Leo Mariani: Yes. Okay. I appreciate the color. It sounds like it’s not going to be too dramatic of a ramp, at least in the near term from your comment.
Akash Patel : Right.
Operator: Our next question comes from Noel Parks with Tuohy Brothers.
Noel Parks: One thing that is off a bit more in the last few months on the sequestration side is from specifically the oil and gas industry players that are looking for sort of storage-only type transaction in CCS. I’ve been hearing them talk more about there being an increased sort of land grab mentality out there about just securing access to and control of pore space. And I was just wondering if that was anything that you are perceiving in your marketplace. I had sort of been thinking that it was going to be more sort of demonstrating the economics that was going to lead the discussions. But, any thoughts you have on that would be great.
Danny Rice: Yes, this is Danny. No, it’s a great question, Noel. I think, when you take a step back and you look at where a lot of the CCS activity is happening, and really leasing activities specifically, a lot of it is happening — almost all of it is happening in and around areas where you have these high concentrations of CO2 coming off of industrial plants. And so those are almost operating all within the Gulf Coast region from Louisiana into Southeast Texas. And so that’s where you’re seeing a lot of people focused all of their activities on the subsurface is around where those sources of CO2 today. And so that’s where the industry is. But I think with NET Power, I think what makes us a little bit different both in terms of what we’re trying to do on the origination side, but also where these plants make good sense is, is not where the sources of CO2 are today.
Because we are the source of CO2, and we can put our plants wherever the sink is regardless of whether there’s CO2 in that region or not. All we need is access to the grid and access to natural gas infrastructure. And so the maps that we’re looking at are probably much, much different than the maps that CCS players that are — are looking at because their maps are saying where are there existing sources of CO2 that I can capture, gather, and sequester in close proximity to those emission sources. Our maps are just saying, where is their high porosity, good permeability, thick rock with a cap rock on top of it. And are their gas pipelines their and their power transmission lines. So we don’t really care about where the existing sources of CO2 emissions are because we are that CO2 factory that you could put anywhere you want.
And so we’re looking at parts of the country that nobody else is looking at because there’s no CO2 emissions in those areas. And because there’s no CO2 emissions in those areas, that subsurface is not worth anything to somebody that would want to go secure that in first place. You really need that pure form of CO2 to be able to unlock the value of the 45Q in those places. So there’s parts of this country where those — that subsurface is only valuable to NET Power. So that’s a — it’s a really interesting dynamic. And I think more importantly, it creates an opportunity for parts of this country that right now we are thinking I don’t know how I’m going to get to net zero. I’m not in an area that has great wind or solar potential. All they have is coal and gas-fired power.
And we look at those markets and we say, there’s great subsurface potential within the sedimentary basins, within the state, or within this region. They have access to natural gas coming from Appalachia, they have access to gas coming from the Rockies, or coming from the Permian. And we say those are perfect market to decarbonize their grids by just replacing their aging coal and gas plants with NET Power. Take advantage of the subsurface that nobody’s taking advantage of and decarbonize their grids, probably a whole lot faster than other areas that have taken a renewables-only approach. So, it’s a really interesting dynamic that the power of our technologies really unlocks for us and our future customers.
Noel Parks: Great. Thanks a lot. It is a helpful distinction that you made there. And, early in the prepared remarks, I think there was a mention of just different technical task, I guess more on the design engineering side. And for example, as mentioned further refinement of the plant controls of our architecture with Baker Hughes. I was wondering if you could just talk about some of those initiatives. What’s involved? Are these lengthy product processes in any way — unexpected compared to what you were looking at earlier in the year?
Brian Allen: Yes, sure, Noel. This is Brian. No, nothing unexpected. I think anytime you change turbomachinery, every OEM has different strategies on things like how they cool third turbine or how they start and lignite, just fundamentals of how a turbine operates. And so we have to account for those in our plant design or plant controls, which is great. So we’re making those controls updates, which will then port over the long term to the utility scale design because that turboexpander, that turbomachinery will have a similar architecture and similar strategy. So it’s really more of a, in terms of the controls, real-time updates as the development progresses. But I would say also as we make some modifications to our plant moving the CO2 compressor and whatnot, there’s always more — when we designed the plant originally, there’s things we learned and different measurements we want to take.
