USC Dornsife alumnus lassoes carbon from the sky

In Hinwil, Switzerland, a beatific Zurich hamlet that plays home to less than 12,000 people, a collection of inconspicuous machines is steadily changing our world. The whirring contraptions are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is then piped to a greenhouse where it enables vegetables to flourish. Built by Swiss company Climeworks, this factory is the first of its kind — a commercial-scale outfit that captures the excess CO₂ clogging our atmosphere and turns it into a useful product.

Climeworks’ success is due in part to the carbon capture advocacy of Julio Friedmann, who earned his doctorate in geology from USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 1995.

Music and science

Raised in Rhode Island by immigrant parents — his father was a piano-playing physicist from Venezuela and his mother a Colombian medical technologist — Friedmann’s early years were guided by two passions: science and music. He originally attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue a degree in physics, but his other interest eventually won out. He ended up with an undergraduate degree in music composition, instead.

Then, Friedmann says, a hotshot young geology professor urged him back on the path of science. MIT geoscientist John Grotzinger recognized Friedmann’s strong scientific acumen and encouraged him to turn his focus back to science. Friedmann went on to earn a Master of Science degree in geology.

A chance encounter with another future mentor led Friedmann to USC. At a conference, Grotzinger introduced Friedmann to Douglas Burbank, then an associate professor of Earth sciences at USC Dornsife. Burbank’s enthusiasm for field work led Friedmann to conclude that experiencing geology up close and personal, “on the ground, under my feet, in my fingernails,” would be an important next step. By his first semester at USC Dornsife, he had already spent 10 out of 13 weekends in the field, gathering plenty of grit beneath his nails.

“The carbon wrangler”

Since earning his Ph.D., Friedmann has spent decades working on capturing carbon from the environment. From his role at the Department of Energy under President Barak Obama, where he headed research and development in numerous fields including carbon storage and CO₂ removal, to his current role as lead of the Carbon Management and Research Initiative at Columbia University in New York, he’s earned his nickname of “the carbon wrangler.” 

Julio Friedmann (Photo: Courtesy of Julio Friedmann.) 

Friedmann’s enthusiasm for his work is contagious. We already recognize the importance of cleaning our streets of trash, he argues, thus we should also be cleaning our atmosphere of its “trash” to prevent the catastrophic corrosion of our environment. Despite significant recent efforts across the globe to limit emissions, we are already on track to emit enough CO₂ over the next 30 years to warm the globe two degrees Celsius. Suddenly, not just preventing but removing carbon in our atmosphere becomes an urgent goal.

This understanding has led Friedmann to collaborate with Helena, a new type of organization based in Los Angeles that aims to address some of the world’s most pressing societal problems. His work with Helena resulted in a 2016 competition to identify and provide investment to promising, early-stage concepts that aim to curb climate change.

Climeworks won that competition and has since worked closely with Helena, going on to build two more carbon extraction plants like the one in Hinwil, with plans to bring the technology to the United States, as well.

Finding solutions in the market

Given his passionate advocacy, it’s unexpected that Friedmann began his career in the oil industry, at Exxon Mobil. He spent five years there before joining the University of Maryland as a researcher. He was delighted to find that tackling the problem of carbon capturing was the perfect amalgamation of his graduate studies and his private sector work. Solving this tough and persistent problem requires both technical know-how and policy-making to motivate private sector innovation, he says.

Indeed, if you ask Friedmann how to most effectively implement carbon capture, he’ll point to the market. Motivate people financially to capture carbon, he says, and you’ll suddenly find solutions that weren’t there before.

He’s a big fan of the 2018 reform of the Federal Tax Carbon Credit 45Q, for which he testified in Congress three times. 45Q provides lucrative tax credits to companies that are willing to capture and store carbon, spurring private companies into projects they may not otherwise have pursued.

Friedmann says it’s these sorts of policies that enabled the cost of solar and wind energy to dramatically decrease over the past few decades, and he is optimistic the same will go for carbon capture technology.

Creative uses for extracted CO₂, from carbonizing beverages to producing plastics to powering greenhouses like the one in Hinwil, are already popping up across the globe. And wherever these innovations arise, you may just find the carbon wrangler behind the scenes.