When I first began exploring the world of air quality and climate technology, I envisioned it as a field primarily driven by scientists and researchers. However, the more conversations I had, from global conferences to interviews across continents, the more I realized that climate solutions emerge from every corner of society, including policymakers, engineers, activists, data scientists, and entrepreneurs. My conversation with Angus Shaw, a veteran technologist turned full-time carbon removal founder, brought that lesson into even sharper focus.
Angus has spent three decades between engineering, chemistry, and large-scale technical programs. But the moment that first set him on the path to climate work happened much earlier, before email, before the internet, before “climate tech” was even a formal term.
1992 – When Carbon Removal Became a Calling
As a teenager, Angus attended a sustainability conference in Edinburgh in 1992. It showcased early solar panels, experimental energy-efficiency systems, and the first global policies designed to heal the ozone layer. At the end of a talk, policymaker Crispin Tickell gave a warning that would quietly change the direction of his life.
We think there’s another problem we’ll need to solve. There’s too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Somehow, it will have to be removed.
At the time, there was no internet, no network to follow up with, and no large-scale community to plug into. But the idea stayed and sat with him through 30 years of technical leadership roles until he finally stepped away from his day job to build carbon removal solutions on his own.
Why Marine BiCRS? Turning Green Tides Into Carbon Removal
Angus’s startup centers on a form of bio-carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) that operates in the marine environment. The core inspiration comes from a natural event called the green tide.
Every late April to early May, the Yellow Sea, between northern China and Korea, explodes into a massive bloom of algae. Fueled by agricultural runoff, ideal temperatures, and nutrient-rich water, the algae grow at extraordinary speed, absorbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
What happens next is less beautiful. The bloom collapses, rots, and washes ashore, overwhelming beaches with a smell no one wants to experience. But buried inside that messy natural phenomenon was a powerful insight: Algae grow fast. They absorb carbon. And nature is already demonstrating the scale.
Angus is building a system that replicates the ‘growth’ part of the green tide while avoiding the ecological damage. His approach captures carbon through rapid algal production, converts part of the biomass into biochar, a stable, solid carbon form, and stores that carbon for the long term. Biochar can be added to soil as a beneficial amendment or buried safely underground, where it doesn’t react or escape. This innovation isn’t the existence of algae or biochar, but in engineering a scalable, modular system that brings biology, chemistry, and carbon storage together efficiently.
The Core Challenge: Engineering for Net Negativity
Many carbon removal concepts sound good on paper, but may fall apart under real-world constraints. If energy use, chemical inputs, transportation, or heat requirements outweigh the carbon captured, then the ‘removal’ isn’t actually removal. That’s why Angus is focused on one major aspect: Ensuring every step of his process is genuinely carbon-negative.
To do that, he relies on techno-economic analysis (TEA) and lifecycle assessment (LCA), both performed with the help of a powerful modeling framework called BioSTEAM, a Python-based tool for simulating biorefineries. This is where software and engineering merge. BioSTEAM analyzes energy inputs, heat requirements, transport emissions, chemical use, yields, and outputs, as well as financial costs. That way, it tells the truth about whether the system removes carbon or not.
Before developing prototypes, Angus builds the test, a concept borrowed from test-driven development in software engineering. The test is the lifecycle assessment.
“The first design always fails,” he said. But if you iterate the LCA as you iterate the design, you can start making decisions that lead you to the desired net-negative outcome. It’s engineering with the end-goal baked in from the first sketch.
Design Pivot: Decentralizing to Reduce the Footprint
One of Angus’s earliest insights emerged directly from his lifecycle modeling.
Chemical engineering usually favors centralized processing: big factories, big efficiencies. But for carbon removal, centralization creates a new problem: transportation.
Shipping feedstocks to a central facility and products back out creates enormous hidden emissions. The opposite had to be done. His solution: modular, shippable mini-factories. Instead of moving biomass long distances, you move a compact manufacturing unit once. Everything else happens locally, dramatically reducing transport emissions.
This was a strong example of how LCA doesn’t just validate your design; it shapes the design.
Data Foundation: Trust, Sensors, and Self-Collected Measurements
Carbon removal depends on measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV). Without reliable data, no carbon credit market or climate model can trust the results. Currently, Angus collects a combination of self-generated and external data.
Self-generated data includes marine photometer readings (pH, salinity, carbonate hardness), HOBO sensors (temperature and light intensity measured per minute), and controlled measurements in his own small-scale lab setup.
External data includes scientific literature, chemical reaction data, global atmospheric datasets, and regularly checking the Keeling Curve, which tracks atmospheric CO2 from Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
When the Keeling Curve turns downward, we’ll know carbon removal is finally working at scale.
Toward 2035: The Future of Marine BiCRS
If everything goes well, if the chemistry proves reliable at scale, if the modular systems continue to refine, and if investors support such long-term climate infrastructure, Angus envisions a world where marine BiCRS becomes a meaningful and trusted part of the global carbon removal portfolio. Not the solution, but a critical one. A solution built on the natural strength of fast-growing marine biomass, high rates of carbon uptake, valuable co-products like biochar or green chemicals, and storage pathways capable of locking carbon away for centuries.
In his view, marine BiCRS stands out because it can be deployed almost anywhere: coastlines, offshore sites, and regions far from traditional industrial hubs. It doesn’t necessarily require the enormous, centralized supply chains that many climate technologies depend on. Instead, it offers a distributed, adaptable infrastructure that communities across the world can participate in. If the next decade unfolds as he hopes, 2035 could mark the point when marine BiCRS shifts from experimental to indispensable.
Central Motivation
After thirty years working across industries, Angus isn’t driven by abstract climate models or distant emission statistics. His motivation is personal, urgent, and deeply grounded in the reality that carbon must be removed, and that someone must build the systems capable of doing it. For him, the work is demanding, iterative, and often slow. It is also profoundly technical, requiring equal parts chemistry, engineering, and stubborn determination. But more than anything, it is necessary.
When I asked Angus what guidance he had for young students like me who hope to enter climate science, engineering, or data-driven environmental research, he shared five core principles:
- Follow curiosity, not categories. Climate solutions live at the intersections: chemistry, biology, software, finance, and engineering. Don’t restrict yourself to a single lane when the strongest ideas emerge from overlap.
- Build both the hard and soft skills: Analytical thinking, modeling, coding, research literacy, communication, collaboration, and comfort with uncertainty. Climate innovation requires all of them, often at once.
- Stay connected. Communities like AirMiners, which didn’t exist when Angus began, now support early builders, researchers, and students. These networks are part of the climate solution.
- Start Small. A garage experiment, a Python model, a school research project—early steps may seem small, but they often grow into careers, companies, and breakthroughs.
- Persistence is everything: Angus spent decades thinking about carbon removal before he built his solution. Climate work rewards people who stay with the problem long enough for the world to catch up.
Why this Conversation Matters
Every interview and conversation for My Air Aware reminds me that climate solutions are both deeply human and deeply technical. Angus’s journey, from a 1992 conference to building a marine carbon removal system today, shows how important long-term curiosity, interdisciplinary thinking, and collaboration are.
Carbon removal is not science fiction. It’s truly engineering, chemistry, data modeling, sensors, design pivots, grant writing, late-night reading, and relentless iteration. It’s people like Angus, working urgently, to remove what we can’t see before it becomes irreversible. And for students like me who care about air quality, health, and climate, conversations like these don’t just teach us about carbon, they show us the pathways we can walk toward meaningful impact.