The budget will allow Trellis to work with Greenie RE and Ebb Carbon to design an insurance product that enables project finance for FOAK CDR and other climate solutions. The funding will support staff time to design the mechanism and disseminate learnings over the next year. Activities will include desk research, project modeling, expert interviews, developing insurance structures, establishing legal entities, and writing public-facing materials about our findings.

The budget will leverage significant cost share from Trellis, industry expertise from Ebb, and foundational work conducted by Greenie RE. Trellis’ goal is to deploy $2-5M in philanthropic catalytic capital by 2026 into a loss reserve that enables the insurance product designed through this grant, expanding Greenie RE’s work to provide impact insurance for climate tech and leveraging Ebb’s experience building CDR plants. The grant will accelerate our impact, enabling us to deploy capital faster and share our learnings sooner.

Additional Information

Lara Pierpoint, PhD

Lara is passionate about technologies that meaningfully reduce emissions and contribute to a cleaner environment. As the Managing Director for Trellis Climate at Prime, she is demonstrating systems innovation and catalytic investment approaches that will speed commercialization, deployment, and scale-up of climate change mitigation infrastructure.

Before joining Prime, as co-CEO and a founding member of Actuate, Lara built the Actuate Climate program to design interventions that get emissions-reducing technologies on the ground faster. In December of 2022, Actuate Climate and the Prime team joyfully decided to join forces, and Lara’s team and programs became Trellis Climate.

Prior to Actuate, Lara worked on energy technology innovation at Exelon. As Director of Technology Strategy for the company, she advised on energy technology trends, invested in early- and mid-stage energy storage companies, and ran Exelon’s partnership R&D program.

Before her time at Exelon, she directed the Office of Energy Supply Security in the U.S. DOE Office of Policy and Systems Analysis, where she was responsible for policy and analysis related to coal, gas, and nuclear power and energy cyber and physical security. She served as AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, focusing on nuclear power and waste issues, energy finance, and electricity storage.

She received her PhD from MIT in Engineering Systems, studying deployment of advanced technologies for nuclear waste recycling, and she holds dual masters degrees from MIT in nuclear engineering and technology policy. She completed her B.S. in physics at UCLA.

Ben Tarbell

About Ben

Ben Tarbell is Co-Founder and CEO of Ebb Carbon. Previously, Ben was the VP of Products at SolarCity as it grew from 0 to 375MW+ of solar assets installed, 50,000+ customers, 2,500+ employees, and IPO growing to $6B+ valuation. He went on to lead the launch of Mosaic's residential solar loan program which became one of the largest sources of residential solar financing providing several billion dollars per year of solar loans. Ben later joined Google X and led the team launching new climate technologies and businesses. Ben has successfully invested in dozens of climate technology startup companies as an angel investor as well as while working at climate-focused venture capital firms. He serves on the board of GlobalGiving and has both an MS in Engineering and an MBA from Stanford University and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University.

About Ebb Carbon

Ebb Carbon is pioneering a new carbon removal solution by enhancing the ocean’s natural ability to safely store CO2. Ebb’s technology is designed to integrate with existing industrial facilities that process seawater, like desalination plants, which today represents over a billion tonnes of carbon removal once integrated. Ebb’s approach has the potential to be one of the largest scale and lowest cost approaches to removing excess CO2 from the air, while reducing ocean acidity locally.

Jeff McAulay

Jeff McAulay is the Co-Founder and CEO at Energetic Capital, a leading provider of driven capital products including project renewable energy project finance debt and insurance. Jeff is also the founding President and architect of GreenieRE a non-profit insurance company dedicated to risk management in decarbonization infrastructure.

Jeff was a founding partner at ADL Ventures, a boutique energy and infrastructure innovation consultancy. He maintains an advisory board position to support impact finance projects. Previously Jeff launched the distributed energy resources team at EnerNOC (now Enel X) which developed the first behind the meter stational storage projects with Tesla. Prior to that, he was the founding leader of the Fraunhofer USA TechBridge Program, performing validation testing on early-stage distributed energy technologies. TechBridge was supported by the US DOE and electric utility companies.

Jeff has an interdisciplinary engineering background having worked on medical devices at Boson Scientific and catalytic fuel reformation at Nuvera Fuel Cells. He holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University and a master's degree from the Technology and Policy Program at MIT.

Emily Lewis O'Brien, PhD

Emily is a Principal at Trellis Climate with responsibilities including strategic planning, impact research and diligence, and pipeline construction. She joins the team from Actuate Climate, which joined forces with Prime in 2022 to form Trellis.

Emily has over a decade of experience in the climate and clean energy field, and her career has focused on data-driven approaches to program design and implementation, state and federal policy development and advocacy, and scientific research. She has carried out this work through roles at impact-driven organizations, including Acadia Center, VEIC, Actuate, and currently at Trellis. Emily served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow in the Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis at the U.S. Department of Energy and as an American Chemical Society Congressional Fellow on the democratic staff of the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee.

Emily earned her PhD in Physical Chemistry from Tufts University, where she studied reactions for making synthetic fuels, and her BS and MS in Chemistry from Northeastern University, where her research focused on hydrogen fuel cells.