Loa Carbon CEO & Co-Founder on Producing Sustainable Natural Gas in Energy Transition

What if the waste product of one industry could become the clean fuel source for another? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing Loa Carbon CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Shearman to discuss producing cost-effective and sustainable natural gas from CO2 waste, the use of artificial intelligence in product development, and the importance of market demand and commercialization strategies when building a product.

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Show Notes

1. Ryan Shearman is a serial founder with a background in mechanical engineering and material science who spent his early career commercializing products featuring unconventional materials, including composite materials and dinosaur bone in the jewelry industry. That hands-on experience with novel materials and product development blocking and tackling set the foundation for everything Loa Carbon is doing today.
2. Loa Carbon started as something completely different. In 2018, Ryan and his co-founders began converting atmospheric CO2 into lab-grown diamonds, bringing the world’s first carbon-captured diamonds to market under the Ether Diamonds brand. The pivot to synthetic natural gas came from getting very good at CO2 conversion while scaling that diamond business.
3. The core chemistry behind Loa Carbon is the Sabatier reaction, discovered 100 years ago by a French physicist. CO2 and hydrogen combine in the presence of a catalyst to produce synthetic natural gas and water. The only outputs are the gas and water, and the water gets recycled back into the process to produce more hydrogen through electrolysis.
4. The primary technical challenge is heat management. The Sabatier reaction is highly exothermic, meaning it produces a tremendous amount of heat, and if that heat is not extracted fast enough, the reaction runs less efficiently or enters a runaway condition. Solving that heat extraction problem at speed was the core engineering breakthrough that makes Loa Carbon’s system viable, and the tools required to do it did not exist a few years ago.
5. Loa Carbon’s reactors are modular and containerized. From the outside they look like a standard 40-foot shipping container, which is by design. The goal is to manufacture them in serialized fashion at centralized locations and deploy them quickly anywhere in the world, removing the need to build large bespoke facilities from scratch.
6. The business model is built around co-location. Loa Carbon places its reactors at facilities that already produce the inputs as waste byproducts, such as landfills where renewable natural gas production vents roughly 35 to 40 percent of its gas stream as CO2. Loa Carbon captures that wasted CO2 and converts it into additional saleable natural gas, increasing a partner’s production capacity by up to 85 to 90 percent.
7. Decarbonization and energy sovereignty are two sides of the same coin for Loa Carbon. One in four countries currently imports natural gas from a foreign supplier. Loa Carbon’s technology allows any country with industrial CO2 waste streams to produce its own natural gas domestically, removing dependence on foreign supply chains that are vulnerable to geopolitical disruption.
8. The geopolitical case for Loa Carbon is already playing out. Iran’s attack on a major Qatari LNG facility took roughly 20 percent of global natural gas supply offline. Countries that were importing Qatari LNG suddenly found themselves bidding against each other for remaining supply. Every one of those countries has the industrial waste streams that could feed a Loa Carbon reactor.
9. There is no such thing as a willingness to pay a green premium at scale. Ryan saw this firsthand selling lab-grown diamonds at a premium because they were sustainably produced. A small segment of customers will pay more for a better environmental story, but building a business on that is a fantasy. Loa Carbon is built to win on economics, not virtue.
10. For a country importing LNG, the landed cost after liquefaction, ocean transport, and regasification can reach 20 to 22 dollars per MMBTU. Loa Carbon’s technology can produce synthetic natural gas in-country at roughly half that cost. That price advantage makes adoption an easy decision rather than a values-based one.
11. Capital markets calibrated to software startup timelines create a structural challenge for hard tech companies. Hardware and deep tech iterations take longer, plants take years to build, and molecules are slower to work with than code. Good companies in the space can get killed simply because they were not given enough time to be right.
12. Loa Carbon uses AI actively in product development, including optimizing reactor geometry and streamlining day-to-day operations. Ryan is clear that this is not an AI bolt-on narrative designed to attract capital. The AI is doing real work in the system, and as the company scales its hiring, familiarity with AI tools will be a prerequisite for many roles.
13. Diversity is not a moral argument for Ryan; it is an engineering one. Homogenous teams have blind spots that correlate, and in deep tech where the whole job is finding things other people have missed, correlated blind spots can be fatal. Diversity of experience and disciplines is what drives diversity of thought, and that is what creates the moat.
14. The energy sector has historically been demographically narrow. Ryan sees an opportunity to attract talent from communities and disciplines that the energy and climate landscape have never successfully recruited from, and views that as a competitive advantage over incumbents who continue to hire from the same pools.
15. The biggest unlock for the Loa Carbon business was not a technological breakthrough. It was a reframe. They set out to build a diamond business and accidentally built an energy company. Being willing to follow where the evidence leads, even when it means abandoning the original thesis, is what made the pivot possible.
16. A good product manager owns what gets built and ships it on time. That is genuinely hard, and most people cannot do it. A great product manager also owns why someone is buying the product, tracing a straight line from any given specification to the real reason a specific human being is going to sign a contract.
17. The best PMs Ryan has worked with hold deep conviction loosely. They can change their mind in public quickly when new evidence arrives, with no ego attached to defending a prior decision. Vying for what is best given the current facts is more important than protecting a position.
18. Great PMs notice when the wrong question is being asked. Good PMs answer the question in front of them. The ability to step back and reframe the problem rather than optimize the answer is what separates solid execution from real product leadership.
19. Fear of failure is the real failure. Failure is tuition, and paying that price early when the stakes are lower is far better than paying it later. Ryan’s advice is to fail fast, learn the thing, and move. Anyone not failing regularly is not pushing hard enough.
20. Watch what buyers of energy are doing, not what climate technology producers are saying. When a government or industry pays real money for domestically produced fuel with zero subsidy support, that is the moment a technology becomes real. Demand signals provide the truth that press releases and pitch decks never can.