“When I envision the future, I still see CO2-made materials being a big part of everyday life. It’s going to be a huge infrastructure change to use CO2 instead of merely throwing it away.“
| In celebration of women’s history month in March, this issue features Dr. Etosha Cave, Co-Founder and CSO of Twelve and history-making woman. Dr. Cave is the co-founder and CSO of Twelve (formerly known as Opus 12), a start-up company dedicated to recycling carbon dioxide and water into higher-valued products–such as jet fuel–using metal catalysts, and electricity. Twelve recently received $20 million in funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. She is also a Member of the NREL Advisory Board. A Houston native, she earned a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. |
| You lived in Antarctica for 5 months. What was that like? Antarctica was great. An Antarctic summer is equivalent to a Michigan winter. You need a lot of cold weather gear, e.g. heavy, fancy parkas, insulated boots, etc. There are about 1000 people on the station, so you develop a great sense of community. I had a lot of amazing conversations with interesting people in the evenings.  You are an amazingly accomplished individual. What do you feel some of your most gratifying accomplishments have been? I am really proud of how Twelve has grown and developed. Our team is really diverse, and we have all been able to come together as a team and create a strong company. Our goal is to drive technology as far as it can go globally. It has also been very gratifying to have one’s work in graduate school become a reality. |
| You’ve talked about how growing up as a teenager next to an abandoned oil and gas site helped ignite your passions to become an engineer. You wanted to clean up the waste from oil or gas energy production. It sounds like you were always a big picture person, even as a child. What do you see as the big picture for CCU in the next few years? That abandoned oil and gas site had tanks that were buried under ground and there was some type of organic waste that leached into the water supply. There were two failure points: leaking tanks and water lines not secured from leaks. No one talked about the site until it became apparent that there was something wrong with the water. It was indeed something that altered my course towards building a future that is absent of industrial waste adversely affecting our environment. With respect to the future of CCU, carbon underpins our known world. But we are building this future in which we can still have this carbon molecule do all of the amazing things it does, but we are able to lessen its harmful consequences when it is merely thrown away. |