David Roberts:   


So these are not things that you can move around easily.
Switching geographies is not practical.


Rebecca Dell:  


It creates a lot of problems and a lot of social dislocation. The
steel industry might not be a huge part of the total US economy
today, but for the communities and even the states that are
hosting these facilities, one facility is a really important part
of your employment. People will fight really hard to keep these
facilities, because they're so concentrated and the local
community is so dependent on them. If you're moving from a
coal-based process to an electricity-based process, frankly, the
places that have the best access to metallurgical coal are not
typically the same as the places that have the best access to
cheap electricity.


David Roberts:   


So CCS is something you can offer these communities and these
facilities to say, “you don't have to change anything
fundamental, you don't have to move, you can continue to exist
here and just bolt this thing onto your facility.”


Rebecca Dell:  


You can potentially maintain existing industrial economies, but
it's not easy. 


One of the reasons why CCS is tough in the steel industry is that
at what are called integrated steel mills, the traditional type
of steel mills that have blast furnaces at them, typically you'll
have three or four really big carbon dioxide sources — your blast
furnace, some other major process furnaces, and things like that.
Together, you have a lot of carbon dioxide coming out in one
place, so you can see how it could be cost-effective to collect
it all. 


But all of that together is often only half or maybe 60 percent
of the carbon dioxide that's coming out of the facility overall.
The rest of it is all these small sources — little process
heaters here and there — that are distributed by the dozens all
over a facility that's the size of a town. Thinking about how you
would collect all of the carbon dioxide from all those
distributed sources and do that cost effectively is really hard.


David Roberts:   


I came into this interview riding on a wave of green-steel hype,
and nothing I'm hearing you say is justifying any of it. 
What is all the excitement around steel? It sounds to me like we
have no good options. 


Rebecca Dell:  


I didn't say anything nasty about hydrogen, did I?


David Roberts:   


I mean, it's going to substitute for that 7 percent with a
special kind of furnace, right? Which is not nothing, but blast
furnaces are most of the furnaces. 


Rebecca Dell:  


All of them are going to have to be retired.


David Roberts:   


That sounds like a brutal social and political process.


Rebecca Dell:  


I'm not going to claim that it will be straightforward, but we do
have 30 years. Industrial equipment doesn't typically last longer
than that. We don't have to do this all at once. But I have never
seen a good idea for how we have a climate-safe blast
furnace. 


We are in a process of closing most, if not all, of the
coal-fired electricity stations around the world, and we all
accept that this type of industrial equipment, this particular
coal-fired type of furnace, is just not consistent with a
climate-safe future. That is also true of blast furnaces.


David Roberts:   


So insofar as there's an elevator-pitch answer in steel, it is
shutting down blast furnaces and building new facilities that
either can work with hydrogen shaft furnaces or are some directly
electrified process that we don't quite have worked out yet.


Rebecca Dell:  


We're getting close, though. That's probably how it's going to
go. 


There are some interesting reports that came out in the last few
months looking at pathways to steel decarbonization. Several
different organizations have done this kind of analysis over the
course of the last year, with different methodologies and
approaches, and all of them basically come to the same
conclusion: no new blast furnaces, and we're going to have to
start shutting down the existing blast furnaces in pretty short
order.


David Roberts:   


I'm guessing these new, less standardized and commodified
processes are more expensive. What kind of delta are we talking
about?


Rebecca Dell:  


This is a great question, and there are two answers. 


First, yes, we do expect that green steel and other green
commodities will be more expensive than existing dirty means of
producing them. Depending on who you ask, and depending on
exactly which process you're talking about, those price premiums
range from 20 percent up to 200 percent. 


That's okay — we pay for environmental performance all the time.
Cars with catalytic converters are more expensive than cars
without catalytic converters; we still think it's a good idea to
put catalytic converters in our cars.


David Roberts:   


But if you're telling a country that's emerging out of poverty
that it's going to be 200 percent more expensive for them to do
so, that's not nothing.


Rebecca Dell:  


This leads me to the second point, which is that these industries
— steel, cement, commodity chemicals — are incredibly valuable.
The whole rest of the economy relies on the material that these
industries produce.


However, from an economic perspective, they are extremely
low-value-added industries. They have very tight margins. These
are your classic commodity industries. The cost of these
materials represents a very small part of the cost of the
finished goods that are made out of them. 


From the perspective of the guy who owns the steel mill or
chemical plant or cement kiln — sometimes it’s a girl, but
usually a guy — he's like, “I have commodity-sized margins here.
There is no room in my margin to pay for any kind of
decarbonization.”


I would encourage you, however, to look at this through the other
end of the telescope. Don't look from the perspective of the guy
who owns the steel mill; look at it from the perspective of the
person who's buying a car made out of steel. Even at a relatively
high additional cost for decarbonization, that's only going to
add a couple hundred bucks to the cost of your car. The average
new car in the United States costs $37,000; $37,200 looks a lot
more manageable.


David Roberts:   


This must have political economy consequences, too, right? If the
steel mill owners can't get the car buyers on their side to rebel
against this, how much power do they have on their own to
politically resist these sorts of things? 


Rebecca Dell:  


The real political and economic problem here is not, “how do we
afford to pay for decarbonization?” We can 100 percent afford to
pay for decarbonization of steel and all of these other
industries. The problem is, how do we pass the costs efficiently
through the supply chain so that the place they land, the final
consumer, is the person in the supply chain who can actually
afford to pay.


David Roberts:   


They’re more dispersed the more you pass them down the chain too;
less concentrated on any one constituency that might rebel
against it.


Rebecca Dell:  


Yes. The policy challenge here is about how you pass those costs
through. Ways that you can do that are things like product
standards. Why do we have catalytic converters in our cars? In a
practical sense, it's because you're not allowed to buy a car
that doesn't have one. If you want to make sure that the costs of
decarbonization get passed all the way through the supply chain,
one way to do that is to have standards that require that
products use clean materials.


David Roberts:   


Of course government procurement is always a huge piece of this
too. Government can start that process. 


Rebecca Dell:  


Yes, the government can start by applying the standards to
itself.


David Roberts:   


That's basically end users voluntarily taking on the cost,
right? 


Rebecca Dell:  


I don’t think there's anything voluntary about my catalytic
converter.


David Roberts:   


Well, policymakers deliberately choosing to put the costs on the
final user so that it's less concentrated. The steel mill owners
are all equally affected; none of them are being priced out
relative to the others.


Rebecca Dell:  


To be philosophical for a second, there are only two pots of
money in society: consumer dollars and taxpayer dollars. The
question is, what ratio of consumer dollars to taxpayer dollars
do we wish to use? That is going to change depending on
circumstances, but that's the question.


David Roberts:   


This helps me have a more realistic view on steel, although it’s
slightly dimmed my enthusiasm.


Rebecca Dell:  


I don't want to give you the impression that nothing's happening
on steel. The Swedes have a project called HYBRIT, a hydrogen
reduction steel project, which is the most advanced in the world.
They recently announced that they made one of their mining
vehicles entirely out of green steel — the first vehicle in the
history of the world to be made out of green steel.


It’s only one vehicle, but the distance between one vehicle and
two vehicles is a lot smaller than the distance between zero
vehicles and one vehicle, and that distance keeps getting smaller
over time. We're making real progress. We're not there yet — it's
definitely at an earlier stage than our colleagues who are
working on power or transportation — but we're making progress.


David Roberts: 


Let’s move on to cement. What is the raw material and what is the
basic processing?


Rebecca Dell:  


The raw material is the main constituent of limestone. Limestone
is a very common kind of rock; you can find it pretty much in any
country. The main constituent of limestone is something called
calcium carbonate. The main ingredient in cement is something
called calcium oxide. You can hear right in the words — there is
carbon in the limestone, there is no carbon in the cement. 


You dig up the rocks and cook them at 1,500℃, roughly 2,600℉.
About 40 percent of your greenhouse gas emissions come from
burning fuel to get your rocks that hot, and the other 60
percent, on average, is from burning off the carbon that was in
the rock. The carbon coming out of the rock is your process
emissions.


David Roberts:   


Once again, it's fairly easy to imagine the energy coming from a
different low-carbon source, but the problem comes down to
process emissions. When the carbon comes off the limestone and is
released, is there some way of capturing it? Is there some way of
doing this without releasing the carbon? What are the green
cement options?


Rebecca Dell:  


Even if we decide that we don't want to use CCS in any other part
of our economy, the place that we are most likely to end up
relying on CCS as our primary decarbonization pathway is in the
cement industry.


David Roberts:   


Are the emission sources more concentrated in cement than they
are in steel?


Rebecca Dell:  


A cement kiln is a much simpler place than a steel mill. We were
talking about steel mills with thousands of employees; if you go
to a cement kiln, the typical number of guys on shift is maybe
25. You just have one big pipe in a cement kiln, so CCS is a lot
more straightforward there. 


People do have ideas for alternative raw materials or alternative
cement chemistries that might be able to address this process
emissions problem without CCS, but it's probably going to be CCS.
Part of that is my assessment of what the technical alternatives
are, but an even more important reason is that cement and the
thing we like to make out of it, concrete, are foundational to
our buildings. It is literally the thing we make foundations out
of. Almost every structure in our society relies on concrete, and
the type of cement that we use, which is called ordinary portland
cement, was first patented in 1824. We're coming up on its
200-year anniversary.


This is a material we feel very comfortable with. We know its
material properties really well. And for obvious reasons, the
construction industry is incredibly risk-averse about the
structural properties of the things that it's building. Even if
you have great ideas for alternative cement chemistries, the
likelihood that the global construction industry would feel
comfortable wholesale shifting over to them in 30 years time is a
pretty tall order.


David Roberts:   


I can't imagine the process you would have to go through to
demonstrate that your concrete would hold up buildings in every
conceivable situation. 


Rebecca Dell:  


We do have performance-based standards for concretes and ways
that we test different types. I don't want to say that there's
nothing to be done here. 


The main ingredient in cement is something called clinker, and we
already use a big range of different clinker factor — that's the
percentage of clinker — in different cements around the world.
Almost all the carbon dioxide comes from making the clinker. A
lot of cement is 95 percent clinker, but it's also very common to
use 65 percent clinker cements. You can cut 30 percent off your
greenhouse gas emissions by using low-clinker cements, and those
things are already technically mature and well-demonstrated —
there are big structures made out of them that you can go and
visit around the world. 


So there’s an opportunity to make at least 30 percent greenhouse
gas emissions reductions, on average, just by going to the lowest
clinker factor that's appropriate for whatever you're using.
There's no technical barrier. It usually is cheaper. We should do
it tomorrow — there's no reason not to. But a 30 percent
emissions reduction still leaves you with 70 percent.


David Roberts:   


What about bucket one, using less? Is there a practical way to
use a lot less cement? 


Rebecca Dell:  


Oh my god, we are so wasteful in the way that we use
concrete. 


People have gone out to actual commercial and multifamily
residential buildings and looked at how much structural material,
primarily concrete, these buildings are using compared to how
much structural material would be needed to support all the
loads. They typically find that there is something in the
neighborhood of twice as much structural material as is needed to
comply with the very safety-protective building codes. 


Almost all of the studies that I've seen have been in Europe or
the United States, so it's mostly in high-income countries that
these numbers come from. We think the situation is probably even
worse in developing countries. 


I live in the San Francisco Bay area. For a commercial or
multifamily construction site in this area, certainly it's more
expensive here than in other parts of the country, but it's not
radically different. Depending on the size of the building, the
typical payroll for one of these construction sites might be
$5,000-$10,000 an hour. To get one of those mixer trucks full of
concrete delivered to your construction site — we're not talking
about fancy concrete here, just normal commodity concrete —
that's about $1,000. So if you can save five or 10 minutes of
time on your job site by wasting a truck full of concrete, you
just saved money. 


This goes back to what I was saying about looking through the
other end of the telescope. Why would you use materials
efficiently when they are so cheap? For private construction here
in the United States, the average amount of a construction
project that is represented by the cost of the cement is less
than 0.5 percent.


David Roberts:   


So cement is so cheap that people overuse it to save time, to
save soft costs …


Rebecca Dell:  


To save anything. Everything is more expensive than cement. If
you take an 18-wheeler and you fill it up to the statutory
maximum weight for driving on an interstate highway in the United
States, it will have approximately $2,600 worth of cement in it.
It will have a one nice laptop worth of cement.


David Roberts:   


This does seem like an area where markets could work well. You
want to put a higher price signal on it and then trust people to
figure out how to eliminate some of it. Is that right?


Rebecca Dell:  


It's a good news / bad news situation. Because cement and all of
these materials are so cheap, it is very hard to persuade people
to use them efficiently. It is very hard to persuade people to
value them in terms of the actual value that they provide to
their lives. It's a little bit like water or electricity that
way. 


However, because they're so cheap, the good news is that even if
the green version is a little bit more expensive, or even a lot
more expensive, than the dirty version, that doesn't actually
make the products that these materials are made out of more
expensive.


If we go back to this commercial building I was talking about,
0.5 percent of its costs are cement. Let's say we mandate dumb
end-of-pipe CCS, the most expensive, worst engineering option
that we can think of, for our cement decarbonization. We involve
only lazy engineers in our project.


Even under that circumstance, maybe we'll double the cost of the
cement — that only adds 0.5 percent to the cost of the building.
In fact, it adds less than 0.5 percent to the cost of the
building, because all of the construction costs that I've been
citing don't include the cost of the land, which is often the
most expensive thing.


David Roberts:   


So I was precisely wrong — it's probably going to be difficult to
put a pure price signal high enough to make the market work. But
you can get away with mandates, because it's not going to affect
consumers much.


Rebecca Dell:  


Yes. This is part of what I was saying earlier — these industries
are incredibly valuable, but because they're low-value-added,
compared to the prices that consumers actually face, these
materials are not typically an important line item.


David Roberts:   


Let's talk about chemicals. I know it's a varied category. Are
there simple things to say about why chemical processing produces
so much greenhouse gas, or does it vary a lot also?


Rebecca Dell:  


The chemical industry is very diverse. I remember talking to a
colleague who was a senior sustainability person at BASF, the
German chemical giant, and she told me that BASF has an 80/20
problem when it comes to their greenhouse gases. BASF makes
approximately 100,000 products. Eighty percent of their
greenhouse gases come from not 20 percent of their products, but
from 20 products. 


Again, these are the basic materials that are the ingredients for
all their other products — mostly fertilizer and plastic. 


For fertilizer, primarily we're talking about nitrogen
fertilizer, so making that cleanly is mostly about making
hydrogen cleanly. People do have some ideas for how to make
nitrogen fertilizer that's not made out of ammonia, but the main
idea is, if you want to make clean ammonia, you just need to
start with clean hydrogen.


David Roberts:   


If you solve the green hydrogen problem, you solve the fertilizer
problem downstream?


Rebecca Dell:  


Yep. There's not a whole lot to making fertilizer besides making
hydrogen.


David Roberts:   


That's convenient. Plastics, I assume, are more difficult.


Rebecca Dell:  


Yes. With plastics, you have the same buckets of solutions we
were talking about earlier. We could use less, and definitely we
should. 


Plastics are interesting, because they’re carbon-based molecules;
they're made out of a carbon-based material. When we make
plastics out of fossil fuels, some of the fossil fuels are burned
to provide energy, but for more than half of the fossil fuels
that we use in plastics production, we're actually taking the
carbon atoms and the hydrogen atoms that are in the fossil fuels
and we're putting them into the plastic product. We're making the
product out of the fossil fuels.


David Roberts:   


So every piece of plastic is, in some sense, carbon
sequestration.


Rebecca Dell:  


You know, Shell says that all the time.


David Roberts:   


I take it back. Does it release the carbon when it breaks down?


Rebecca Dell:  


There is a scenario in which, if you collected all the plastic at
the end of its life, and you made sure that it was clean and dry
and well-segregated, and you put it in a nicely lined hole in the
ground, it would be inert in that hole for a very long time and
technically you could call that carbon storage. 


But that's not actually what we do with plastic at the end of its
life, and the way that we actually treat plastic at the end of
its life leads to a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.


David Roberts:   


What do we do? Do we burn it?


Rebecca Dell:  


Some of it we burn. That's like burning fossil fuels directly,
and that's a very popular option around the world. 


Here in the United States we mostly put it into mixed garbage.
When you have plastic and organic material mixed together in your
garbage, the organic material, food waste, will decompose
anaerobically. All the carbon atoms that were in that organic
material will then leak out as methane instead of as carbon
dioxide.


Methane, depending on the timeline you're looking at, is
somewhere between 30 and 85 times more potent of a greenhouse gas
than the carbon dioxide that you would get if you properly
composted your organics. 


So even if the carbon atoms in the plastic are not decomposing
quickly and turning into carbon dioxide, they are leading to
methane emissions from trash, which are an important source of
overall greenhouse gas emissions.


David Roberts:   


It seems like here, bucket one is the lowest-hanging fruit by
far. We're so wasteful. Plastic is so gross and overused.


Rebecca Dell:  


In the United States, the EPA estimates that only 8 or 9 percent
of plastic is even collected for recycling, and of that, only
about half is actually recycled in any form at all. Almost
always, the recycling process is that you have a wide variety of
mixed plastic, you melt it down, and when you lump all of these
different materials together you get very, very low-quality
plastic, radically downcycling. 


Most of the plastics we use are, in theory, infinitely
recyclable. If you have a high-purity waste stream, you can melt
it down and get new, first-quality products that are just like
the old ones. But we don't do that. 


We need to use less plastic, but we also need to have tight
regulations on exactly what types of plastic can be used, so that
there are only a few types out there and all plastic packaging is
the same couple of types, so they can be easily segregated and
meaningfully recycled. 


David Roberts:   


We can change the way we design plastic products and the types of
plastic we make to encourage more recycling, but obviously you're
never going to get to zero that way. Is there a way to avoid,
bucket two, or are we stuck with CCS here? Are there real
alternatives on the horizon to carbon plastic?


Rebecca Dell:  


Bioplastics are real. I occasionally will encounter a PLA fork or
something like that. They're not a meaningful portion of current
plastic production. And as we were talking about before, there's
just not enough biomass to go around to make large quantities of
plastic out of biomass, so that's going to be a niche item
forever. 


We can take carbon atoms out of carbon dioxide and turn them into
plastic; it requires an eye-watering amount of energy. This is
important for carbon-utilization conversations generally: imagine
we started with these big, exciting, highly energy-dense fossil
fuel molecules; we had a combustion reaction, where we took out
all of the energy that was stored in those molecules; and what we
were left with was carbon dioxide, which was a combustion
product. It's what's left over after you take out all of the
energy.


If you want to turn it back into one of these big exciting
molecules, you have to put more energy back in than you got out
in the first place from burning it. The chemicals industry is the
most energy-consuming industry of any industry in the world. It's
only the third-most greenhouse gas emitting, because a lot of
that energy is stored in the product and doesn't go directly into
carbon dioxide.


A couple of years back, the big pan-European chemicals industry
trade association published this fantastic report where they
said, “okay, you guys want us to decarbonize, let's get serious
about what that actually would be. Let's go through one process
at a time and talk about the energy and feedstock requirements
for the green alternatives in every case.”


What they found was that to produce the basket of chemicals that
they were currently producing and to do it using carbon dioxide
as their primary source of carbon would require something like
1,900 terawatt-hours per year of clean electricity. The IEA
estimates that in their Paris compliance scenario in 2050, the
total amount of electricity that is generated and used for all
purposes on the continent of Europe is only about 3,400 terawatt
hours per year.


More than half of all the electricity would have to go to the
chemicals industry if you wanted to make all of your carbon-based
chemicals out of carbon dioxide. 


So, it can be done, but we are really in too-cheap-to-meter
territory with our electricity if we're doing that.


David Roberts:   


None of those sound like good options. What's your favorite for
plastics? 


Rebecca Dell:  


It's got to be using less, material efficiency. I have seen no
scenarios where you can get 1.5℃ or even 2℃-consistent reductions
in emissions from the chemicals industry without dramatically
reducing the amount of plastic that we use and dramatically
increasing the quantity and quality of recycled plastic.


David Roberts:   


With steel, you mentioned that when you're developing as a
country there are a lot of big one-time uses and then your usage
tails off. Is there an arc for plastics?


Rebecca Dell:  


Not that we’ve been able to find. It’s just up and up and up.
Since 2015, the rate at which total global plastic production is
increasing has stopped accelerating.


David Roberts:   


I guess that's good news?


Rebecca Dell:  


The problem is not getting worse faster. It's just getting worse
at the same very rapid rate that it was previously getting worse
at. That's the nicest thing I can say about the trend for plastic
production volumes.


David Roberts:   


I do want to touch on some policy options. It sounds like if
we're looking big picture, at industry decarbonizing by 2030, the
most difficult area is plastics. Is that roughly accurate, or
they're all difficult?


Rebecca Dell:  


I don't like to think of any of them as difficult. I find that
framing both unhelpful and inaccurate, because people just
started noticing the importance of the industrial sector about a
year ago. I often tell people that where we are in our
decarbonization progress in these sectors is similar to maybe
where the power sector was in the late 90s. 


I don't know, I was a kid then, but I'm assuming that in the 90s
the concept of completely decarbonizing the power sector probably
felt pretty hard to people who were out there trying to get solar
panels installed and being called silly hippies. We have 20 or 25
years of progress that we've made since then.


It's not going to be easy, it's not going to happen by itself,
but we have a line of sight to where we're going. We see how it's
going to happen.


The situation in the industrial sector is not that it's somehow
inherently harder. We're just at a much earlier stage in our
decarbonization journey.


David Roberts:   


We waited a long time to get started, though. We do have to go
faster in it than we did in electricity, arguably.


Rebecca Dell:  


That is true. We did take our sweet time to get started.


David Roberts:   


You're closely in touch with political and policy angles on this
— do you see urgency around this commensurate with the scale and
speed necessary to do it? 


Rebecca Dell:  


I mean, obviously not. Even the parts of the climate challenge
that we're doing the best at we're not on track, and this is not
one of the parts that we are doing the best at.


It is very clear to me that what we need to do to decarbonize
these industries is entirely within our capacities here in the
United States and also globally. Please don't interpret what I'm
saying as any disrespect to the efforts of the Biden
administration. The people who are doing this work in the Biden
administration are very, very clear about what the scale of the
challenge is, and they are attempting to move as fast as they
possibly can. But they would probably be the first people to tell
you, “what we're doing is not enough.”


David Roberts:   


Let's look at what we are doing, then. We had executive actions
early on, we had the Recovery Act, then we got the Bipartisan
Infrastructure Act. Are there big pieces of good policy on this
that have already been passed? Secondly, are there good pieces of
policy on this in Build Back Better that we, like everyone else,
are sitting around waiting forever for action on? 


Rebecca Dell:  


The biggest thing that was in the bipartisan infrastructure law
is a serious pile of money for commercializing and demonstrating
clean industrial technologies. Most of that is going through the
Department of Energy, and the way that the money was allocated is
pretty flexible. The DOE currently has a lot of discretion about
exactly how they spend that money, and there are a few different
pots of it, so it's hard for me to give you a dollar amount that
will go to the industrial sector, but it will be somewhere
between half a billion and a few billion dollars. That's a
serious amount of money.


David Roberts:   


It does sound like in some of these markets or sub-markets we are
at that point where a visibly successful demonstration project
could be triggering, could unleash things.


Rebecca Dell:  


It’s a thing we need really badly, and it's a thing that
absolutely requires public money. There's a certain amount of
technology risk that the private sector in these industries, in
particular, is simply not going to pay for. 


David Roberts:   


What about Build Back Better? Is there some pot of gold at the
end of that?


Rebecca Dell:  


It’s a much larger pot of money in Build Back Better. We go from
a minimum amount of industrial decarbonization demonstration
projects of $0.5 billion currently up to a minimum amount of $4
billion if Build Back Better gets passed. Then the upper limit,
depending on how you count it, goes up commensurately. 


The other important thing is that Biden issued an executive order
last month on federal sustainability which included for the first
time direct instructions for the federal government to buy
low-greenhouse gas building materials — read: steel and cement —
when it builds stuff with federal money.


David Roberts:   


That’s not a small thing. That's a very big customer,
right? 


Rebecca Dell:  


We call the family of policies where the government buys
low-greenhouse gas building materials “Buy Clean.” If you look
across all levels of government — federal, state, and local —
almost half of all the cement in the United States is purchased
with taxpayer dollars.


David Roberts:   


In other words, Buy Clean government policy could do a lot.


Rebecca Dell:  


If it's well-structured and aggressively implemented, it could
make a huge difference. Build Back Better, in addition to
demonstration, has a bunch of money in it to facilitate the
implementation of Buy Clean.


David Roberts:   


Just at the federal level, or helping states or cities too?
Presumably, government at any level could do a little bit of
this.


Rebecca Dell:  


There are a lot of spillover benefits. If the federal government
says, “we're going to do this,” that makes it much cheaper and
easier for state and local governments to do it, even without
direct federal subsidies.


For example, the federal government has to put in place the
measuring and reporting frameworks for the greenhouse gas
intensity of different products; they have to make sure that the
low-carbon products are available wherever federal construction
is happening. All of the fixed costs of getting the system up and
running can be accepted by the federal government.


David Roberts:   


All of which makes it easier for the next person to do it.


Rebecca Dell:  


There's also a lot of exciting stuff happening at the state
level. California was the first state to pass a Buy Clean law,
but since then, five other states have passed Buy Clean laws of
one type or another.


David Roberts:   


Mostly cement and steel?


Rebecca Dell:  


The specific set of materials that's covered varies from state to
state. Some states it's cement only; some states have steel,
cement, and other things; in California, unfortunately, it's
everything except cement. The cement industry had good lobbyists.


David Roberts:   


Is this the sort of thing where if enough states get in on this,
they're eventually going to force a sea change?


Rebecca Dell:  


These are concepts that need to be proved out. If you can have a
state policy that leads to widespread use of comparatively very
low-greenhouse gas building materials, it becomes a lot easier
for the EPA to start regulating related issues. The goal here is
to create a virtuous circle of greenhouse gas ambition.


David Roberts:   


On one side you have investment for demonstration projects and
setting up these systems; on the other side, for demand-pull, you
have Buy Clean. Are there other big-ticket policy items that have
not yet been tackled?


Rebecca Dell:  


There are a lot of different ways to structure the investment
side. You can do credit subsidies; you can do direct subsidies;
you can also do direct federal investment, which we have done a
lot of in years past and in fact, the Defense Production Act
allows us to do an almost unlimited amount of, if we wanted to.
There are a lot of good arguments to be made for direct federal
investment in clean production. All of those things are really
important. 


There are also some important governance issues. A lot of these
industries and markets have had pretty poor enforcement of
existing regulations, both around non-greenhouse gas pollution
and around labor standards. We have some pretty good rules on the
books that are very poorly enforced. If we want the energy
transition and the clean transition across the economy to be
sustainable politically, we have to be showing people real,
direct benefits in their lives and their family's health. That
has to be an important part of this conversation. 


Also in the governance bucket, the United States is very bad at
industrial policy. It was not always true, but for the last 40
years or so, we've had this weird fantasy that we don't do
industrial policy. We definitely do industrial policy, but it's
incoherent and easy to be captured by the covered industries
because we’re pretending that we're not doing it.


One of the consequences of this is that we have entirely hollowed
out the expertise and the governance infrastructure of industrial
policy, particularly at the federal level. There's hardly anybody
whose job it is to think about these things in the federal
government, compared to other countries whose manufacturing
sectors we would like to emulate.


David Roberts:   


Look at Germany. It's all very explicit. It's right up front.
They're very clear about what they want to do and how they're
going to do it. It's so much more sensible.


Rebecca Dell:  


And they spend a lot of money on it. The main applied R&D in
the manufacturing sector that's from the German government is a
system of things called the Fraunhofer Institutes. They spend
almost 3 billion euros a year on the Fraunhofer Institutes.


The analogous thing in the US government is the Advanced
Manufacturing Office, which has an annual budget of $400 million.
Our economy is five times larger than Germany's, so compared to
the overall size of our economy, we are spending less than 5
percent of what they are spending on applied R&D. And that's
the piece of industrial policy that we feel most comfortable
with!


David Roberts:   


That cuts across every sector, right? We constantly talk about
goals and targets, but the capacity to do things on purpose with
our economy has been hollowed out. 


Rebecca Dell:  


This is particularly true in the manufacturing sectors.


David Roberts:   


Is that largely because we exported so much of it? 


Rebecca Dell:  


I might make the causal relationship go in the other direction.
One of the reasons why we had a lot of deindustrialization was
that we didn't have a concerted effort to maintain a vibrant
industrial economy. For example, Germany still has most of its
steel mills.


David Roberts:   


If anything, we deliberately accelerated the reverse process with
trade deals and things like that. That seems like a long-term
project, reversing that process. 


Rebecca Dell:  


And an important part of that is rebuilding our governance
capacity. It blows my mind that the highest-ranking person in the
federal government whose job it is to think about the future of
the US manufacturing sector — the head of the Advanced
Manufacturing Office at DOE — has the rank of Office Director.


There isn't a single Assistant Secretary anywhere, in any
department, on this beat. That is wild. There are 20 million
Americans employed in this sector.


David Roberts:   


The final piece I want to look at is international trade.
Presumably either we or other countries are going to start using
trade deals as an instrument of decarbonization in industry. Is
that something we're trying to do, or that people are talking
about?


Rebecca Dell:  


It is. You may recall that Donald Trump, when he was president,
put tariffs on steel and aluminum, just because he felt like it.
Late last year, around the same time as the big climate meeting
that happened in Scotland, the US and EU made an announcement
about how they are working together on a deal to transform those
tariffs into something that is mutual and linked to greenhouse
gases. 


There's definitely a lot of work happening in this space. We have
not yet settled on what the best policy tools are to promote
decarbonization. For solar panels, some people say “we should
have free trade in solar panels so that there are cheap solar
panels and everybody can have the cheapest possible clean
electricity.” Other people say “no, if we want to decarbonize we
should have high tariffs on solar panels so that countries can
have employment and manufacturing and broader social benefits,
which will make the whole country more supportive of solar
power.”


We still have a lot of work to do to figure out what a truly
climate-safe vision for trade policy is. There's a relatively
narrow set of policies that are traditional trade policies. In
most cases, for things like tariffs, that's often less important
than, what are the international reverberations? What are the
trade consequences of purely domestic policies like subsidies and
procurement policies? 


David Roberts:   


In terms of stimulating global movement toward industrial
decarbonization, our biggest tools are probably still domestic.
Doing it as fast as we can and making those products cheaper,
rationalizing the industry, etc., is probably going to be a
bigger deal than any tariffs we put on.


Rebecca Dell:  


Our goal is usually not that the trade policy itself will promote
decarbonization, but that we can put in place trade policies that
will prevent international trade from undermining our purely
domestic policies, so different countries can push their
industries to decarbonize faster without having to worry that
dirty production from overseas will flood into the market.


David Roberts:   


How do you prevent industry from just moving, or shifting
production? 


Rebecca Dell:  


This is one of the reasons why things like procurement policy are
so fantastic, because when the regulation is on the product, not
on the facility, there's no incentive to move the facility. The
market-creation policies allow you to sidestep some of these
difficult questions. 


People talk a lot about how businesses hate regulations.
Businesses don't hate regulations; businesses hate regulations
that they have to comply with, but their competitors don't. 


David Roberts:   


Well, I can not thank you enough. I know 10 times more about this
now than I did when we started, so I really appreciate you taking
all the time. Maybe someday we'll drill down a little deeper into
one of these many, many rabbit holes that we tripped so lightly
over in this conversation.


Rebecca Dell:  


I would be more than happy to talk in greater detail in the
future. As you can probably tell, talking about this is one of my
favorite things to do.


David Roberts:   


It's so fun. Thanks so much, Rebecca.


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