Dai Ellis on what scaling up HIV medicines can teach us about building a thriving carbon removal market

The third episode of The Carbon Curve podcast is with Dai Ellis.

Today’s discussion is about sketching out a vision for the carbon removal market. Creating that market is going to be really tricky. Unlike other climate technologies carbon removal, for the most part, doesn’t deliver a product or service besides its climate benefit. But the market for carbon removal can’t exist without large purchasers creating consistent demand.

In recent months we’ve seen the private sector take up that mantle by banding together with other companies to create advance market commitments (or AMCs) to buy CDR, establishing much needed demand for this nascent industry.

The model is fashioned after AMCs that were used in the global health space to scale up access to vaccines, HIV medicines, and other life saving health products in low income countries.

Dai Ellis was instrumental in helping shape some of those markets back when we both worked at the Clinton Foundation (referred to as the Clinton Health Access Initiative or CHAI in this episode) well over 10 years ago.

Now he’s thinking about market shaping in the context of new climate technologies. He wrote a series of four articles on his newsletter (subscribe here) sharing his lessons in global health to the early carbon removal market. Despite some key differences that Dai points out, there’s some really valuable lessons that we can apply from global health to scaling up CDR. This episode will shed some light on those lessons.

Dai Ellis is an entrepreneur and executive coach to climate tech founders and CEOs. He helps companies through inflection-point moments of rapid growth, typically in the Series A to C phase, and his current clients include a range of leading climate tech companies like Arcadia, Sealed, Running Tide, and David Energy.

Climate tech is Dai’s third career chapter after long stints in healthcare and education. Most recently, he co-founded a VC-backed startup in Africa called Nova Pioneer, building the first pan-African network of K-12 schools offering world-class education at affordable tuition levels.

Even more relevant to what we’ll be talking about today, Dai previously led the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s (CHAI) work on creating and shaping markets for drugs, vaccines, and other health products in the developing world. During that stretch of his career he also chaired the Global Fund’s Market Dynamics Committee and served as an advisor to the Gates Foundation.

In this episode, Na’im and Dai talk about:

* What an advance market commitment (AMC) is, and how it was used in creating a market for vaccines and HIV medicines in low income countries

* Features and challenges of these global health markets vs. the early CDR market today

* Key similarities and differences between AMCs from the global health space and AMCs that have emerged to scale up CDR

* Dai’s six building blocks for not just creating, but shaping a healthy, thriving CDR market and the 2 building blocks we need to stand up most urgently

Read Dai’s excellent full series here:

* Frontier and its AMC progenitor

* Adventures in market shaping

* Frontier as a CDR market steward

* Toward a vision for the CDR market

Read my recent report with CarbonPlan on the barriers to scaling the carbon removal industry.

You can connect with Dai Ellis on LinkedIn or Twitter or shoot him an email at ellisdai [at] gmail [dot] com.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app or subscribe via The Carbon Curve newsletter here. If you’d like to get in touch with Na’im, you can reach out via Twitter and LinkedIn.

Na’im Merchant is an advisor and thought partner to start-ups, policy groups, and research organizations on scaling up the climate technologies to meet the monumental challenge removing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere to combat climate change. Every two weeks, Na’im will release a short interview with individuals advancing bold new ideas and taking a collective action approach to scaling up carbon removal.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carboncurve.substack.com