Course Overview & Details
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Presenter: Stanford Professor (Earth Sciences, cross-listed in Engineering and the School of Medicine), leading global expert in biomineralization, with 20+ years of academic research and real-world commercial carbon capture experience. He built the first utility-scale carbon-to-cement plant in Moss Landing, CA, and is currently commercializing second-gen carbon sequestration tech for the global concrete industry.
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Host Context: Stanford University graduate-level lecture for Earth Sciences, Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Energy & Climate Policy students, part of the university’s sustainable energy and climate action curriculum.
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Session Format: 75-minute presentation + 15-minute live audience Q&A, with unfiltered industry and policy reality checks (no greenwashed hype).
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Core Audience: Climate policy students, civil/environmental engineers, earth scientists, clean tech entrepreneurs, and anyone frustrated that most mainstream climate solutions fail to scale or pencil out economically.
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Central Thesis: We’ve been approaching the CO2 crisis all wrong. Stop treating CO2 exclusively as a toxic pollutant to bury underground – it’s the most abundant raw material on Earth. The only scalable, permanent, and economically sustainable way to address climate change is to mimic nature’s 4-billion-year-old playbook: lock CO2 permanently into the built environment, using the concrete and construction materials the world already pours 32 billion tons of every single year.
