The young entrepreneur kicking goals for carbon capture
She’s trying to turn carbon dioxide into plaster board, but this young entrepreneur has some even bigger plans for Australia
Sophia Hamblin Wang spent her formative years in a tiny fishing village in far north Queensland, home to just a few hundred people. Now 31, the entrepreneur is hoping her innovative carbon capture and storage technology can have an impact on millions, if not billions, of people.
Hamblin Wang is the chief operating officer of Mineral Carbonation International, or MCi, the result of 12 years of research and development, and millions of dollars in grants from the federal and NSW governments, and mining services firm Orica.
The Australian National University graduate, who is also a Rubik’s cube master, swapped a career in academia to take on climate change after her hometown was hit by multiple category five cyclones. The catastrophes sparked her interest in climate change.
Her greentech company takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turns it into building materials and other industrial products. It’s proof, says Hamblin Wang, that carbon dioxide can help, rather than hinder, the planet. And she’s banking on rapid change once companies realise they can turn a profit from their carbon dioxide emissions.
“We make money out of emissions,” Hamblin Wang says. “Our business model is about turnig CO2 into usable materials and creating global industries around waste.
“The world is starting to take more notice of sustainability and carbon neutrality, and if you’re going to be interested in going down that path then you might as well do it in a profitable way.”
The executive says that even if Australia transitions to 100 per cent renewable energy, the country will still need to take CO2 out of the atmosphere to achieve its Paris targets.
“MCi is focusing on the cement and steel industries,” she says. “They don’t have an easy pathway to decarbonisation, and at this rate they’ll be emitting long into the future.
“We’re partnering with companies in those industries to help them find zero and negative emissions pathways.”
Hamblin Wang’s Canberra-based company has 22 employees — chemical engineers, process engineers and geologists — and is quickly expanding. The start-up was founded in 2013 and in 2016 set up a mineral carbonation research pilot plant in Newcastle. It was the world’s first carbon reactor. That same year, MCi signed a memorandum of understanding worth $100m with Singaporean company ArmorShield Holdings.
“At scale, our business model is extremely profitable”
She says MCi has the potential to lock away billions of tons of CO2 into usage materials, and is in talks with Australian companies in cement, steel and waste processing industries.
“At scale, our business model is extremely profitable,” she says.
“We’re locking away more CO2 than we’re producing. If we have 500 industrial mineral carbonation plants all over the world, we’ll be locking away billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide to use for billions of tonnes of building materials as well as locking away CO2 in a long-term, safe way.”
The mineral carbonisation process involves capturing CO2 when fossil fuels are burned, then transporting it to a plant where it is transformed into magnesium carbonate and silica sand. It can then be processed into cement, plasterboard, pavers and other products.
The lack of consensus in recent years on the best way for the planet to achieve carbon neutrality has an unusual side effect. Hamblin Wang finds herself with fewer competitors than she would like and has recently started an advocacy group for carbon capture and utilisation companies — CO2 Value Australia (CVA) — in a bid to make Australia the leader in the carbon technology space.
“We’re a smart country, we have all the capabilities here”
Says Hamblin Wang: “We need to signal to Australia, to the public and to governments, that Australia can be a hub for carbon processing. Technology is difficult to develop, so we need some policy certainty, as well as favourable conditions, to come up with technologies we have not even thought of yet.
“We’re a smart country, we have all the capabilities here, in resource processing and tech development. We should absolutely be looking at processing CO2 into different materials.”
Hamblin Wang is pushing hard for carbon capture and utilisation to be taken seriously at a global level. She was recently in Davos, where she presented on a panel and rubbed shoulders with heads of states as well as business leaders and celebrities such as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and will.i.am.
She’s also a member of a youth organisation called Global Shapers, a network of 10,000 people who aim to help influence the world with a youth voice. Each year it sends 50 members to Davos to help influence climate policy.
“With the bushfires and everything happening back home, a lot of people spent more time listening to what I had to say,” she says. “I had people’s ears. And it was a really good opportunity to get people listening to what we’re doing, which is solutions-focused technologies for climate change.”
She says that in one of the sessions, a CEO of a large company declared that his company committed to carbon neutrality by 2050, but that he didn’t see the point.
“At the end of the day, what does that even mean?” he told the forum, according to Hamblin Wang. “Most of us won’t even be here.”
Hamblin Wang says that when she presented her panel, immediately after those comments, she was quick to tackle those comments head on.
“I am going to be here in 2050,” she told the room.
She tells The Deal it’s important for the future of the planet to create business models as if we’re going to be living for another 200 years. “We have eight or 10 years to make a change with regard to our carbon emissions, and the 2020s are going to be the crucial decade to take action,” she says.
“I see my role as developing the technology, and communicating the potential of that technology and our industry to the world. There is a huge potential to achieve not just carbon neutrality, but carbon negativity, and develop new global industries that don’t even exist yet.”