came out of this observation. because the collector of co-2 is equivalent to its carbon footprint or its negative carbon footprint to the carbon avoidance of a wind mill which is several hundred times as big. right? that was what got me started. the observation from this is the first step in the process, just contacting the air may not be easy, but it's not so hard that we don't do it. we do it in a wind mill. and we do it there with much less value coming out. by the way, if they too would cost the same per square meter of frontal area and they would be equally efficient and the wind mill costs 5 cents per kilowatt, mine would cost 50 cents per ton. my conclusion is not that it would cost 50 cents per on the but my conclusion is this first step isn't going to kill me. what's going to get me is the second step now that i've absorbed the co-2 on some material i have to get it back

off. and that will cost me money. i know that from a power plant scrubber. there it costs me money. so -- but the problem now is the same. i have some sorbent. my absorbent had to be a little bit more stronger and it turns the out that scale's rhythmically in the dilution for every factor two in dilution i need to pay an extra amount of energy. if you work it out, we pay about 1 1/2 to 2 times depending on how i do the accounting in energy than the flue gas scrubber must pay in the ideal solution. we cost a little more but not 100 times. we are a little more expensive by not linearly more expensive. here you can see the energies. so this is how much energy we need for air, this is how much we would need for co-2 from a power plant and what you see

here, if the eveningeers can see this, this is rp log t. let me put this out with a fancy formula so you know)zca we act do math on occasion. what thisn basically says, the dynamics works. and by now nobody disagrees with this any more. the thermodynamics of capturing co-2 from the air is pretty benign. the criticism is that that's all good and theoretical but you can't get there. that's what the critics say. and they say, sherwood said, the cost of getting things is linear in the dilution. and here is a national research council study from 1987 in which this is said. he said, look, the cost of metals is proportional linearly proportional to the dilution. and the fact ser that it costs that's sherwood's rule.5n if we apply sherwood's rule, $10 per ton of air to our problem,

we are dead. we're $25,000 a ton of co-2. so we can't do that, right? here's our aspiration where we want to be way below this long curve. i put it here at 20 drl a ton because these are 1985 numbers. so how come we could get there? my first observation is this linearity makes perfect sense jiì% a ton of ore, i can dig it up, i can crush it, i can grind it, i can run one flotation and i can dispose of the tailings, i just spent $10 in 1985 dollars. i'm done. basically what that says is the cost of ore metal extraction is dominated bycáb/ that first co. that first ñrstep. everything7úprñ else is small potatoes. if that's the case, obviously, if you have to look at twice as much ore, you will spend twice

as much money. therefore, sherwood's rule nearly always applies and i would point out that bromine from sea water is not on the curve and the reason it's not we're not crushing and grinding sea water. it follows its own curve. lastly, there's uranium from sea water and that is even better than what we would ever need to get to in order to succeed. and that's because uranium in sea water is 3 parts per billion. and according to mr. sherwood, this$ should cost you $3 millio per kilogram and recent work in japan said well between 200 and 1200 kilograms because it's not done industrialle so there's a fairly big window there. but the thing that was important we make the first step passive. we make braids of resin which absorbs uranium out of sea we anchor it to the ocean floor

sherwood's rule shrwood's rule is rule of thumb. and we just gave you an example. so nearly as a disclosure, i got involved in this in 2003 when

allen wright who you see here in the picture formed a company in tucson. i owned a little piece of it. it turned into kilimanjaro. i still own a little piece. kilimanjaro is now moving into a new area, so i'm actually getting further and further removed from having a direct stake, economic stake in private start-ups on this. i think that's just fine because, in a way, i need to push this in a public arena because that's actually more important that it's visible and can be done. so our goal was to provide a proof of principle. and we honestly stumbled into an anionic exchange resin which had a very remarkable feature. if it's dry it loves co-2 and binds it very tightly. when it's wet it gives it back. and we could show that if we equilibrated it with co-2 with some pressure and made it wet,

the pressure equilibrium would be 500 times larger than when it was struck. we are taking advantage of the fact that the water chemistry with these carbonates in these resins changes the i wa it behaves. what we believe happens and we are trying to prove this in detail, that when it is wet, you have -- and it's empty, it's a carbonate and these big carbonator ions sit between those two positive ammonium ions. as you dry it out, the hydration clouds shrink and carbonate becomes less and less comfortable. at some point it pays energetically to split one of the remaining waters into an h-plus and an oh-minus making a carbonate and a hydroxide. that hydroxide really wants co-2. this will load up on co-2 but the moment i make it wet the old bicarbonate/carbonate chemistry

comes back and you'll have co-2 over that mixture. that you can now move up, pull off, as you pull it off, you drop back to the carbonate and the cycle repeats itself. what drives it is the drying of the system in the open air. if it didn't dry, it couldn't do it. so we are bound to consume water in our process. here are some materials you see in a photograph here. we purchased this actually, this is actually an electro chemical membrane where the resin itself is embedded into a polypropylene sheet in various shapes and forms. after we put it in the sheet we have 1.7 mole and we can hold on the absorption and desorpgs in the maximum swing. in practice we would sing only 30, 40% of that. so the basic idea is we stand out in the wind, the system dries, its absorbs co-2. as it now has it i put it in a

box and i now have several options. one is i can suck out the air before i do anything and make it wet and have an atmosphere of co-2 and nothing much else in the box. i can also absorb that co-2 into an aqueous brine and sodium carbonate to bisodium carbonate or i can just make co-2 enriched air which i might sell to a greenhouse. so in the original version, we actually pulled the vacuum, then compress the co-2 after liquid and that's where we spend all of our energy and that's why we spend 50 kill ojoules or more of power to evacuate system. that is to say if i ran this against the coal plant, one-third of the co-2 i collected would be emitted. if i plugged into an average u.s. power plug i would have 20% of my co-2 reemitted at some

distant power plant if it ran it against wind mills, of course, that wouldn't happen. here is a small demonstration unit. we actually demonstrated this technology in london some years ago where we have the filters and the edges is push pd around by this dyson fence inside the front and you can watch the co-2 box go away and you can put wet ones in and refill it with co-2. and with you can look it up on the internet, we have plants in there and they grow happily with the co-2 we can get off those things when they're wet and we put them outside and they lock up again. the trick in what we did is we made the air carry our work. the air carries kinetic energy. has plenty to run through the filters. we cannot run fast but we can run steady. the air carries thermal energy. as a matter of fact if you measure very carefully you notice that the energy coming out of the back of our filters

is a little cooler than the air coming in. that's where we paid our energy payment. it is technically a very large energy penalty. somebody pointed this out to me. but i'm not paying it. if you hang a towel on the clothesline you're not paying the heat of evaporation although somehow, somewhere the air has paid for it. we see all the air moving through dropped in temperature by about a degree. that's how we end up paying for it. it also carries chemical potential in that it wants to evaporate that water which is on there because the air is not saturate in water. so as a result we are extremely rare in the desert and that's where i would like to do the demonstration but we're not working so well in the tropics because the air is very humid there and we cannot really load. the next question, the next problem is how can we get from these little things we just did in the laboratory over to the full scale where you actually deal with 30 giga tons of co-2. so we decide -- and this is an

artist's concept of an underlying design, a one ton a day unit. think of these as 30 panels up in the air, meter wide, 2 1/2 meters tall and they're exposed to the wind and they will load up in a matter of an hour. so this thing rotates every minute, every two minutes one of them is being removed as full and pushed into one of those boxes downstairs, so there's some robotic system going on which is going to do all of that. and so this is the typical size of a one ton a day unit. by the way, we didn't start with one ton a day. we started with a shipping container and see what we can stuff into it. it turns out it turned out to be almost a ton. that's the size. and if you have 100 million of those, you would collect 36 giga tns of co-2. if they last ten years you have to build 10 million units. you would ask is that a large number o or a small number?

well, we're producing 80 million light trucks and cars, so that sets the scale. right? i would argue we can argue whether it's a car or 1 1/2 or 2 coarse half a car, it's bigger in volume but pretty hollow. i would argue it's comparable. but another point i would make shanghai harbor processes 30 million containers a year and they're full. so there's an industrial capacity behind shanghai which fills 30 million such containers and they're probably on average more full than ours are. so the industrial capacity to do this clearly exists. the question is whether you can figure out the policy which will give us that. but this is the scale we would need to operate on if you wanted to do it all by ourselves. we decided to stay small because i have been struggling with this observation that this power plant in the front of this car

significantly cheaper than this power plant on the other suicide of the picture. typical coal plant is today 1500 dollars a kilowatt. a car engine, not this one but a typical car engine is $10 a kilowatt. they don't last all that long, but mass production really has driven prices down and we feel that if you really want to push cost, you have to go to mass production and drive prices down this way. so rather than thinking of making these things bigger and bigger, we prefer to think of it as making more and more of them. and that gets you into this mass production idea. what we found when we recently wrote a paper on this topic, not in then context of air capture but in general that the reason itse historically you wouldn't have done that is the personal cost of running that is unaffordable. so the only way you can massi

massively poweralize power plants is to have a high degree of automation. until recently this was not available but this is the existence proof that this is doable. this is a google car driving without a driver. so the technology for automating is right now coming online. so therefore, i wouldn't scale up to large sizes. i would instead go massively parallel. that's what drove us to this one ton a day image where you can actually drive the unit to where you want it and if it's not need there any more, you pack it up and drive it somewhere else. and if you need a lot of co-2 in one place then 10,000 of them have to be in one place and you can put that many on a square kilometer without the interference to be too high. so cost issues and economic viability. i'm going to punt. i'm telling you this right up front because i don't know the answer and you don't know it either and the critic don't know

it either. absolutely unpredictable. i paid $20 for my first one. i now pay about 10 cents. i can show you how this can be done for 10 cents, why don't you do it? so the answer is you cannot predict until it happens. so having a long discussion, hence that $20. by that i mean if i did everything just perfectly where would i be in the ice trope. i can tell you so many things. so there's no underlying thing that's sticking out saying it has to be very expensive. but on the over hand i can prove

to you i can get to the we can get to. but that's an ultimate cost, not today's cost. and learning can give you large differences. but i can tell you something else. not in the long run. so we better figure out whether we can get below $100 a ton. if we can, this is a big player in the game. then for about 85 cents a gln of gasoline, i can get my pack. it's changed much more than that over the last few years. and i keep driving my car. so that level could be absorbed. but if it's much more than $100 a ton, other technologies will see substitute. >> can you explain why that is? >> when i start ed to think abot all of this, i asked myself,

what's my budget. and i said, there are coal plants and there are nuclear plants. if i take the difference, i have about $60 per ton. in other words if i spend more than $60 a ton that nuclear plant is cheaper. so over $100 a ton and looking at biofuels f you look at all those other options you have on the table, it becomes more and more interesting to do that and less and less interesting to do this. maybe it's $150 a ton, but somewhere around that level, the alternatives simply look too good and we will phase out completely. there's one exception. it if climate change really hurts, we'll pay any price to get that back. but we will not keep running on

a technology -- it may prove to be the cheapest option. for me it's roughly the tipping point. i can't guarantee that 25 cents, pu i'm confident by that number. here's the technology at $600 a ton. they thought it was $250 but both of them are first of a kind. if you talk to peter eisenbu eisenburger's company, they all say they are bee low $100. i'll be the pessimist and say they are near $100. if you just reach there and you didn't do anything but make the stuff and let it dry again, you can do this well below $50 a

ton, probably at $30 right now. the raw materials are even less than that. i do want to point out the example there, light coming out of your fixtures that are 7,000 times cheaper in the 20a&/açwt century. pv dropped 100 fold. if we went from $600 to $6, we're actually there. so. my view is the $600 number is actually not all that bad. if you try something the first time and actually said i'm trying to corroborate and do nothing fancy and you came out at $600, getting that ten times cheaper doesn't strike me as all that hard. you can see the development in the company. you can't prove it because they won't let you look at the details. they are pushing towards $100 and there are outside investors

who seem to be convince d by these numbers. so i would argue we're on that track. how far on that track, nobody knows. but it couldn't go to $30 or less. i cannot see any obstacle which would say can't possibly do that. that's just saying we don't usually do it that well. ultimately you want to start doing something and co-2 is everywhere available. and then you see the price varies with location. it can be as cheap as $50. it's ultimately the distance that sets the cost.

typically the local demand is quite small. we looked at it at like 50 tons a day. so it's not all that big, but it is doable. so you have these merchant markets. you ship co2 by trucks. also welding supplies turns out same car engines are done with dry ice. so there are huge numbers of tiny applications. you saw chemical commodities. those are probably of limit because nearly always they have a big plant right next to it which makes a lot of co-2 and you can't tie into that. there's biomass production. a lot of people that want algae reactors and need co-2. and they ask can we get it from the mechanism and since we like things dry and wet cycle, it actually fits very nicely with

what we do. greenhouse gets co-2 and people pay that. probably not where you have pipelines, but where you do exploratory work where you managed to pay for the pipeline with a little premium you could take the co-2 from the air. synthetic renewable fuels is another big market and here it can play a big role because some of the co-2 has to come from the air, but the other is you can do it in places you could never get to. it's a lot easier to convince people in the muld of australia or desert to put co-2 right here than in manhattan or washington. the co-2 is made where people are and therefore both sides are

near people. it can do it anywhere and thereby simplify a lot of those issues. i mean the market for greenhouses is not all that large. the market for fizzy drinks is not all that large. the recovery starts to get big and ultimately you have the co-2 omission reductions. so we think glass houses could be 200 million a year. it's not something venture capitalists are salivating over, but it gave you a starting point. a company who wants to do just that. and has negotiated that. synthetic fuels is a big thing. so we ran on hydrogen.

we take water out of the environment, we have renewable energy, we split the high water into hydrogen and oxygen, get the oxygen back into the air maybe and when you need power in the car you consume the hydrogen and make the water again. nice cycle. i'd pay more for the transformation. it's ease rier to have a liquid on board than the hydrogen. so technology with hydrogen and co-2 to make any hydrocarbon exist. it was hard about it is to get the price of the energy lower that this actually works. as a matter of fact, if you have $30 per on to of co-2, if you spend 50% efficiency, you added for the electricity to the price of gas. so it's the electricity price which will tell you how this game will go.

you can think of a biomass substitu substitute. you run pv, which is 30, 40 times as efficient as biophoto synthesis. and an elect liezer to make hydrogen and combine with the co-2 from the air. as you come bust it and put co-2 into the environment, the psych sl closed. my vision of this is you have two complimentary energy carriers. for the stationary application electricity is perfect. it's clean. it's responsive. i turn on that switch and things work. no admission at the point of consumption. it's very difficult to store it directly, but you can make the electricity at a large plant and that involves co-2 you can

easily capture it there. probably much more cheaply than air capture. you have liquid fuel from the other side. they are easily stored. they can store e enormous amounts of energy. you might want to work out how much power you have pouring into your car while you're at a gas station and filling it. it's horrendous power plant as you're spilling the co-2 into the tank. you can use it for on board transportation, but you could also do it for electricity storage and you lose a lot of it. but on the other happened, your capital investment in the storage device is very small sitting on a battery for a day is a quarter per kilowatt hour and that's before i paid for the battery going away because after the cycle it doesn't work anymore. it's just for the interest i paid to own the battery. it has extremely high energy density. it's 50 mega jewel in a battery.

so it's easily stored. but it does produce co-2, and therefore, would need air capture to close the cycle. but with air capture, i can have it. and i just make the point that the crummy can full of gasoline has 100 times the energy density than the nice lithium ion battery in the background. carbon energy systems, you start with all sorts of energy sources. i quoted them from nuclear and renewable, which are carbon free to dirty carbon and petroleum, which goes to the transportation sectors and runs all on natural gas would make electricity as we do right now, but it also would make gas converted to liquid fuel. that goes into the mobile energy demand. air capture would have to get the co-2 back and into storage. similarly, the co-2 from the electricity production would go into the storage.

if on the other hand you went entirely on nonfossil energy, the electricity has no carbon impact, but you would use some of it to make fuels, which are on the food chain. and the liquid fuels would be used in the mobile demand that would lead to emotion missions to the air which you mop back up and feed back into making nor synthesis. and of course, the real world would be some overlap over many of these various options. so let me conclude on a few observations on the policy issues. the fundamental changes you get is it makes e megss reversible. that's good and bad. and you emit and i don't like it, i can absorb it and later on

present it with a bill. i can tell you what it cost me to counter this unfriendly act on your part. i can assign that cost to you. it's not a good reason to delay action. in a way people say it's a moral hazard because you have the ability to make it reversible, but it cuts two ways. the one moral hazard was i don't need to deal with it, i can deal with it later. the other one is oops, i just did it, what are you going to do about it? that you now can fix. that's a fundamental change. if you listen to some of the power you tillties, they basically say we feel for you, we understand the problem, but you wouldn't want to pay what it cost to deal with the problem. if you say you don't want to deal with the problem, we'll just charge you the air capture, you'd be surprised how fast. because suddenly they have an

incentive to deal with the problem which only comes in once they have a competitor that sets the price. if the air capture is not there, it's size to say, trust me, it costs too much and we went through this discussion in the 1980s. we actually had to do it. prices dropped by an order of magnitude in a hurry u. i suspect the same thing will happen here once you force it. one way to force it, you don't want to deal with it, there's somebody that can do it on your behalf. that means you have to make the emission reversible. nevertheless, i would say air capture is the capture of last resort. it's not something you do because it's the easiest. in a way, it's the hardest and it's by definition the hardest because if you had another technology that costs you more, clearly you would do air capture instead. the beauty is it can handle emissions from all sources. how did you manage to make this co-2.

i can say how much did you make? i can get it back. that's the first advantage. you can deal with anything you know. it can't get worse than that. that would be incredibly valuable to know and there's a real value in finding the actual price of air capture. that's the only way to find that out. it also issues feasibility of carbon scenarios. you can't avoid car bob. here you can mop up what you did in the past because it did make emissions reversible. it provides solution to the risk of leaky storage. we have been talking about what happens if you put it on the ground and it comes back. one answer is right now it comes back right away because we never put it underground in the first place. the other part is there are hazards and damages, but the oil

companies have accepted that or they won't do enhanced oil recovery. it gradually leaks back and you didn't get anything for your money. now that we have air capture, this is a risk. it's not i don't know what to do with fellowship can tell you the price is $100 a ton for every ton you have to pay to get the co-2 back and put it back where it belongs. ultimately it encouraged points of capture. years ago i wrote a paper on this where we argued you really want -- rather than figuring out

who made it where and what, we go all the way to the source and say if you extract a ton of carbon from the ground, you need to show a certificate that you or somebody else put another ton of carbon. those two things will balance. you want to dig up a ton, you need a certificate. in the meantime, we need some transitional phase because overnight we cannot create that many certificates. air capture can play u and everybody else can. air capture will set the price. that's the method of last resort. i would argue you back permits with air capture base and suddenly you are in business and air capture sets the carbon price worldwide.

>> a backed permit, you back it up. the way we originally said since we have a cfgggév'ut of sequestration, we do the equivalent of a gold coin. somebody did something to put carbon away. then we said you can get a permit, that's a temporary thing, a bridge to bring between where we are today and where we want to be. and the permit is like a dollar bill. so it can print as many as it needs to keep the price at a reasonable level. the carbon board can turn around and say we start backing them up by putting co-2 away. so you go back on the gold standard. it actually turned out if you start thinking, the carbon board looks more and more like a

federal reserve. in a way it is a funny currency u. if you put air capture behind, you know where the price will end up. it will end up at the price of air capture and anybody who is cheaper gets the rent of being cheaper. so the goal guys will do that. by the way, they only got 80% in the last 20% they still got through air capture buzz it got too expensive. you can balance all this out and say if now a government decides that it wants to have negative e emissions, all it has to do is rip up certificates and you are there. right now in this picture if

some government decided they buy them up and retire them without having any carbon coming out of the ground, you have created a negative emission. you have carbon out of the ground because somebody comes in and purchased them and doesn't use them. for example, a government. as you tear them up you basically shorten the availability of permits by

retiring them you create negative emissions, which have nothing else to go against so you could get into a world where we say we have a goal of getting back half an ppm a year. >> yes, it would. it's very similar. half of the people will tell me what you just told me. the other half say this is a tax. in a way, we are right in the middle. being the truly extreme and in the early days that carbon board has the ability to print perms chrks are not covered and thereby can set where you want to be. the european trading showed the problem. it's like saying through the

federal reserve we're going to set the interest in perpetuity. we set the carbon cap z way in advance and the economy did a somersault and nobody needed it and the price collapsed. if you have somebody who can actually maintain that availability, you get a much smoother ride. that was our idea. now a colleague of mine in oxford had suggested that in the beginning, you should just have to buy one carbon certificate per hundred coming out and gradually that ramps up. that's disadvantage renewable energy because they don't get that benefit. that's a detail worth thinking through.

i think we'll find alternatives to air capture and that's a good thing. you can go to renewable so you didn't need it. and you can't have closed cycle liquid fuels with air capture and all of that would get you out of the ccs. air capture acts as a competitor and the ultimate all emissions. so the competitors occupy sectors. what's left over and i would argue the left over is what's left to air capture. in conclusion it's worth pursuing air capture. it's a powerful tool. it outperforms biomass air capture. it could be an important policy

tool in creating carbon reductions. there's no physical reason why it could not work. it's not an, which do not work. it's carbon negative. technical feasibility has been d demonstrated and very similar processes are routinely in other industries. you think about it, any plant removes the co-2 from the air before it goes in. they are feasible. the aps process is six times too expensive, but it is a first of a kind and it's a boot force technology. i think mass production can drive cost reductions. learning curves in other fields have reduced hundred fold. the frictional cost is actually

very low. i think the risk is mitigated by limiting unit scale of operation ps. i think for $30 million you can build functional prototypes. you don't have to go to power plant scale before you know works. and the return is amply by fied by applicability. you don't just do it in one place, you can do it anywhere. and it's amplified by motivating other option. i think small markets allow you to boot strap, but they are small and they are difficult and a policy intervention. when i u think actually be a long-term thing. i think what i want in the long-term and that's what i'm working on now is to get to build i building an air capture center that demonstrates the technology and integrates brand new ideas

into academia. you want demonstrations, you want deployed prototypes, work all the time and establish rapid prototyping capabilities to build up and improve and learn by doing. because i think that's what it takes. there's a lot of basic science, which we don't yet fully understand. this is a new technology. this is a new separation technology. it's very different from others. we're still beginners. and this is new to systems engineering. the scaling story alone is a whole big story in its own right. and ultimately it's about sustainable signs and how humans interface to all of that. and you need the policy outreach. and i snuck in there. there's an ip pool that needs to be managed and if we're not careful it will fragment so finely into small companies that nobody can do anything. so all of that needs to be sorted out and worked out.

but i do think that new ideas can change the words and they are often unpredicted, unmodelled and they change d th course of future development in very unexpected ways. this one has similar disruptive nature. at this point i think i've gotten through my main section. if you have questions and debate points, i'm more than happy to entertain them. i think i already have a first one there. thank you. >> first question is, what inventions are needed to make this a possibility. the second is not related in one sense, but it is in the oh sense. could this be tried in a state in the united states where an experimental nation?

>> the second answer is yes. i just said $30 million will get you a prototype u. you can take that as a guess. that is certainly within the range. and it wants to be a desert and drive because my particular technology works in such an environment. so that's a good start. so i could see that. so ask what inventions are necessary, let me sort of give you a first ra-ra answer. the first answer is we have made the invention. it works. and i think there's some truth to that. on the other hand, if we want to stay as small as we are, we better have a large degree of automation. we will only work in certain

climates with our technology and you want to get much broader than that. you would like to get much more efficient than we are. i think to come back to this picture, we look about like this. . if that. we're not yet a car. we're still a horse-drawn wagon. so to get from where we are to something which is really well done is a very long way, but if you asked what inventions it takes to get to you, they probably couldn't have answered you either. so there will be a lot of inventions, but i think the stick figure version of it is working. but from there to having a true breakthrough and having it happen on large scale, i can give you an analogy.

if you have five people saying jet engines in airplanes cannot work because they are so horribly inefficient they can't even carry their own weight. in 1938, it happened. in 1950 the first commercial plane was built. so time counts for that in my view in the order of a decade or so. and once it's running, it takes two or three decades to really get big. and i can give you plenty of examples of that. >> part of the difficulty i see is the economic feasibility. you point out the lightbulb and how technology has improved, but most cases there's a pretty obvious economic drivers. and i think that's missing here. i got an e-mail from my brother, i'm an earth scientist, he's a

mechanical engineer. he sends me a graph of carbon in the atmosphere over geologic time. it averaged 3,000 parts per million, 1,500 in the mez sewic. so what's the big deal? europe is tolerating 5,000 in the past. these are the people we have to convince. >> it's hard. to start with, you've got to move. because there was no ice on the planet back then. so the ocean was 70 meters higher. so that's the first thing. the second thing is we evolved. and my daughter asked me recently what would be my scariest thought about climate change. i said we are designed -- we

have a body temperature around 37 degrees. our skin temperature better be 35. if it's not, we overheat. we can get rid of thermoheat by evaporative cooling. it turns out nobody on the planet is the dew point temperature above 31 degrees. warming models suggest that with heavy degree warming, you get a three quarter degree warming in temperature. it makes sense that you will. i would have thought it's 1 to 1, but the model says it's only 3/ 3/4. but surely we could e evolve. if you give it enough time. but we won't. so the scenario that scares me the most is that you actually have to -- you cannot go outside

and you rely on air-conditioning for dear life. it's not a convenience. otherwise, you cannot make it. we know that from mining. miners going into very deep mines have to wear ice vests in order to manage their body temperature. and that's because the humidity is hig]p8á a and the temperatur high. in arizona you can sweat and you cool. and in 36 degree dew point temperature or wet bar temperature, you actually cannot survive. so life u could get rough. and we are making changes on a scale evolution really didn't have to deal with. and i would argue at some level it's an insurance issue. i would go one step further. where's your pain threshold? you actually have health

problems. but lower numbers we will have a pain threshold at some point the coral reeves will dissolve around 1,200 ppm because the ocean got acidic enough that coral reeves cannot dissolve. it turns out calcium carbonate is not solvable because it's super saturated. so we all have some pain threshold. it's way too early to tell about climate change how reliable all these details are that was in 1993 or so. i took the point of view maybe 400 is fine, maybe 500 is fine. maybe 800 is fine. one of those numbers is your limit. the problem i cannot tell you what it is, if you really get upset about the polar bears being gone, we need to stop a lot earlier.

if that's something the world doesn't care about, we can go a little further. but we will have to stop somewhere because the pain got large enough. so what convinced my back then if we have to get to a carbon economy, the only question is, when? the worst mistake i can make is i'm 50 years too early. >> i get all that. i made those arguments with my brother. but it doesn't convince him in the least. and i don't think he's untypical. >> let me try another thing out. let me say it for the sake of argument for 50 cents a ton, the problem is solved. would he invest into that? because i have the impression, and this is part of the political debate, i have the impression that this is typical

human nature if i tell you you really have to change your ways in order to avoid some damage, you're going to tell me i'm lying because you really don't want to change your ways. so i'm arguing a lot of that denial is literally that. it's denial. i don't want to hear it because it really changes my life. so the reason i'm working on technological fixings in a way is i want to get out of that debate. i don't want to tell you you have to change your life. we can have that debate offline for other reasons. we can argue whether you should live this way or not, but i don't want to tie it to climate change. you pay a little bit of money and the problem is gone. bad things can happen because we don't know what the planet will do. and you won't like to live in an ice age nor would you like to live at 3,000 ppm.

>> your one-ton unit, how much energy does it use, number one, and second ly, if you did a lif cycle analysis of the energy that went into building of the unit, which sometimes you can see charts where windmills made in china with electricity from coal power might, have you done this analysis? how energy intensive is the unit? where would you the get the energy in your desert environment? just a little bit more on that. >> okay. a ton a day is a quarter more. i just told you it's 50 kill jewels per mold. so divide by four.

the net total is that i would emit some co2 elsewhere in this process. but this is just comparing the operational process. i cannot really do a life cycle until we have a real unit, but i can give you a rule of thumb. most equipment has a few times its own weight. and if you look at this thing, it's tons of stuff. as a matter of fact, i know exactly how much carbon is in the resin because it's effectively oil. so there's the fact of three. so give or take, take that weight a few times, we are collecting one ton a day in weeks or months, i have collected more co-2 that is embedded into the machine. i can't tell you this within

accuracy because the equal machine habit been decided. but i'm reasonable confident pst the same argument for a car. i can guarantee over a lifetime it puts out a lot co-2 than into making it. this is an inverse car. as a matter of fact, it's like 15 cars running all the time. it collects far more co-2 than it's own weight and something ought to be horribly bad in its own carbon footprint for it to not make good on this in a short amount of time. >> second question, elaborate, you mentioned the tree, you e showed a picture of the tree. it looks like an artificial tree and alluded to a thousand. could you elaborate the benefits of this machine versus just planting more trees. which is probably a question you get all the time. >> the analogy it would make,

can you draw a plow with a horse? of course, you can. would you rather pull it with a tractor? yes. the tractor is not good at horse racing and doesn't look all that good, but the bottom line is we're specialists in collecting co-2. we absorb per unit area of surface area over which we make contact significantly more. but we also don't worry about shading. so we therefore can pack them a lot more tightly. so as a consequence, if you gave me an object which is the size of a tree, has a cross section and the wind blows through, in our case you can tell that the co-2 on the other side is noticeably lower. in the tree's case, you cannot. but the bottom line is we are over the lifetime of the tree,

if you divide that by the number of days, you come about a thousand apart. >> two questions. at least one of which may be really premature. the first question is just could you clarify again. i'm not an engineer. could you explain what the status of this technology is maybe in terms of how much years away is this from either a unit or commercial viability? and the other question i have is is there any regulator around in the u.s. or elsewhere that's actually talking about giving any kind of regulatory credit for somebody who comes up with a widget that does air capture? or is that discussion premature?

>> the first question, let me tell you where we are. you saw in one of the pictures, i think you alluded to it, a prototype that worked slightly differently, which was about the size of a doorway. what we have right now in our system is laboratory scale things. but they do work the entire loop. so we can actually have air in the lab tests moved by the fans in the air and the air handling system in the room is good enough to do this. the material will give it back up and we can get it back up to 5%. my goal for the next year is to have a small e device outside, which runs continuously and you can watch on the web. it will tell you how much co-2 it collected today and all of

that. so at that level, we are at right now. how long it will take from that to industrial scale depends a lot on how much impetus is there. the companies that are in had this space have splurged money for years and then they are looking for more money and that all takes time. it's a tedious and slow process. if they have a large program to make this happen n a matter of a few years, you could see whether we are making progress and you could have this thing operating at a reasonable scale, which for me would be kilograms to hundreds of kilograms a day in a practical manner. my goal is to have something like that at the university in a matter of four years. if i have the budget for that, i certainly can do that. if i have to scrounge for the budget, i will get delayed.

the scale moving forward from there is very difficult. it depends on what environment you're in. the startups all started from the presumption that there is nobody to help them. and that they have to find an economic market that is driven by its own dynamics. and that's not all that easy, particularly looking for venture capital. if i come to you, most venture guys say this can never grow to a multibillion-dollar affair, so forget it. nobody says how about there's no regulation which makes that happen, so forget it. so you're caught in that no man's land and it's hard to get out. right now a new company started, it's a little premature to talk about it in detail, but they want to feed co-2 to greenhouses but they want to be done in a few years.

so i think we are at the verge of something, but we are not there. if you compared me, i would say we are like windmills in the 1950s and '60s. we are like solar panels in the '60s. yes, it works, but we're far from really being there. and that's why it takes solace that it's cheaper over time. we have to learn that too, but you could argue that that version of that social panel actually already exists because the space station has to scrub out its co-2. but their price is no object. by the way, that was exactly what happened to the first solar panel. it was out and price was no object so nobody pushed the cost no down. so what's different for us is he has to drive the cost down.

if you don't succeed with that, my view is you can only find it out by doing. so you can think of this as a bet you have to place and you may lose it. chances of losing are very small. if you're not directly involved, you may say he's not right about it. he has a 30% chance of losing. but i think it's worth trying because the potential benefit is enormous. and the only way to find out is you can't learn by doing without doing. >> so is kilimanjaro still operating and are they pursuing this technology? that's the first question. the second is do you have a point of view about the

alternati alternative technologies that the others are starting up? do you see a path to get to $100 a ton or lower threshold. >> kilimanjaro is still operating entity. they are right now pushing other things than direct air capture. so i'm fairly far removed in san francisco. but they exist -- they are planning to do things. the other players, i would argue, it varies. first, i would say keep in mind if we hadn't stumbled into the humidity swing and decided this is so much better than anything else we saw we would be doing something that's similar to global thermostat because we're also looking at all sorts of

things and expecting to have a thermal fling. i think using sodium or potassium hydroxide to carbonate is really an uphill battle. and if you go back to 1999 when said this demonstrates that it can be done, but we got to get off that hydroxide. so i have the least belief in technologies like david keith, which used that. we started there. we made it work. we had a machine, which was fairly big and worked extremely well. we decided we don't want to play this game any longer. we need to have find better ways of doing it. but we learned a lot from that exercise, and so i think all of the competitors learn a lot from

their exercises and gradually they will get better in their various natures. . if you ask me to operate in the tropics, it's very miserable. we wrote a paper where we tried out some islands because a colleague of mine said this is the place to be. for us it's miserable and cold and rainy. it was a good exercise to see whether i could make it work or not. cost was a factor too, but we made it work. we did it in the lab, of course, but we created conditions. high wind speeds, very cold, slightly above freezing temperatures. it's like iceland. and we found we can make it work, but even in the paper, i said, this is something for somebody with a thermal swing. it's not designed for us. this is an uphill battle for our

technology. so i suspect there will be multiple technologies for different applications. we haven't really begun to explore the space of different reservoi reservoirs. we haven't really begun to look at all of that. so i think there's an enormous amount of room. so you're asking a question sticking with your analogy but going a little earlier and saying should the car have a steam engine, electric engine. sometimes you revisit this 50 years later so there are lots of various technologies. i think these thermal swings can get there too. if you insist on pushing over the fan, you have very limited power to do that because otherwise you run out of budget, but it is doable. so i think among all the

players, there are a lot of good ideas and how this will play out, only time will tell. if you can do this in an academic setting, i can try out all sorts of technologies not necessarily tied to a particular player. that's what i really want to do is build a group which can talk to different industrial partners and make different things work. that's how we have to make it happen. >> talking about the economics of this. the cost of it are born by individual or maybe even the national government, but the benefits are for everyone. how would you figure that economics of the thing across the world? >> well, right now we are trying to put individual countries and

convince them to have a cap. and its successes haven't really been all that successful. but you come in from the trade side and you say, you know, you are putting out far more co-2 than we do and exporting goods into this country and we have rules about it because ultimately this is the tragedy of the comments. you have to find a way of dealing with it. if you don't have one big guy that can control it, tough figure it out in interactions. so you say, okay, if you do that, we'll import these goods, but we will adjust your carbon balance accordingly. and we will charge that as a condition of bringing it in. and you might even get it through the wto because you

performed a service. so it is not impossible, but it's a very big uphill battle. and that is the fundamental challenge. this goes back to your question in a round about way, how do we convince everybody to play? and one of the things air capture does change is it says if you don't play, i can do it on your behalf and, a, i'm mad because i had to pay for it, and b, i was trying to stick it back to you. and that's new. everybody says now that it's out, there's nothing we can do anymore. so that does change the debate. >> can you describe the ideal climatic conditions or hydraulic conditions? >> ours specifically?

>> yeah, because the -- >> there are different systems with different features. ours likes dry air. . my sort of qualitative test is how long does it take a towel to dry? and the longer it takes you to dry that towel, the harder it is for us to run. for us the perfect place is a desert because it's warm and things dry incredibly fast. then it is ready to pick up co-2 very, very rapidly. now the next part is i do need water to get it back. so i don't want to be in a place where access to water is impossible. we have several methods of doing it. some of them can actually use sea water. one way of doing this is to coat material with a poor surface. co-2 will go through, water

vapor will go through, but salt water will not. we demonstrated that -- we actually took a construction material. you can wrap our stuff and dip it in water and will release co-2 and it will not pick up the salt. >> does wind affect it? >> that's a complicated quest n question. the way i would answer is wind is necessary if -- think of this as a box. i put it up and the air can go through. if no air goes through, i will take whatever air is in it and strip all of the co-2 out and it stops. if you tell me the flow is very, very slow, then what i will do is i will saw my box into thinner boxes and put them side by side.

right now our cost is the box, not the frame which holds it. as long as that is true, we can let the wind speed go down and out. basically you tell me what is your minimum wind speed at which you want to run, and i tell you how thick your boxes are and the lower your wind speed, the smaller i have to make it. it's like a sale. the lower the wind speeds, the thinner it has to be. the we can operate down to half a meter a second, which is really, really low. if you get below that, things really mess up. >> how much water would you need? >> we right now -- we have run outside. we can wash the dust off. yes, it collects dust, no question about it. but if you hose it off, it's just fine.

we found that we're in need of a power plant for awhile. we could actually see a gradual deterioration because of this. you can wash it in sodium carbonate and it recovers completely. so most things are fine, but we use about our water consumption is 10 to 1. so i have a colleague at oxford who argues that we should do this to grow crops indoors in places that don't have enough rainfall and we could operate at 1% of the natural rainfall if you harvest at that we would still be operating because we don't need that much water. so he says you kwould grow crops indoors in the entire sahara because the rainfall is everywhere, at least 1% of what you need to actually grow crops outside.

so he sees this as a water conserving mechanism by putting a lid on the plant growth. and that's a possibility. but we are consuming water. we could be consuming sea water. it's easier if you give me fresh water, but it doesn't have to be ultrapure. >> could you go over how the resin works again to capture the co-2? >> the resin we purchased is fairly common. they have a number of companies who have similar ones. they are typically toly sty reens and have ammonium ion as

the positive charge positive clark embedded into that resin. so think of having a nitrogen atom with a positive charge and four connections to the polymer resin behind it. and that, these positive clarks have a counter ion, which when you buy this stuff it's a chloride. so there are positive charges and negative charges. and you can wash this in hydroxide and the sodium ion, the chloride ions get washed out. and the hydroxide ions will replace them. so when we started, we said that stuff has to pick up co2, because it's a hydroxide. and we liked it because up to this moment we had worked with materials dipped into sodium hydroxide solutions. so we wanted to know whether this is faster or slower, and i made a prediction it will be significantly quicker. because the surfaces are rough, so it should go faster. and true enough, when we took it

in the hydroxide form, it absorbed co2 roughly 15 times faster than the parallel sheet, which was soaked in sodium hydroxide, one more or two more sodium hydroxide solution. then what we noticed, is the sodium hydroxide exposed to air, it cannot go to bicarbonate. we noticed early on that we pick the up way too much co2. as we started to measure it, it became very clear our stuff was going straight to the buy carbona carbonate. so every single one converted it self into a bicarbonate ion. we had some irregularities in the data we couldn't understand until we timely realized we couldn't control for the moisture level. thouf that we controlled for the

moisture level we suddenly saw that the loading state we entered up was extremely sensitive to the water loading of the material. and so what we then found is that the water controls the affinity to co2. if it's dry, it has a 500 times higher equilibrium than when it's wet. so therefore, you can load it all the way to the bicarbonate at 400 ppm. and if you then dip it in water or expose it to 100% relative humidity, it will go in a small, confined volume all the way to 20% co2. we found we can hold roughly 5% in a system with a little bit of counter streaming at the exit. we can hold the stream with 5% co2 in the exit, or if we did it in a vacuum, we could hold 5% of

an atmosphere of co2 in that unit and then extract that from the system. and that's what we did. one way of doing it by the way, is we used liquid nitrogen to freeze it up. and we instantly created two atmospheres of co2 by letting it warm up again. but the basic concept as far as as we can tell is that the hydration clouds of these carbonate ions, in these tiny pockets of polymer, right, actually act differently than in free water, fully wet, and as the ions, the hydration clouds shrink, the relative eke lib yum between carbonate, bicarbonate and hydroxide shifts in favor of getting rid of the bicarbonate. and the hydroxide has a high affinity to co2. so that's how it seems to

happen. we are now building molecular dynamics models, and i can't really talk about it yet because we're not finished. but the preliminary answers look like we can recreate the phenomenon in silicone. it actually works in the computer.÷$óe you actually see a humidity effect there as well, if you take, for example, two graph fain sheets. put some granules and put water molecules and carbonate ions, you see the same shift of eke lib yum we see in the real polymers. so you see it quantitative. so we brief it all makes sense. we now have to do a lot of speck tros copy and work out all the details. but we also found nobody has the instrumentation to do this. people haven't really studied

systems where you have absorbant with two strongly-acting sore baits, because both water and co2 get absorbed on the system, but they strongly interact with each other. and ha happens is, when you put the system in eke lib yum, and you're now einlated with co2 and i now feed it a little bit extra co2, we can observe that that co2 comes off and waters come on. if on the other hand you push on some water by raising the p -- the water pressure a little, it then spits out some co2. as a consequence, while it's absorbing co2 on the outside it cools, because it's pushing water out, right? and the energy which makes this work, and that's why people say

that can't work because he gets something for nothing. no, we don't. we're evaporating water. and that's how we pay for it. and the energy for that we can account for, and it comes out just right. so that was a more technical -- >> thank you so much for coming. >> you ran me ragged. i'm not sure. [ applause ] >> thank you. this weekend on the c-span networks, american history tv is live from baltimore's ft. mchenry for the 200th anniversary of the star-spangled banner. and later at 6:00 eastern on american history tv we'll tour ft. mchenry and learn how war came to baltimore in 1814, about the british barrage on the fort and how francis scott key was there to witness the fight.

saturday, bill clinton and george w. bush. and sunday evening at 8:00, q&a with author rick pearlstein. and on c-span 2, on book tv, ken silverstein on the secret world of oil. and at 6:45. kirsten gillibrand on her life in politics and her call for women to rise up and make a difference in the world. find our television schedule at c-span.org. call us at 202-626-3400. e-mail us at comments @c-span.org. join the c-span conversation. follow us on facebook and twitter. at an event in washington, hosted by the national u.s. arab

chamber of commerce diplomats discussed the business climate in north africa. they're joined by the u.s. assistant the secretary of state. this is two and a half hours. >> if i may invite our chairman to the stage. thank you. on behalf of the national u.s. arab chamber of commerce, i'm delighted to welcome you this morning to this north africa business forum. it's taking place in the backdrop of the first ever africa summit, to be held in the united states. we have an outstanding roster today, both from the arab and

the american side. i particularly want to thank the assistant secretary of state, the honorable charles rifkin for being here today and for leading a delegation of several of our american ambassadors. mr.rifkin is no stranger to africa. he has diplomacy in his blood, be being the son of a distinguished ambassador, william rifkin. charles brings many years of experience in both business and diplomacy to his position as assistant secretary of state in the bureau of economic and business affairs. it's a very key post at the center of america's commercial relations with the world. american business is very fortunate to have him there. had mr. rifkin will speak to us at 9:45 and introduce the

american ambassadors with him. but at this time, i have pleasure to introduce from the floor, our assistant secretary of state of state ann patterson of the near east bureau. she has a crammed schedule during this summit, as you can imagine. but she is kindly dropping by to underscore the importance of north africa to the united states and to encourage fwrart commercial cooperation between us. ann is the senior state official for the neares esast. she's a career ambassador who has served in four countries, most recently egypt. thank you, ann, for being here this morning and for your long service to the country. [ applause ] >> i think she deserves applause. we are here today to talk about north africa.

north africa holds one half of the population of the arab world. last year our exports to north africa totaled $11.5 billion. north africa encompasses much of what draws the world's attention today. many of its countries have recently undergone wrenching political change. some, actual revolution. many wrestle with hide rydrocar one way or the other. how best to produce them while striving to find ways to be less dependent on them. all wrestle with the balance of religion and politics and of religion in politics. all the countries face the youth bulge and how best to train and educate young people so they can be productive in the 21st century, yet despite or possibly because of these challenges,

each country in north africa has recently made a commitment to economic reform and defining ways to attract more investment and trade with foreign partners. there are huge challenges, as i've outlined, but there are also huge opportunities. particularly, as these economic reforms take hold. without question, for our north african partners and for all americans, there are high stakes in seeing these efforts succeed. the national u.s. arab chamber of commerce is honored to sponsor this event today. we are active in promoting trade between the u.s. and north africa and indeed with all the countries of the arab world. over the span of 50 years we have built strong commercial ties and mutual trust between american and arab business.

and we hope you will join us as a member. that's my only plug for the morning. let me also recognize several dignitaries in our audience. i hope they have arrived. rashad balaur, from morocco? is he here? he's supposed to be here, but he will come. the chancellor at the moroccan embassy. the minister potentialary in the office of egypt. good! thank you. [ applause ] and commercial attache of the

republic of tunisia, welcome. [ applause ] i now have the pleasure to introduce our distinguished north african speakers. we are very fortunate to have, as our keynote speaker this morning, his excellency, the egyptian minister of trade and industry. [ applause ] he is not only egypt's senior business minister, he is also a long-standing member of the wof party as was his father. a prominent businessman. he served on the board of cairo and alexandria stock exchanges. he was one of the original founders of one of the first egyptian companies to take agricultural raw production and process and package it to the

highest world standards. no one who visited cairo in those days could fail to be proudly offered a jar of vetri jam. our speakers representing morocco. [ applause ] mr. bodoon is the advocate for small enterprise and integration of the small sector in morocco. he serves within the ministry of trade, investment and digital economy. these are long titles. but in this essence, he's responsible for assuring morocco is a full player in the high-tech, 21st century economy. fittingly, he's a millennial, i believe the youngest official

among the king's appointments. he was educated in paris and was a conch trader on the desk at morgan stanley. he thus brings to his job a practical knowledge of what it takes for morocco to compete in world financial markets and what investors need and expect from morocco as a hub. our next speaker is also the ceo -- is my high school french, is it okay? and on the board of homochrome, one of the largest diversified groups in the country. she received her mba from the

university of dallas. and if you know anything about dallas, you know it's famous for people like ms. shagrun who enjoy a challenge. in morocco, she's a tireless advocate for business, for women in business and for all moroccans to achieve their highest potential. she's a high accepted pilot. she's driven race cars in rallies. and she owns a harley. so you know where ever you're going, she's going to get there ahead of you. [ laughter ] so now let me call to our speakers and call first for the keynote address. [ applause ]

>> good morning, everybody, and thank you very much for inviting me and for giving me this privilege. but before starting, as we are here at the u.s. arab chamber of commerce, i would like to ask you for a moment of silence to acknowledge those who are suffering, those who lost their lives and are losing their lives as we speak in gaza and israel. thank you. as i was saying, it is for me a privilege to be a speaker at the national u.s. arab chamber of commerce with such a distinguished and select group of ministers, ambassadors, in

the presence of leaders business men and business women. it is also for me a great pleasure to be in washington. it's beautiful and vibrant city, the capitol of the worldw>ñ thas hosting today some 50 delegations from african countries participating in the leaders summit. it is an excellent opportunity, also, to meet in this north africa forum, ministers from morocco and ambassadors, u.s. ambassadors and other north african countries, to listen to experiences of countries of the region, following what has been called the arab spring.

to listen to the experience of those who seem to be on the road to fulfilling the aims and aspirations of their people after a couple of difficult and turbulent years, like egypt and tunisia. those who have heard the call for democracy and respect for human rights and have taken measures to avoid the revolutionary wave, like morocco, and unfortunately, those who are still in the midst of the turmoil like libya. let me start, as far as egypt is concerned, let me start with the second wave of the revolution when egyptians took to the streets to put an end to the rule of the muslim brothers who had failed to fulfill the aims of the people, namely, to build

a new egypt, a free, democratic, secular, just and modern state. the new government had to face three huge, huge challenges. a political challenge, to rebuild the democratic institutions of the country. a security challenge to restore law & order and an economic challenge to regain the confidence of financial markets and investors. to face the political challenge, a road map was drawn with a precise schedule and timeline in three stages. the first stage aimed at drafting a constitution, followed by presidential, then parliamentary elections. the chief justice of the supreme court was sworn in as temporary

president of the republic until a new president was elected. the constitution drafted by committee of 50 representing all sectors of egypt's political, social and religious spectrum was passed by a vast majority and referendum on the 14th and 15th of january, 2014. the big support that the constitution, that the constitution had was expected. because the constitution responds to a great extent to the aspirations of the egyptian people, guaranteeing women and minorities rights and providing for the separation of powers for an independent court system, for the rule of law, for a democratic government where social justice prevails and political checks and balances

are maintained. presidential elections took place between the 26th and the 28th of may. ha defa assisi was elected. elections are to take place before the end of this year leading eventually to the modernization of the political life in egypt. as for the security challenge, the new government had to face the threats of muslim brothers to chose to resort to terrorism, to kill innocent civilians, burn churches and monasteries, bomb

headquarters and police precincts, attack army officers and soldiers in sinai and in the western desert. destroy infrastructure, especially electricity distribution networks, railway and metro stations. this challenge is in my mind the most difficult one to deal with. because its confrontation very often calls for criticism. sometimes the government appears to be too lenient and is accused of being too lenient, because it suspects due process, and the due process is usually slow. but more often, the government overreacts, commits mistakes and is criticized for lack of respect for human rights.

the boundaries between respects of basic rights on one hand and maintaining the security on the other is a delicate one, especially when you have to deal with terrorist threats. but the egyptians today realize that they need this stage, a strong hand to pull the country together and bring about required stability, allowing for the return to normal economic and political life and the resumption of investments and tourism. the third challenge is economic one. the financial year ending june 13, 2013 had recorded a budget deficit amounting to 270 billion egyptian pounds, representing 13.8% of the gdp.

it recorded also a growth rate of 2%, while the population, growth rate is 2.5, meaning that the per capita income of the egyptian was declining. it recorded also a deficit of account amounting to $30 billion. in a nutshell, the egyptian economy was and still is suffering from deficits, a budget deficit, a growth deficit and an external deficit. as a result of the accumulated budget deficits, public debt reached 92% of the gdp. the external deficit led to the depletion of the foreign currency reserves that were down to $11 billion in, on june 13,

2013. down from $36 billion in january 2011. today they stand approximately at $17.3 billion. and the growth deficit led to the increase of the unemployment rate for 13%. industry was in no better shape than the rest of the economy and was facing several problems, including a serious shortage of industrial lands and when available, it lacked infrastructure. a serious energy crunch, constituting a severe constraints on industrial developments and more generally on economic development. a shortage of available sources of banking finance, to a large extent due to government crowding out. and more importantly, and as a result of all of the above, a

serious loss of confidence and trust of investors whether egyptian or foreign. so, in order to jump start the economy, the government adopted an aggressive financial policy and approved a stimulus package allocated to the execution of infrastructure projects, including housing projects, roads, bridges, grain silos, the completion of the third line of the cairo metro, the upgrading of electricity power stations. the land infrastructure in 35 industrial zones. and the upgrading of the egyptian railway network. thanks to the financial support of friendly arab states, namely,

the united arab emirates and saudi arabia, this increase in public spending did not have any implications on the budget deficit, which was, as a matter of fact, brought down during the financial year 2013/2014, ending on june 30, 2014. that was brought down to 12%. down, again, from 13.8%. but all this is obviously not efficient. and to put the egyptian economy on the right track, a plan was designed to reduce the macro economic risks, arising from the fiscal and external vulnerabilities of the economy. and the plan aimed at, number one, restructuring the budget in order to reduce its deficit,

then it aimed at implementing an ambitious program to increase the annual growth rates, and finally, to boost exports of goods and services to reduce the current deficit. the restructuring of the budget required the replacement of most of the spending on inefficient fuel subsidies, with spending on education, health and infrastructure. it also entails fiscal reforms, aiming at increasing public revenues, including the introduction of real estate taxes, of a capital gain tax on stock market transactions and a value-added tax. but most importantly, it will require taking the necessary measures to entice and give the

incentives to the informed sector to get integrated into the former. the government has started to implement the plan last month and has taken the very bold and courageous decision to reduce fuel and electricity subsidy the and to increase spending on basic services, including health, education. let me stop here and remind those of you who have been following the egypt politically and economically, that since 1977, when late president sadat tried to reduce the subsidies, no government since then tried and failed to reduce subsidies. no government has attempted to touch this very, very delicate subject. when our government has, as i

said, taken the very bold and courageous decision, has increased the prices of fuel and electricity substantially, reducing in a first step, the subsidies that are burdening the budget. we also introduced, as i said, several taxes, including a real estate tax and a capital gain tax on transactions on stock market transactions. on the other hand, a very ambitious investment program is being drawn. it includes megaprojects like the one aimed at developing the suez canal zone, to establish logistics and a commercial hub.

another megaproject is what we call the golden of chain project which involves developing the area in the nile valley in upper egypt and an area which is very rich with mineral resources, including phosphates, gold, quartz and many ours with a view to create an industrial center using those resources. third, make a project that is not known and that will be declared tomorrow since president assisi is going to break the ground, is the doubling of the suez canal. a better canal will be digged starting tomorrow as a matter of fact. improving and reducing the passage time through the suez canal by 50%.

other investment projects include the reclamation of approximately 1.75 hectares, the construction of 3,000 kilometers of roads in this financial year. kbd8÷ the development of renewable solar and wind energies, housing projects, electrical power plants, petro chemical projects and others. but the execution of this ambition plan depends to a large extent on our ability to regain the confidence of the financial markets and the trust of investors. to this end, we are currently reviewing laws and declarations doing business in egypt with a view to create the proper environment to attract investments, facilitate procedures and reduce

bureaucracy. also a huge effort is currently being put to improve the egyptian working force and raise the level of available technical skills by providing vocational training and supporting technical education. finally, the economic reform plan aims at reducing the current account deficits by promoting and encouraging exports, building on the free-trade agreements egypt signed with several countries, the arab countries and the framework of the league of nations. the georgia, tunisia and morocco and east african countries in the agreement, the european union in the context of the partnership agreement and

finally, turkey. it should be emphasized, and regardless of those free trade agreements, that egypt enjoys definite competitive advantages in the production of fruits, vegetables, agra industries, textiles, ready-made products, chemicals and petro chemicals among many others and should plan to double the values of its exports within the coming seven years. in addition, egypt plans on bringing back the flow of visitors. let me remind you that back in 2010, close to 15 million tourists had visited egypt, generating revenue of $12 billion in u.s. dollars. it would not be too unreasonable to target, to receive 20 million

tourists within five years from now. provided, however, measures are taken to diversify markets. as it was said in the introduction, the challenges are enormous, but so are the opportunities. and we are adamant, we will do whatever is needed in order to put egypt on the fast track of sustainable and inclusive growth, and to regain the confidence of financial markets, respecting our commitments, preserving the rights of investors, abiding by the rule of law, shaping economic incentives to save, to invest, to innovate, to adopt new technologies. and above all, we would have the honest and the courage to take

the correct decision, even if they are difficult and painful. because we have no other alternative but to succeed. thank you. [ applause ] thank you, mr. minister, for a really brilliant speech of where, where egypt is today. i'd like to now call on -- and i brief i have a new title for you as vice minister? is vice chairman? they all those fit for our next speaker from morocco. your excellency? [ applause ]

>> thank you very much. ladies and gentlemen, good morning. it is for me a great pleasure to take part in this business forum organized by the international, u.s. arab chambers of commerce around this very important topic that is north africa. our challenges and opportunities in this particular time of transition. i am delight to provide some insight about business opportunities in our region in general and in my country in general. i would like to seize this opportunity to bridge business communities between this region and the arab world. ladies and gentlemen, north africa today produces about the

third of africa's gdp and is a market of 170 million people. the country, the countries of the region share the same concern regarding issue of development, such as economy growth, unemployment and meeting the social expectations. however, north africa trade represents less than 4% of the total trade. to give you a comparison, in the european union, it's about 60%. and in the commercial area it's about 15%. and this is estimated to between 2 to 3 point of gdp per year. in a win/win logic, in various sectors to create economies of skills and integrate value

change for a more competitive business environment. the ongoing structural change in the global economy, which is marked by a reshaping of global values chain offers significant opportunities, especially in the field of energy, finance, facilitation and information technology and communication. morocco has always expressed its support for an integrated market. more over, his majesty, the king, visits to tunisia last may was a renewed tunl to build strong partnership between the two countries and to highlight the role of maghreb integration. ladies and gentlemen, morocco has today one of the most diversified economy in the

region is, with traditional sectors, such as agribusiness, textile, but also, and this is very important, a new, emerging sectors, such as industrials. the information technology and communication but also outsourcing and finance. despite the international economy crisis, our economy has proved to be resilient with the strong macro economy stability, low inflation and strong growth rate over the past several years. today we can say that we benefit from the confidence of international financial organizations, agencies and foreign investors. thanks to the implementation, we

recorded an annual growth of 5%. this growth momentum was mainly driven by a strong domestic demand and capital with an investment rain with around 35% of our gdp. it's one of the best performance in the region. last year morocco has stepped up to the 77th rank in the world economic for competitive report which make us today the third highest ranked african economy, but also the first one in this region. the kingdom has established an attractive legal framework for foreign investors by developing a network of international agreements, including 63 protection agreements and 59

agreements avoiding the double taxations. thanks to a wide set of free trades agreements, concludes with the united states, with the european union, with turkey, with egypt, with tunisia and jordan, morocco can offer today to american companies a free duty access to a market of 55 countries and more than a billion customers, which represent about 60% of the total world gdp. ladies and gentlemen, morocco and the united states enjoy a strong partnership and a strategic alliance. historically speaking, morocco was the first nation in the world to recognize the independence of the united states of america in 1777. the treaty of friendship signed in 1783 between the two tr