Arctic adventures: Olya Irzak of Frost Methane
Olya is the CEO of Frost Methane, a startup which “flares” (burns) methane. Flaring reduces methane’s warming potential by 28x by turning it into methane’s more famous but less-warming cousin, CO2. We discussed her journey in climate tech, selecting high-leverage problems, and how newcomers in climate tech should give her a call.
Within 5 minutes, Olya was giving me a detailed analysis of the virtues of different types of solar oven, an expertise she’d acquired whilst running “alternative festivals” for the quasi-religious Witnesses of Climatology group.
“Religions have the best track record of solving ‘tragedy-of-the-commons’ problems like climate change. So we formed a really diverse group of people interested in climate and we’d celebrate alternative religious holidays which centered around developing more sustainable systems.
So we were trying to run a barbecue for (Fossil Fuel) Independence Day. We started off with a bunch of Fresnel lenses [hyper-concentrating lenses used to melt metals] and tried to scramble some eggs, but we just ended up burning lots of very small holes. The next year we tested a variety of solar ovens, and there’s a fantastic one by GoSun which relies upon vacuum tubes. It’s not so easy to make your own vacuum tubes so we had to concede that DIY wasn’t the right option in this case”.
But DIY has served Olya pretty well at Frost Methane. Their approach hinges upon capturing methane — which is emitted in concentrated jets from melting permafrost — and burning it. In their initial struggle to find lightweight, sturdy ways to capture large amounts of natural gas, they hit upon heavily discounted ex-military parachutes. To find the methane, they managed to win a bidding war for the infra-red cameras of a bankrupt asteroid mining startup.
From Google to gas flaring
The mixture of grit, creativity, and engineering brainpower seems to have characterized Olya’s career so far. Born in Russia, she grew up in Israel, studying in Canada, Switzerland, and Sweden before settling in the USA.
“As a Russian who studied in chilly Canada, the idea of a bit of global warming initially didn’t bother me that much. It was only when I started reading about ocean acidification — which is much more alarmingly branded — that I began to realize the potential for truly catastrophic climate change. The potential for mass extinction of species was enough to make me want to only work on climate for the rest of my career”.
Olya cut her teeth in Google Energy and Google’s moonshot division, X, where she worked on electrical grids and heating electrification. Whilst at X, she started looking for problems where the impact was large but the number of people working on them was small.
“I realized that people didn’t even know how much methane was being emitted by oil and gas extraction [in 2013]. The estimates for methane emissions from natural gas fields ranged from 0.1% to 9%. And I was just so agitated — I thought it was INSANE that we didn’t know these numbers. Now every few years I try and sit down and look at all of the emissions data and just brainstorm on each of the sources of emission and think: what could we do here? It’s a very first-principles approach”.
This “first principles” approach can lead to unorthodox conclusions. Methane emissions from melting permafrost are one of the positive feedback loops which pique the interest of engineers and climatologists alike: as the earth gets warmer, more methane is released from the frost, which contributes to further warming. Methane is between 28–84x more warming than CO2 (depending upon the timescale on which it’s assessed). Olya started getting excited when she realized that this release was relatively concentrated in jets, in addition to diffuse leaking from lots of places. This meant that capturing it and burning it might be a viable option. But it didn’t mean it was easy.
As Olya puts it, “if I was a better businessperson or a worse adventurer, I probably wouldn’t have started working on permafrost.” Frost Methane began as an ambitious side project, enlisting collaborators from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and Ethan Chaleff & Laughlin Barker, friends who had the skills in mechanical and electrical engineering to prototype a monitoring solution. It was initially interesting because “when you divided the impact by the number of people working on it, it was a pretty high leverage problem”.
After a couple of expeditions, it became clear that methane capture and flaring could be an economically viable model for a climate tech startup, but it would require full time effort and substantial diversification. Methane from permafrost was only a small fraction of the problem. By broadening their focus to include the flaring of methane being released from coal mines, Frost Methane could take advantage of established protocols, easing entry into existing carbon markets and thus earning revenue.
Burning gas and selling the impact
Carbon markets allow polluting organizations to pay to offset their emissions — because, for instance, they’re subject to a cap-and-trade scheme, or because they have made public commitments to do so, as an increasing number of multinationals are opting to do. Suppliers like Frost Methane provide such offsets, verified through a third-party organization such as the American Carbon Registry or VERRA. Carbon markets have grown steadily over the last 3 years, hitting $215 billion in total value in 2019, and they show no sign of slowing. Despite COVID-19 delaying the arrival of a hotly anticipated scheme for offsetting aviation emissions (CORSIA), the future seems bright for carbon markets, with China’s plans for the world’s largest carbon market central to their recent commitment to carbon neutrality before 2060.
To Olya, this kind of market is fertile ground for innovation. “Allowing people to compete to see who can reduce carbon emissions the cheapest? That seems like a good way to go. It’s going to encourage people to look for lots of smaller, less obvious solutions, which might be missed by explicit legislation”
These non-obvious solutions are the ones likely to excite venture capitalists, who are rapidly moving into the space. PWC recently described climate tech as “the next frontier for venture capital”, reporting a 3750% increase in investment since 2013. By way of comparison, they note that “this is on the order of 3 times the growth rate of VC investment into AI, during a time period renowned for its uptick in AI investment.”
Olya’s own ambitions align well with VC’s appetite for outsized returns:
“They’re not really interested unless you can envisage a future where you’re making $100 million a year. If they invest in 10 startups, 9/10 are going to fail, so the one that succeeds has to be big, big enough to pay for the whole batch. For myself, I consider my impact threshold for starting a company to be mitigating 0.1% of global emissions annually. We think that Frost Methane’s impact could be as high as 1%”.
If you’re 50:50, just do it
We finished our conversation with some advice for people entering the space. Olya recounted early days at Google X, seeking out everybody working on climate and hounding them to have lunch. Although lunch opportunities are few and far between in 2020, she still advocates vigorous engagement in social activities, such as with the numerous groups in the space — ClimateLink, Verge, Watt It Takes, Witnesses of Climatology and of course Work On Climate. She’s also bullish on taking the leap into a role, and learning on the job.
“I guess I’d really like to tell people — if you’re 50:50, just do it. And actually, that’s not just about climate change — if you’re considering any career switch which will have some social benefit, go for it.
Aligning your work — which you do 40 hours a week — with your values is absolutely worth the 10k salary hit you’ll take. And it’s ok if you don’t have the expertise; you don’t need to know everything! If you’re a software engineer, you’ll be hired to do software, and you can learn the climate stuff from the people around you”.
We agreed that one of the scary things about a move into climate is that it’s hard for software professionals to sort the wheat from the chaff. As a mid-career developer, you can spot dodgy tech startups a mile off, but it’s much harder to figure out what’s good and bad in climate.
“In that case, I wish people would just call me. I spent 10 years learning this stuff and honestly, I would love to help people understand where companies they’re considering fit into the space of solutions”.
If that, or anything else we discussed, sounds interesting, grab a spot on Olya’s Office Hours!
We urgently need more brilliant minds spending their time preventing catastrophic climate change. This is why we created Work On Climate (workonclimate.org) to help skilled technical workers find new jobs in climate.
Work on Climate offers free services that empower people to make their transition: office hours with climate experts, learning groups to deep dive into subareas of climate, matchmaking with climate companies (climatecto.org), and technical volunteering (climatefellows.org). We fundamentally believe that climate action happens through a positive, action-oriented community — check out our very active Slack.
