Eion is a carbon removal technology company that offers a scientifically proven, permanent, cost-effective, scalable, and nature-based solution for carbon removal through agriculture. Pulse 2.0 interviewed co-founder and CEO Adam Wolf to learn more about the company.
Adam Wolf’s Background
Adam Wolf has always been passionate about farming.
“But honestly, beer was the real starting point of the journey that would eventually become Eion,” Wolf reflected. “I loved brewing beer in high school and saw that UC Davis had a beer brewing major. And I thought ‘Oh my God, this is my life path.’ I applied, got in, and through UC Davis, was exposed to agriculture. I just fell in love with every aspect: the farmers, the problem-solving, and the variability of climates worldwide. From there, I explored many facets of agriculture: becoming an agronomist, working as an assistant farm advisor in Yolo County in California, serving as a pest control advisor, and eventually founding my first agriculture company Arable. The common thread has always been figuring out how to leverage all the agricultural lands we manage as a force for good. And more recently, that focus has shifted to figuring out how to put agricultural land to work to remove carbon dioxide, which is what we do at Eion.”
Formation Of Eion
How did the idea for Eion come together? “It’s been a career of experience in agronomy, soil science, geochemistry, and most importantly, collaboration with farmers. We are different in that we work closely with farmers and ranchers to safely and permanently pull carbon out of the atmosphere using the Earth’s natural mineralization cycle. While I was in graduate school, I did research in the former Soviet Union to consider the climate at a continental scale. Specifically, we investigated how soil captures carbon when agricultural lands are left alone. It turns out that the soil soaks up carbon, but it doesn’t stay stored for long because, when the land inevitably goes back into production, the carbon is re-released,” Wolf shared. “During this same period, I also studied Earth systems science and learned more about Earth’s workings and geochemistry. I came to realize that rock weathering has always functioned as a planetary thermostat. Then, in 2015, The National Academy of Sciences published a paper suggesting the potential of enhanced rock weathering (ERW) as a carbon removal pathway. Here it was again – this planetary thermostat as old as time – and I felt like I had a sense of how to scale it with all of the lessons I had gained in agriculture. But no one knew how to measure it in order to quantify the carbon removal. As my interest in ERW grew stronger over the next few years, I reached out to my co-founder Elliot Chang, a wildly gifted chemist, and we started figuring out how to directly and precisely measure ERW in an agricultural context.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Wolf’s favorite memory working for Eion so far? “My favorite memories have been gathering around a dinner table with our team and with different folks in the carbon space,” Wolf pointed out.
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges Wolf faced in building the company and has the current macroeconomic climate had any effect on the company? “The macroeconomic conditions are challenging for most, and I wouldn’t frame this environment as uniquely difficult for us. Eion faces many of the same challenges businesses generally face, but being in carbon removal creates some unique hurdles. First, carbon removal is inherently about clean-up, and many approaches operate more like a tax on society. That only creates resistance to adoption because you’re creating an added burden for the supply chain to adopt your solution,” Wolf acknowledged. “Instead, Eion has been focused since day one on creating value for everyone involved. This supply chain mentality isn’t sexy or shiny, but at the end of the day, it’s core to making the economic case for why anyone should finance and invest in our business. What does this mean in practice? We use a mineral that has soil and crop benefits for farmers. Our measurement and deployment methods don’t create more work for agricultural partners; instead, we accommodate how they already work. We work with local and regional businesses on last-mile logistics to create jobs, partner with trusted advisors to manage farmer relationships and use existing equipment and machinery to reduce technical risk. It’s all a little boring and practical at the end of the day. But the gist is that we make sure incentives are aligned and that we’re creating value for people so we can build a business that will scale and endure.”
Core Products
What are Eion’s core products and features? “Our core customers are entities looking to meet their climate goals, and they pay us by the ton to remove atmospheric carbon. To do this, Eion works closely with farmers, ranchers, and existing agriculture systems to get pulverized minerals onto fields where they will quickly absorb carbon dioxide before transporting it away to be permanently stored. (This is enhanced rock weathering or ERW generally.) Eion didn’t invent ERW – the Earth did! – but we figured out how to scale it by working with the agricultural system. In some ways, we’re simply a logistics company that removes carbon dioxide,” Wolf explained. “One of Eion’s unique features, outside of our strong relationship with agriculture, is our direct measurement approach – soil fingerprinting – which can precisely show that carbon dioxide was removed before being transported away and permanently sequestered. We created a super practical way of doing this in the field that avoids creating extra work for growers and will eventually be something that other ERW suppliers can use to deploy their solutions.”
Most Significant Milestones
What have been some of Eion’s most significant milestones? “Most significantly, we’ve taken the very Princeton concept of developing a deeply considered theoretical model (the MRV) and then going to test that model to see if it holds true. I think a lot of people theorize without ever testing, or they collect data randomly and hope to find a pattern using what my professor calls ‘force of intellect’ to solve the puzzle. Only then do they test it,” Wolf pointed out. “At Eion, in contrast, we first developed the theory and then implemented it at ever larger scales. From bench to plot, to the whole field, and then to multi-state, our theory holds up.”
Customer Success Story
When I asked Wolf about a customer success story, he replied:
“While we love talking about the tons of rock we move and the tons of carbon we remove, we love talking even more about the value we’re creating for farmers. We just posted this video and this blog post that gets into more detail.”
Funding
Eion closed a $12 million Series A funding round in December 2022. That funding round was co-led by AgFunder and Ridgeline along with participation from a broad coalition of strategic climate, agriculture tech, financial and impact investors, as well as upstream mineral supplier Sibelco. New and returning investors also include Carbon Removal Partners, Mercator Partners, Orion, Overture, SLVC and Trailhead Capital. In terms of revenue, Eion is selling tons of carbon via Patch.
“We’re on track to remove 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually starting in 2026,” Wolf assessed.
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Eion pursuing? “You’d have to math your way through figuring out how much carbon needs to be removed. Nan Ransohoff and the Frontier team have done a lot of this research,” Wolf replied. “We have interest from farmers representing over 1 million acres of working land in the United States. We’re working to gin up the demand from carbon removal buyers in order to match this supply potential.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Eion from its competition? “There are various ways to do ERW; our differentiation comes from how we fit within the existing agricultural system. It’s our practical way of getting a proven carbon removal pathway (ERW) to market quickly, with less technology or adoption risk, while creating value along the way,” Wolf emphasized. “Perhaps what sets us apart more than anything else is our focus on value creation and ensuring that the economics work all the way down to the acre.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Eion’s future company goals? “A key measure of success for Eion is creating better economic outcomes in the rural areas where we operate, so we are hoping to amplify stories and maximize impact in these communities. And our approach is a practical solution that can be scaled today, so our immediate focus is commercialization, which includes getting our own mill, moving even more rock, and creating more jobs,” Wolf concluded. “On the science side, we have a lot of active collaboration going on to advance rigorous measurement and standardization for ERW. That includes working with independent verification and certification bodies, stress-testing our methodology in partnership with academics and experts at institutions like the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the Leverhulme Center for Climate Mitigation, and looking ahead to publishing a final paper in 2023. We’re also working with UC Berkeley, UIUC, University of Nebraska, University of Sheffield, USDA-ARS, Rutgers, and organizations like SGS, AgMetrics, and the Illinois Crop Improvement Association to build a robust set of data points on ERW for continued research.”
