I first time met Katja Grothe-Eberhardt at a B-Corp CEO dinner a dark winter day in 2023. It quickly became clear that Katja and I shared two big passions: positive environmental impact and coffee - both which have been the heated discussion themes for our following catch ups: how to make improvements in quality of life. Turns out that the two objectives, carbon mitigation and good coffee find their intersection quite easily.

As CEO of Klimate, which she co-founded with Mads Emil Dalsgaard and Simon Bager, Katja has since 2020 been obsessed with finding better and more direct ways to solve the climate crisis. Direct as in directly catching CO2 from the air and store it in the ground or direct in preparing soil for an optimized carbon sequestration, to name a few among many. Klimate does this by building a digital platform to which companies can attach and together with Klimate build a model for offsetting some or all their yearly emissions. Klimate doesn’t act as the agents of carbon removal but facilitates the removal through carefully curated and trusted companies and works as a liaison that connects the emitting entities to the right sequestering entities, often a compilation of them.

Katja displays a rare degree of trustworthiness, which in my estimation is the underlying driver of environmental impact, and with Katja's big interest in specialty coffee - which only underscores this dimension - it became obvious that Klimate was the carbon capturing company Prolog had to work with.

Our 55.5 Ton GHG Capture Pledge of 2024 is only the beginning of a hopefully long-term collaboration with Klimate to reach net zero by 2050. To understand the importance and nuances of carbon capture we invited Katja to a coffee in our meatpacking coffee shop. The insights Katja unfolded were truly insightful. To uncover these, as well as understand why we might look into a future where GHG is collected in the household and disposed as a recycling fraction.

What is the story behind Klimate?

Back in 2019 I became a mom for the first time. When my son was around three months old, I was very impacted by what we saw around the world with forest fires and floods. This was one of the first years where this was getting a lot of attention. We started to document that these things are man-made, and coming from a background having worked with finance, investments and strategy overall for companies I got extremely involved in how we actually solve this problem. How do we avoid more of these bad things from happening in the future? I met my two co-founders, one of them being a PhD within the topic of carbon removal. This was how we kicked off Klimate, because it was focused on how we scale technologies and how we ensure that there's a science led way to evaluating and understanding the different technologies that are emerging for storing and removing CO2.

What are the main drivers behind Klimate’s success?

It's two things. One being a pure commitment to working with carbon dioxide removal from the very beginning. I think we have very high integrity that's been there from the very beginning. The other part is that we are extremely science led. We are driven bottom up by science and data - we only work with projects that live up to our standards, and we often spend several months following technologies to get the right level of confidence to work with it. You can say we're science led, tech enabled. We spend all our tech resources on getting monetary reporting and verification data in place for companies to utilize. The more information, the more we become dependent on technologies.

What has biggest value, a GHG emission assessment worth 100.000dkk or off-setting GHG emissions for 100.000dkk?

That's a good question, and I can’t give a simple answer. If we want to achieve the goal of reducing our emissions, we need to ensure that we have the right data. Data is extremely important because it gives you insights into understanding where in the value chain you are emitting and where you can change some ingredients of the procedure.

It’s always necessary to have the data baseline in place, because it gives the most informed decisions about how to bring down the overall emissions in a company. Ultimately, when we talk about carbon removal it's better to talk about it as mitigation actions beyond your own value chain, but still driven by a company commitment or  carbon tax. Therefore, it's not an either or. First, we need to reduce, then we need to do what we can to contribute to remove excess emissions or unavoidable emissions.

Is the entry point for even getting to a point where you know how much of your emissions you are off-setting too high? (Given that the cost for calculating GHG emissions is relatively high and therefore less accessible to smaller/young companies).

Yes, you can say that about a lot of things for smaller companies, lawyers, auditors, etc. and I do think this is contributing in an unbalanced way to add costs for smaller companies.

If you want precise data, you want to work with a third-party company, which is also often required for bigger companies. Some third-party companies exist that are deeply integrated into bigger systems and which can pull out very precise data. This is easier in smaller countries and smaller communities - Iceland being an example where it's super easy to make that deep integration and know exactly how much waste is being produced, how much energy is driven by thermal power, etc. When you look at a country like Denmark which is also a relatively small country - but with a diversified pool of contractors – then the cost of third-party assessments gets extremely high. Ultimately, it's about balancing the precision of the data. My stand would be that it's always better to get data that is certain enough that you can rely on it even knowing it’s not 100% precise. I would never infer 100% precision in this regard because I don't think 100% precision is going to imply the added value- I'm still looking for that silver bullet that can give a sufficient level of certainty for smaller companies.

Should we make a default system in Denmark, where we have economists give good estimates on how many emissions your specific company emits and offer different offsetting opportunities based on this? E.g. 10%/30%/50%/100%.

I'm not convinced that it’s going to be driven by the public authorities in all countries, but I think it could be interesting to have. What we are quite eagerly awaiting is the EU guidelines for how to work climate mitigation n beyond the value chain and carbon removal in general, because it needs to go hand in hand with the carbon tax system. If you have a carbon tax system, but you can't utilize that to reinvest in carbon removal technologies, then you're in essence being double taxed. So what we are quite interested in, when we have a new parliament in place, is the entire work around the EU guidelines for working with carbon removal.  

The carbon tax level also matters, and you need to find the right level. This has been researched, and there are recommendations and guidelines amounting to 100 euros per ton of CO2, going up to 200 euros per ton of CO2. This price can drive the incentive to reduce as you have the high price associated with emitting carbon. So, you need to focus on reductions and have the financial incentive to successfully reduce as much as you can. . This is always the first step, and everything that relates to removing historic or excess GHG - what we call unavoidable emissions – should come after that. In connection with this I would always recommend a carbon tax to facilitate total decarbonisation

Once GHG taxation becomes the norm/law, will this create an unnatural incentive structure for venturing into some industries rather than others?

I hope that it will drive the overall transition where everyone starts to think about sustainability from the outset of starting a company.

How much should a company spend on GHG off-setting?

A good rule of thumb is to look at it as a carbon tax. Then you can use the baseline data or tons emitted as a starting point. The most ambitious companies we work with are in the range of 200 euros per ton of CO2 but even below that there's a lot to be done and it can also be seen as a gradual model for the companies we work with.

In Prolog we have realized that if we aren't financially sustainable, and more so, it's difficult, if not impossible to have a strong environmental and social impact. How do you see the partnership between financial growth and socio-environmental impact and don't we talk enough about the synergy between growth and sustainability as opposed to the two being adversary concepts?

I agree with the fact that there needs to be a financial capability to be able to do good most of the time. Except if you're put in the world for other measures. I think it comes down to how the company acts. Prolog is extremely focused on quality, both in the products that you use and products that you sell, and it's quite easy to tell that. So, I think it's about thinking about raising that quality aspect in the products. The higher quality of the product that you sell and the better financial stability at the company, the more good you can do. That is generally something that I think companies should work for. If you just sell more and more and, therefore, also have to offset more it’s not sustainable growth.

What motivates you in your job? 

The impact that we have on driving the capacity necessary for the future.

What governmental policy should be implemented to support environmental impact?

The most obvious ones are that we need to have the right incentives for companies to reduce their emissions. I think a carbon tax is a very good instrument for doing that because it puts a tangible value on emitting carbon.

I also think that the government plays a big role in driving the development of technologies within carbon removal, for a start,. by funding innovation and projects in the early stages where they still need to develop their technology. Within carbon removal there's so many actors that need to come together to make this possible. One thing is the technology, another is the infrastructure around the storage of CO2. The government plays a role in all of these processes.

How does ESG capturing look like in 50 years, and will we have captured all of it?

I expect that it's going to be a more integrated part of our society than we now think. How do we capture emissions at the source points? It might be a sci-fi sort of scenario, but from the very beginning I've been thinking that it's going to be much more integrated into daily life. I even had my fantasies about how you collect carbon from households and have a whole garbage system around that. I think we don't know what the solutions at each step in the value chain are going to look like right now, but I'm convinced that we're going to have a mix of nature-based solutions and engineered solutions. How they look at scale is something we already started to see now with the direct air capture systems but how can they be even smarter utilized at the individual source points? At the individual level I’m quite excited about this because we know how it looks at the company level. I am convinced that with the right movement that we will reach the targets in 50 years. I think you need to have that conviction to keep going in this industry.