Today's guest is Talal Hasan, a lawyer turned venture capitalist turned climate tech founder who has spent the better part of a decade chasing a rather ambitious goal: turning carbon dioxide into rock. His journey started in the Omani investment world, helping set up the venture capital arm for the Sultanate's sovereign wealth fund, but a 2018 discovery about a massive dead zone in the Arabian Sea sent him down a rabbit hole that would eventually lead to 44.01.

Named after the molecular mass of CO2, 44.01 is an Oman-based carbon mineralisation company that accelerates a natural process where ultramafic rock absorbs carbon dioxide and converts it into solid carbonate minerals, and it turns out the Arabian Peninsula has some of the largest surface-level deposits of exactly this rock anywhere in the world. What normally takes decades in nature, Talal and his team are doing in months.

The company most recently raised a $42M Series A from a cap table that reads like a climate tech fantasy draft: Equinor Ventures, Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Sumitomo, Air Liquide, and a personal nod from Sam Altman's Apollo Projects for good measure. They're now scaling from pilot projects with ADNOC and Masdar to commercial operations, with plans to export the technology they've developed in the Gulf to formations in Norway, Canada, and beyond.

We get into the Peter Kelemen article that sparked the idea, what it takes to convince the world that drilling into rock is actually the answer to climate change, and why transportation logistics might be the real constraint on scaling carbon removal globally.

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Timestamps: 

00:00 - Introduction 
03:00 - The Arabian Sea Dead Zone Discovery 
05:00 - From Venture Capitalist to Climate Founder 
08:00 - The Peter Keleman Moment 
13:00 - Why Oman's Geology is Perfect 
19:00 - Accelerating Nature: Decades to Months 
24:00 - Addressing the Greenwashing Question 
30:00 - Building Proprietary Mineralization Technology 
36:00 - The ADNOC Partnership Strategy 
41:00 - Exporting Hard Tech from MENA 
45:00 - The Long-Term Investment Thesis 
47:00 - Taking 44.01 Global

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Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/416fda01/transcript.txt

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