Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it.

I'm Tim O'Brien. Every week on Crash Course, I'm going to bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur and

I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide

with competition and power.

Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.

Google's Research Lab started a project a few years ago that it thought had the

potential to slow the impact of man-made climate change. It was going to make fuel

from carbon dioxide harvested from sea water.

This fuel would still release carbon when it was burned, just like oil and gas.

But because it was made from carbon taken from the atmosphere,

instead of taken from underground deposits,

it wouldn't end up increasing the overall level of greenhouse gases.

Our world economy is fueled by fossil fuels still and they have a lot of amazing properties

that are hard to replicate and so if we can make renewable fuels we would just advance

substantially as a you a world civilization.

That's Kathy Hanoon who led the project,

which Google called Fogghorn.

And the Fogghorn team actually did succeed in making fuel

from seawater. But Google pulled the plug on the project anyway in early 2016

because it was just too expensive. It just didn't look like we would be able to hit a price point on a timeline that would

justify the very large investment that would be required to bring that technology to market.

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