The following interview is a conversation we had with Omar Abou-Sayed, Co-Founder of Vaulted Deep, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $8 Million Raised to Build the Future of Carbon Removal
Omar Abou-Sayed
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Brett
No problem. So I’d love to kick off with where you began your career in 1998 and when you were an engineer at BP. So take us back to 1998. What types of projects were you working on?
Omar Abou-Sayed
Yeah, the first. And this tells you the foresight that BP had at the time under its CEO or John Brown. Well, vents or John Brown. My first week on the job, they handed me this binder, and it was a consultant’s report on emission technologies to consider for making the Gulf of Mexico operations for BP compliant with the Kyoto protocol. And so my first job was, hey, figure out how to implement this. And I remember thinking two things to myself. Like, on the one hand, how awesome it is. Is it that, like, I’m getting this much responsibility? Also, how crazy is it that, like, two months after graduation, I’m being given this much responsibility?
Omar Abou-Sayed
And I remember feeling a little conflicted, like, whether this was a sign of, you know, the company I worked for was taking it seriously enough that they wanted to do it versus taking it so unseriously that they gave it to someone who probably wasn’t qualified to do it. But, yeah, that was one of my first projects. I was also dealing with production operations from deepwater and facilities engineering from deepwater offshore structures and helping restore failed equipment, helping stop leaks from damaged couplings underwater. And I was spending a lot of time on really large intervention vessels offshore in the quarters where the remote operated vehicles were, like, looking at screens while we sank these tethered submarines to go and actuate valves underwater. I mean, it was. It was real Sci-Fi stuff. It was pretty cool.
Brett
And then where did you go from there? What was the next step in your career after that?
Omar Abou-Sayed
So, within BP, I held a variety of engineering and commercial kind of business roles. And then I got a tap on my shoulder and got sent to London to be part of the leadership team of the Russia business unit at a time when that business unit was trying to restore some business that had been taken from it by its business partners, and then setting the stage for a major push into Russia, into new business. And so I was a very junior person. I was like we called the turtle. I was with my home on my back, following everybody around, taking notes and helping them with their actions. So it was an executive and development role. Really fascinating, though, to start understanding the geopolitics behind what I had previously thought as an engineering set of problems.
Omar Abou-Sayed
I then left and went to Harvard Business School, where I did my MBA, and afterwards was recruited back into BPD by my mentor, who had previously been in charge of Russia and the Middle east at BP, but was then at that point running chemicals and had asked me to be part of this new venture to spin chemicals out of BP and set it up as a standalone public company in the US. It was kind of a dream job I didn’t know that I had been dreaming about. His point at the time was that most of our people are in unions and we can’t make a lot of changes there. Most of our plants and assets are being given to us. We have a fixed starting point.
Omar Abou-Sayed
All I can really do is think about the leadership of the business and how I change the DNA of this organization by bringing in new people with new gene pool in. And so I got to be in charge of the whole HR ecosystem, how we recruit, who we recruit, how we retain them, how we develop them, who we hire, how we fire, how we pay. It was really awesome. And then from there we moved. That business ended up getting acquired from BP after we had turned it around. And then I got brought into a private equity fund called TPG, where I was an entrepreneur in residence, along with my mentor and a couple other people from that BP team.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And there I put together a bunch of strategies and investment theses to pursue everywhere from let’s buy the Chiquita banana company and convert it into a biofuels business all the way to lets buy BP and take it apart and sell it to different businesses and unlock value because its worth more in pieces than as a single entity. And I was really focused on energy services and cleantech, and that kind of got me the cleantech bug and I ended up dropping into one of the portfolio companies that our team put together for TPG, which was called elements renewable sciences, and that was a renewable chemicals company. That was the last business I was in as a vice president before starting my Founder journey.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And it also played a pretty key role introducing me the problems around some of the cleantech feedstocks, like algae oil, which unlocked in my mind a connection point between our ability to store carbon in organic matter, but then not really necessarily being able to do things that were economic at the time. And I thought, gosh, theres this technology that my dad had invented years prior that was in response to some environmental legislation being passed, and the need oil companies needs to remediate waste in challenging and sensitive environments. And I realized you could really store and trap carbon very inexpensively in organic matter because it absorbs the carbon kind of in passing in its existence. And if you combined it with this technology that my dad had invented with his colleagues and contemporaries, you could actually sequester that underground.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And I thought maybe we could sell carbon credits for this. And that was the seed of what became Vaulted about twelve years later. Unfortunately, when I had the idea originally there was no market for those carbon credits, and it took about a decade for that market to be able to emerge, for us to really pursue that business model in earnest.
Brett
What were you looking at?
Omar Abou-Sayed
Or what were you able to see.
Brett
That others werent, that it took them a decade for the market to catch up with you?
Omar Abou-Sayed
Well, I think it took some urgency in the market. It took a generational transition. So I think there are a lot of us who maybe thought that we need to do something about climate change. I was not ahead of the game there. The Kyoto protocol pre existed me, but I think what it took for the market to evolve, frankly, and I say this with respect to those whose shoulders I stand, but it took the baby boomers relinquishing the reins of power to generation XDEM and to millennials, who in general grew up where climate change was not controversial. I mean, it was taught to us as it is, as science. And so weve moved into a period, I think, where both the urges around climate change is obvious.
Omar Abou-Sayed
The impacts of our failure to deal with climate change yet have touched everybody, whether its because your home insurance rates are skyrocketing, or because youre having wildfires or hurricanes or floods or rain, aberrant rain events. So it’s become very apparent to everyone that the need is now, and the people who have the reins of power are finally people who aren’t standing idle and denying the science of it. And so I think that’s what it took for this market to evolve in the way where companies like mine can now really lean in and sprint.
Brett
How would you describe the state of the market today.
Omar Abou-Sayed
I’d say there’s two separate markets in the carbon and in the environmental space. Theres a whole universe of technologies that just reduce the emissions or reduce the environmental footprint around preexisting industries. And then theres this emerging industry of like carbon removal, which is about how do we abate the last hardest to abate emissions that our economy simply cant move away from easily. And the way I think about that is you hear a lot about net zero companies like mine that are in carbon removal. We are the net, in net zero. We are the thing that will balance off the hard to abate emissions from everybody else. So what you find is a fairly mature set of conversations around reducing emissions and emission reduction technologies, monetizing them through cost savings and monetizing them through legacy types of carbon credits. That’s been around for a while.
Omar Abou-Sayed
That market is going through some turmoil because there’s some concern about the quality of those carbon credits. In the meantime, you have this much more nascent emerging set of carbon removal technologies backed by carbon removal credits, which is its own emerging market. And thats a market that is projected to grow substantially in 10,000 fold or something like that. Its the fastest growing part of the carbon environmental abatement and climate change abatement ecosystem, but it is still very nascent. It feels like a club. It feels like all the companies know each other, the carbon credit buyers all know each other. It feels like very much still a small club that is growing. Trey.
Brett
And when it comes to who you’re selling to, who is that dream customer, what market are you selling into?
Omar Abou-Sayed
So we are primarily selling into companies that have made net zero commitments and have explicitly said that carbon removal is part of their strategy. In the main, this is a voluntary carbon credit. So this is a voluntary purchase they’re making. In some extent. It’s some mix between marketing budget for them, corporate philanthropy, and also represents a lot of foresight. So these are four thinking companies that are trying to catalyze and establish this necessary market and create a space for these companies to thrive early on, ultimately. So our ideal customer profile is a company that kind of fits in that category, but longer term and maybe even medium terminal. We look beyond 2030 and onto 2030 to 2050 timeframe. We expect and hope that this market evolves where the economy has accepted an obligation around this type of balancing of this net and net zero.
Omar Abou-Sayed
Lots of countries have made net zero commitments. Lots of companies have made net zero commitments, but it’s still all voluntary. And so in the end, we think we need to move to where there’s collective action driven by regulation, driven by organizing mechanisms that goes beyond a club of companies trying to do the right thing so that it becomes a more broad based adoption.
Brett
Are you actively working then with lobbyists and other firms to try to shape what that regulation and that policy would look like?
Omar Abou-Sayed
Look, we are active in the conversation with all parties who are working to create this market today. So we’re not like actively lobbying to create obligations on our customers. But we are in the conversation with the policymakers who are looking at incentives that they can write into the tax code and incentives, whether they be regional incentives or national incentives, to promote and give companies a way to monetize their environmental activities. So a good example of that is the 45 Q tax credit as written. 45 Q is really best for companies that are trying to trap gaseous CO2 from the atmosphere and trap it into some materials or put it underground. It’s not great for those of us, and it doesn’t. We don’t qualify today.
Omar Abou-Sayed
Those of us who take carbon that was captured by something organic, which would otherwise be end of life and release back to the atmosphere, and we sequester that and prevent its release. 45 Q doesn’t cover us. So there is an organized effort to explain to policymakers that there’s real science today, companies like ours, that can meet the urgency of the moment with a mature technology that has already scaled and proven at scale, but where this incentive really needs to apply so that it can promote its adoption. So for now, at our size, the voluntary carbon markets are working great for us, but we do want to see the playing field be level, where there are incentives that are being promoted for managing carbon emissions and managing carbon removal, that those incentives be doled out in a fair and level way.
Brett
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Omar Abou-Sayed
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Brett
So, obviously, regulation is important to you in the business. Do you ever worry about, like, the negative impact of that? Do you ever worry about regulation coming out that could harm you? Let’s say if there’s regulation, that there’s like this incentive, and then five years later, that incentive gets like, wiped out and they take that away. Do you, like, worry about those types of things and think about those types.
Omar Abou-Sayed
Of things all the time? I find that the regulators we interact with are fantastic partners in really thinking hard about how to get the right thing done that both protects the environment today from unintended consequences and also protects it long term. So I find that those conversations are actually fairly easy. So I want to separate out regulation from policy. And I think from a policy standpoint, what we’ve seen in environmental tax credits in the past, things like ITC and PTC that came in and out, is it can cause starts and stops to development. So stability matters regardless of the level of support, kind of stable support matters, and we would advocate for that. But there’s a market here for us now, and we are getting great traction. So this is like future Omars issue that I’m sort of planning the seeds to deal with.
Omar Abou-Sayed
But today we are putting carbon underground. We are selling every last ton we can put underground. We are permitting new sites. We’re having great conversations with the regulators about adopting our precedented facility type permits where we have in California and we have in Kansas and promulgating those into other states. So for us, it’s like we have more opportunity than we can act on at this moment, and we’re chasing hard at all of those. But we do want to sort of work with others who are planting the seeds on making sure that this industry continues to get the support that it deserves.
Brett
You mentioned there it’s an issue that a future Omar would be worried about. What’s the issue today that current Omar is worried about? What’s on your mind? What’s keeping you up at night, just from a business perspective, like what’s top of mind?
Omar Abou-Sayed
So I’m going to have a real human moment. I’ve been an entrepreneur in entrepreneurial companies for about the last 15 years in building facilities in the past. What keeps me up at night is someone getting hurt. I get phone calls at the night and on the weekends from certain members of the broader team, and this includes the predecessor or company I founded. And you see it, and when you answer the phone, you’re praying that it’s a money problem and not someone got hurt. I. So everything else is. Ive become kind of Zen about the entrepreneurial journey. I think you have to because it can be lonely. The highs are super high and the lows can be really low. And so I think some amount of emotional moderation to deal with it. But thats the thing that keeps me up at night most.
Omar Abou-Sayed
If I think about differently existential risks for our company, id say there are folks in the broader conversation and broader stakeholders who often haven’t met a clean tech project they like yet and will let perfect be the enemy of good enough. And so every technology I’m commercializing, technology that came out of the oil and gas industry that my dad invented to help oil companies be cleaner. But fundamentally, it relies on sequestering things deep in the earth. It relies on the science that also underpins hydraulic fracturing, the pressure pumping science that underlies that. And its really important. While people of good faith who take the time to understand the deployment of our technology and what its built on get very comfortable with how safe it is. Certainly the regulators have gotten very comfortable with what were doing and its safety.
Omar Abou-Sayed
But I do worry that we will miss opportunity in states or in jurisdictions, municipalities where were not given a fair opportunity to explain the technology. So community engagement and really being able to explain what we do is so important to opening the widest aperture for us to deploy. And so that’s why ahead of regulatory was one of our first new hires into the business after we carved it out and spun it off. It is a key focus area for us that represents how fast we can deploy.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And because the problem is so urgent, unlike many other companies that are maybe in the science fair project camp and who are going to absolutely play a critical role in the future as their costs come down the cost curve and as they become more mature, we are taking a technology that has been deployed and that we helped deploy globally for the last 30 plus years that relies on off the shelf equipment that we can buy order and customize from a wide array of vendors. It’s scaled, it’s down the cost curve. We’re selling our carbon removal tons at half the price, plus or minus, maybe not quite half, but nearly half the price of our closest analog companies. And so for me, were in a moment where the urgency is demanded.
Omar Abou-Sayed
Weve built a company and a technology that can meet the urgency of the moment. And its so critical, therefore, that were able to deploy and get the freedom to operate, to deploy as fast as we can.
Brett
Did people get it right away? When you go into these communities and start talking about what youre building, do they get it or does it require just a massive amount of education for them to understand?
Omar Abou-Sayed
It depends. Our most recent facility that Weve ramped up and opened was in Kansas, and we did a lot of work with. With regulators, with our neighbors, with our communities, with policymakers, with our government representatives. I’ll say that it didn’t take long for them to understand what were doing and what we wanted to do. And really, I remember we had this town hall at our site with cookies that one of the wives of one of the attendees had baked, and our state senator was there, and the head of the regulatory body that issues our permits was there, and all the neighbors were there. I gave the spiel, and I was ready, right? I was ready to go into science mode, and I can flip the science mode and switch on and get to talking about all these things.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And the first question was, when do you all think you’re going to be open, and when will you start accepting applications for jobs? And I think people want to see technologies get deployed that are good for the environment. And they understand that in the absence of what we can do, both the climate is suffering, but there are real local co benefits to what we do that deal with things like land application of biosolids that have contaminated forever chemicals in it, PFAS and PFOA, and sometimes metals and sometimes pathogens. So when you take the full picture and you kind of step back and look at all the benefits, we get a lot of support. And that’s one of the things, my favorite things about this technology is it’s not just solving the climate issue. We’re actually solving multiple problems at once.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And I think that really paves the way for us to have positive conversations there.
Brett
From a marketing perspective, how would you summarize your general marketing philosophy and approach?
Omar Abou-Sayed
I’m not sure that this will be exactly how we do it on a go forward basis, but I am a very science person. I always joke with my friends on both sides of the political aisle. I say it’s one thing to say I believe the science when youre talking about vaccines, but then not believe the science when youre talking about wastewater disposal through an injection well, or GMO’s or whatever it is. And so I really take a science first approach. One of my core held values is that knowledge and science, thats a core part of our messaging. And its really important a because it addresses a lot of the concerns that a person of good faith comes into this conversation who isnt well studied on the topic, but has heard things. Right. And so it addresses those concerns very squarely.
Omar Abou-Sayed
It also plays into just the narrative of the company. Right. This was a problem that my dad and his colleagues were presented with when the Clean Water act was passed. And my dad was leading a research team that was experimenting with different hydraulic fracturing technologies and what materials could be used as proppants in those wells. When the EPA and NGO’s came and said, listen, new legislation is passed. Your prior operation, this is to the oil company my dad worked for. Your prior operation of leaving your oily drilling wastes on the surface of the tundra here in the north slope of Alaska isn’t permissible anymore. What are you going to do about it? And plan a was like, excavate it, stick it on a ship and haul it to a landfill in like, Washington state, which was very expensive.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And my dad said, look, I’ve been doing all this research, my team and I, and we think we can grind this material up and put it back where it came from. This is rock that was excavated with the drill bit and brought to the surface from the deep earth. We can return it back to the deep earth if we use hydraulic fracturing. Science, the EPA and the NGO’s and the state of Alaska all signed off, got on board, and, you know, this technology was birthed out of a scientific solution to an environmental problem. And so I start from there. Theres another angle we could start with, which is really about the co benefits and about solving the multiple problems at once. And I think that really resonates with other audiences.
Brett
What have you learned about fundraising so far?
Omar Abou-Sayed
So its a little obvious, but take money when you can, because its not a foregone conclusion that just because you have a great answer that the funds will be there. I also really subscribe to the perspective of be known before you need money. Make sure that if you have a target set of funds that you think are the right investors for you, get to know them at least one round before you’re ready for their money. Tell them what you plan to do and meet your commitment. So if you say, look, this is the objective of what we’re currently trying to do, here are the three things we want to prove out. I’ll keep you informed. And as we prove those things out, I’d love to come back and have a conversation with you. Get known before you need the money.
Omar Abou-Sayed
Be honest about the milestones you intend to pursue, and also be honest about the risks. I found that when I have a conversation with someone, I say, I run companies that rely on deep well injection and deep well injection science and were experts at it. And here are the risks of injecting things underground, and heres how we mitigate them. But being honest about the risks and what youre doing to mitigate it gives you a lot of credibility. Its a lot better than trying to arm, wave or ignore it because a smart investor, and you only want money from smart investors, theyre going to do their homework.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And if theres a significant risk out there that they find that you havent pre addressed, then you kind of lose credibility because either you look like you didnt know about it or you didnt want to talk about it. The last thing is timing really matters. Raising money in a hard environment, there are a lot more great ideas than ideas that survive and ideas that get funded. And raising in a great environment is a lot easier than raising in a tough environment. A lot of great ideas dont get funded at bottom of cycle. So timing does matter. You dont control timing, but timing does matter.
Brett
Final question for you. Lets zoom out. Three to five years into the future, whats the big picture vision? Whats the company going to look like? And most importantly, whats the impact going to look like?
Omar Abou-Sayed
Trey? Yeah, I mean, we will be the largest carbon removal company. I think well get there before five years and ill say if I were to qualify it, durable, permanent, high quality carbon removal company. But we will be the largest carbon removal company at the lowest price. We will have a fleet of new wells that we’ve built in multiple jurisdictions, both domestically and hopefully internationally. And I think if we do this right, we will have created a great return for our investors and have a clear glide path to not getting to tens of wells, but getting to hundreds of wells. And we will have inspired lookalikes and positive. We will, who won’t be as awesome as we are, but we will inspire look alikes who take their own tack about this broader technological theme that we’re playing into.
Omar Abou-Sayed
And we will have inspired them and magnified our impact that way.
Brett
Amazing. Love the vision. And I’ve really loved this conversation. We’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired and they want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go?
Omar Abou-Sayed
Feel free to email me@omaraultedeep.com, or come to our website, www.vaulteddeep.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on Twitter. We’re not on TikTok or some of the other socials, but we’re out there and we’d love to hear from you.
Brett
I don’t think too many in our audience are active tech talk users, so no worries there.
Omar Abou-Sayed
Awesome.
Brett
Thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Omar Abou-Sayed
Thanks, Brett. Appreciate you.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio.
Omar Abou-Sayed
If you’re a B2B Founder.
Brett
Looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionarie on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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