Welcome to Zero. I am Akshadrati.

This week, steel, stealth and flattening the carbon cove.

This summer, I spent three weeks traveling around the U.S. visiting climate startups.

Today I'm going to tell you the story of one of them.

A secretive company called Electra that operates out of a suburban office park in Colorado.

Electra is taking on a massive, often unrecognized problem, decarbonizing steel, an industry

worth nearly $1 trillion that accounts for 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The vast majority of those emissions come from the first step in the process of making steel,

converting iron ore to iron.

What I pitched to him is, like, I had four ideas, actually, to be honest with you.

First idea I was explaining to him was around iron and steel of electrification at low temperature,

and he said, let me stop you right there. I'm already sold.

That's Sandeep Nijhavan, co-founder of Electra, describing a conversation with his first investor,

who was sold on the radical simplicity of what Sandeep was proposing.

Zero carbon steel using iron produced at low temperature.

Since that initial pitch, Electra has gone on to raise $85 million.

What attracts people to Electra is the fact that not only can zero carbon steel solve a climate problem,

but that it also has the potential to make a lot of money.

That's one reason why Electra has been in stealth mode for the last two years.

It did not want any of its ideas stolen.

Now, the company is finally talking, because its idea has gone from a PowerPoint presentation

to working at lab scale.

...