After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar exit, I made the jump to hardware. Now I’m working on carbon removal + steel at Charm Industrial, and electric long-haul trucking with Revoy. It’s epically fun to be building in the real world, but little did I expect that more than half the cost of building a hardware company would come from regulatory bottlenecks. Despite a huge push for climate fixes and the bipartisan geopolitical desire to bring industry back to the USA, I’ve been shocked to find that the single biggest barrier—by far—is over-regulation from the massive depth of bureaucracy.
Hardtech companies of all flavors are being forced to burn through limited capital while they wait for regulatory clarity and/or permits. This creates a constant cycle of cost increases that ultimately flows to consumers, it lowers investment in the US manufacturing and industrial base, it delays innovative new hardware getting into the hands of consumers and businesses, and at the end of the day, it leaves us all worse off, stuck with a quality of life pegged to technology developed decades ago.
Regulatory delays and bottlenecks have added millions of pounds of pollutants like PM2.5, NOₓ and CO₂ to our air from the continuation of business as usual, instead of the deployment of clean technologies from my two hardtech efforts alone. While CO₂ is a long-term climate issue, PM2.5 and NOₓ are immediate major drivers of asthma and excess morbidity. Both operations have high bipartisan appeal—and we’ve never been denied a permit—because we’re fundamentally cleaning up things that matter to everyone: dirty air, wildfires, orphaned oil wells. Revoy is also helping deflate the cost of long-haul freight. But none of that has made getting freedom to operate easy. For creative new technologies the default answer is “no” because there isn’t a clear path to permitting at all, and figuring out that path itself takes years — time that startups can’t afford to wait.
Regulation obviously has a critical role in protecting people and the environment, but the sheer volume, over-specificity and sometimes ambiguity of those same regulations is now actively working against those goals! We’re unintentionally blocking the very things that would improve our environment. We’ve become a society that blocks all things, and we need to be a society that builds great things every day. The rest of this article gets very specific about the astronomical costs regulations are imposing on us as a society, and the massive positive impact that could be unleashed by cutting back regulation that is working against new, cost-saving, creative technology that could also be making people and the environment healthy again.
To make it concrete: both Charm and Revoy are capital-efficient hardtech companies, but Charm will spend low hundreds of millions to get to breakeven, and Revoy will spend tens of millions. In both cases, more than half of the total cost of building each company has gone to counterproductive regulatory burden. I’m hellbent on pushing through these barriers, but the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is the deathbed of thousands of hardtech companies that could be drastically improving our lives. We must unleash them.
$300M in Societal Cost & $125M in Burden for Charm
Charm produces and delivers verified carbon removal to companies like Google, Microsoft and JPMorgan. Charm’s breakthrough was realizing that you could take CO₂ captured in farm & forestry plant residues, convert it into a carbon-rich, BBQ sauce-like liquid (it’s literally the smoke flavor in BBQ sauce), and inject it into old oil wells to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere. This has all kinds of co-benefits like reducing the massive overburden of wildfire fuels, cleaning up & plugging nasty orphaned oil wells, and improving PM2.5 and NOₓ air quality by avoiding that biomass being burned instead.
And yet… there was a hangup: what kind of injection well is this? Should it be permitted as a Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal, or Class V experimental? This question on permitting path took four years to answer. Four years to decide which path to use, not even the actual permit! It took this long because regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in taking a formal position on something new. Even when we’d done an enormous amount of lab and field work with bio-oil to understand its safety and behavior at surface and subsurface conditions. A regulator faces little cost to moving incredibly cautiously, but a major cost if they approve something that triggers activist pushback.
In the end, we’re grateful that—eventually—a state regulator took the reins and reviewed, managed, and issued the first-ever Class V bio-oil sequestration permit, through what was still an incredibly complex and detailed 14-month review process.
Now imagine that, instead of the 5.5 years from first contact to issued permit, it had only taken the 6 months it actually required to get everyone across the regulatory establishment to agree on a Class V pathway, we would have had 5 additional years operating the well. That’s the equivalent, from our real supply chain, of sinking at least 30,000 tonnes of carbon per year at $600/tonne. Looking only at this one aspect, this delay came with a $90M price tag for Charm. We’ve also spent untold millions on regulatory affairs at all levels of government, not to mention the missed acceleration in sales, and other direct hard costs spent in R&D and processing bio-oil for inefficient and expensive injection into salt caverns instead.
But the public health burden created by this regulatory slowness is where it gets really crazy. This one regulatory delay meant we all got subjected to decreased air quality from an additional 30,000 tonnes per year of pile burning. The resulting particulate emissions alone are estimated to have caused a mindblowing $40m/year in healthcare costs. This is $200M in additional healthcare burden over those five years, mostly borne by Medicare and Medicaid. There are additional costs to NOₓ emissions and more that take it to $300M.
In total, the total cost to society of this single regulatory delay will be about $400M: $120-150M of unnecessary cost to Charm, and the bulk of it—$300M or so—borne by the public in healthcare costs. I’m not sharing these numbers to complain or make excuses; Charm is still on the path to having a huge impact and we’re among the lucky few that can survive these delays. What pains me most is the 5 years of lost carbon removal and pollutant reduction, and the compounding effect that has on all our health and healthcare costs. Over-regulation is now working against the very things it’s intended to protect.
Regulators do their absolute best with the system they have, but the combined effects of: (1) extremely detailed and complex regulation, (2) chaotic budgets and understaffing that disrupt an efficient process, and (3) endless lawsuits against regulators since 1970s-era Naderism have created an atmosphere of fear. If we want to solve the climate crisis, build abundance, lower costs, and generate wealth for all, this has to change. We need to delete and simplify reams of regulations. We need to pay regulators well, and we need to trust our regulators to operate quickly and decisively by putting reasonable limits on endless activist legal challenges.
>$25M in Unnecessary Burden for Revoy
Revoy’s breakthrough was realizing that you could lower long-haul freight costs and electrify long-haul semi trucks by leaving the diesel tractor in place and dropping an electric powertrain onto the back of the semi. Today, we boost semis from 7 mpg to 120 mpg, driving a 94% reduction in fuel consumption. This slashes emissions that negatively impact both air quality and climate.
And yet again… a hangup: what exactly is this electric doohickey? Is it a truck? A trailer? Something else? It was clear from the regulations that it was a “converter dolly”. But getting complete alignment on that simple fact across an alphabet soup of government agencies spanning both federal and state—NHTSA, FMCSA, FHWA, state transit authorities, air quality management districts, state DMVs, highway patrols and more—took years.
A “powered converter dolly” isn’t even a new thing! Here’s one from the sixties that ran on diesel to help trucks get over mountain passes:
There were some bright spots. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) quickly converged on informal definitional clarity, and then eventually a Highway Patrol Captain who was eager to get innovative electric vehicles on the road pushed it through with a state DMV to register the first four Revoys. But bringing along the rest of the agencies, and the rest of the states, was not fast. It delayed deployments, soaked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal and lobbyist time (not to mention all the corresponding time on the government side that all of us taxpayers have to bear), and maybe most importantly… even with a formal memo from the Federal DOT, it is still not 100% resolved in some states.
As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device—whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations—is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It’s a complete waste of money for everyone.
And that $27M dollar cost doesn’t include the cost to society. This over-regulation will delay deployment of EV trucks by years, increasing NOₓ and PM 2.5 air pollution exposure for many of society’s least well-off who live near freeways. The delayed deployment will also increase CO₂ emissions that threaten the climate and environment. Revoy’s Founder (Ian Rust) and I actually disagree on what exactly it is about the regulatory environment that needs to change, but we agree it’s completely broken and hurting both people and the planet.
In every interaction I have with regulators, I’m reminded that they’re good people doing god’s work operating in a fundamentally broken system. A regulatory system that structurally insists on legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a massive negative return for society.
If we had a regulatory system that could move fast to experiment with creative new technologies, we’d live in a world where our environment gets cleaned up faster, where awesome new hardware was constantly improving our lives by making things better and cheaper, and where large-scale hardtech innovation happened here at home in the USA, not in China.
As we collectively work to build more manufacturing capacity at home and build the next wave of technologies to power the economy, we need to grapple with the real bottlenecks holding us back. I hope other hardtech founders will publicly share more of their stories as well (the stories I’ve heard in private would shock you). Props to Blake Scholl for doing so.
We need a come-to-jesus about regulatory limits, timelines, and scope. Yes, we need basic and strong protections for clear harms, but we need to unleash every hardworking American, not just a few companies with massive funding, to invent and build hardware again. We need to combine many approaches to get there: expedited reviews for new technology, freedom to operate by default, permits by right-not-process, deleting as many regulatory steps as possible, and more. CA YIMBY’s successful push to pass a deluge of housing acceleration laws in the past two years could serve as a model. America building things again is the foundation of a prosperous, powerful, and clean America.