Electro-Active Technologies: Powering your City with Waste
Every year humanity wastes a staggering 1.3 billion tons of food, losing nearly $1 trillion in value and releasing massive amounts of methane contributing to climate change. At the same time, development of clean renewable power is a global imperative to decarbonize in the face of climate change. These seemingly disparate issues converge into a huge opportunity thanks to Electro-Active Technologies.
Electro-Active is a young biotech company with breakthrough technology to turn food waste into clean renewable hydrogen. We talked to co-founders Alex Lewis and Abhijeet Borole to learn more.
Food waste and clean power are both global issues to be solved in the face of climate change, how did these converge with your technology?
This all started at Oak Ridge National Lab, one of the largest DoE funded research institutes. The goal was producing hydrogen from biomass derived waste to then use for production of biofuels. The core scientific insight centered on using microbes to convert organic waste into electrons, which flow to a metal catalyst where the hydrogen production happens. Organic waste derived from biomass or food waste is very complex so we use a diverse community of microbes that can handle all the different types of food in this system. We spent years doing targeted evolution, alongside working out the necessary diversity and its maintenance.
We chose food waste as an input due to its huge contribution to climate change via methane emissions. There are over one billion tons of food waste produced every year so we don’t have any worry about enough input. If we could build a robust system with this input and industrial quality hydrogen as an output we would have a two pronged impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Integrating biology and electrochemistry in this way has never been done before at large scale. So, we came to Indie Bio to investigate the scale-up issues using fundamental biology developed previously.
So how do you solve this scale issue?
There are a couple challenges we are trying to solve. Our first aim is to avoid the typical pitfalls of biological scale up. Microbial fermentation tends to focus on getting to the highest possible volume, making parameters very hard to control and decreasing performance. We actually grow our microbial community as a biofilm so we care about surface area. This allows us to optimize small units where we maintain the biofilm, and stack them together in order to scale to the exact size a customer needs.
The other unique challenge is the huge cost of transportation in bringing hydrogen to the customer, sometimes being over 50% of the cost. The reason for this is centralized production of hydrogen in big natural gas refineries from where it has to be trucked to cities which can be hundreds of miles from the source. This makes it less economic versus other fuels. Our units can cut out this transportation cost since our input, food waste, is in the cities and the hydrogen is also used locally. The organic material can be provided by waste haulers and hydrogen can be sold to fuel cell users and other industries.
Waste hauler need to provide material, why is that?
Many states and cities are imposing laws preventing haulers from sending organics to landfills because they emit so much methane. Haulers are collecting tons of food waste but have no way to process it except sending it to compost. This incurs large transportation cost, has low market value, and does not capitalize on the energy content present in food waste. Additionally, only 25% of compost facilities in California accept food waste because it can be problematic to process and generates odor, mainly from the high liquid content. Our process actually helps with these issues by extracting the liquid content of food waste, making the residuals prime input for compost as well as animal feed, while improving transport efficiency. Composters get benefit from streamlining their operations and lowering costs, and we benefit by getting our feedstock.
Who are the main buyers of hydrogen? And who would start using if prices dropped?
Hydrogen is a big industry already, roughly $150 billion, used primarily in fertilizers for agriculture and petrochemical refining.
If we can drop the price there is likely to be a huge expansion of use in the transportation industry with fuel cell vehicles, which provide long range, rapid fueling, and zero emission transportation. The whole auto industry is looking at fuel cells as the #1 trend in the next decade, over electric, due to these advantages. Hydrogen has significant advantages for medium and heavy duty trucks and the maritime industry, since the bigger the freight, the dirtier the fuel. Batteries have low energy density, so they do not make sense for these types of transportation.
Grid energy storage is another big problem people are trying to solve. Wind and solar can now provide more power than the electricity demand during certain hours of the day. This has resulted in a need for electricity storage, however, no good solutions are available. We need to unlock storage since production and demand don’t line up. Our systems can actually absorb electricity during peak production hours when demand is low, convert it to hydrogen, and then make it available for use whenever people want.
You mentioned coming to IndieBio with the goal of scaling, what did you do in these four months?
On the technical side we’ve done multiple iterations on the individual reactor configuration and stack design. We scaled up the reactors to larger individual cells, up to twenty-eight times bigger than at Oak Ridge, and studied the biofilm performance. Then, we integrated and operated a stack of cells. The small scale system hit our commercial hydrogen productivity goal and the larger units are over halfway there.
On the business side, we’ve talked to a number of fuel cell manufacturers, hydrogen users, and even cities that are excited about $6 per kilogram hydrogen, our target. Waste haulers are very aware of all the policies coming out faster and faster so they see the opportunity of our system to solve their capacity issues while saving money. All this led to LOIs with players on the waste side as well as for the hydrogen end use.
What are the next steps for Electro-Active as you finish at IndieBio?
We plan to continue testing our stack and generate long term performance data including hydrogen purity in our system. That will be done as part of the Innovation Crossroads program, a non-dilutive grant that lets us continue to leverage Oak Ridge National Lab’s resources to advance our system.
We were also accepted into the H2 Refuel Accelerator where we’ll work with Toyota, Shell, and other sponsors on manufacturing issues related to the stack to make it commercially ready for hydrogen end use, an area they have made significant investments in. We’ll also be working with the Fraunhofer Institute on power management for the grid and solar energy use to bring down the cost of hydrogen production.
All this comes together with the goal of scaling up our prototype to a system that can handle one ton of food waste per day. This is the basis for our pilots planned in early 2020 with the goal of demonstrating the feasibility of this technology to convert waste into green hydrogen.
Watch Electro-Active’s pitch on IndieBio Demo Day, Tuesday June 25th in San Francisco or via LiveStream. Register here!
