Feasibility and Scaling Key to Green Energy Solutions: An Energy Week Discussion.
Throughout the month of November 2022, I was lucky enough to host amazing conversations amongst founders, investors, and industry leaders in the TDK Ventures network for panels and 1:1 discussions about the future of the energy transition. This piece is a summary of the key insights from a panel I moderated on green hydrogen and green chemicals with a cast of amazing leaders in the space. Thanks for taking the time to read, and do reach out if you are building or investing in this sector — I’m always open to brainstorm!
Tailwinds for scaling green chemicals
Faced with the realities of a warming climate, researchers, academics, and R&D professionals are asking now, more than ever, “If an electrochemical process for producing, storing, or transporting clean energy works in the laboratory, can it be scaled for commercial use?” TDK Ventures’ panel about green hydrogen and chemicals during Energy Week 2022 brought together leaders in the sector to discuss today’s tailwinds, key problems, and insights on achieving scale for solutions that will decarbonize this space.
For much of history, says Yet Ming Chiang, Kyocera Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at MIT, researchers have been content to discover if something works scientifically and technically. The climate crisis and push toward alternative fuels has changed that. Chiang brought a key voice as repeat founder and long-time researcher to TDK Ventures’ Energy Week 2022 panel discussion of green hydrogen and chemicals’ role in mitigating the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.
“Practicalities, economies, and the political environment have contributed to this new urgency,” explained Clea Kolster, partner and head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, who joined the panel alongside Chiang. “We’re looking for solutions that are cheaper, more abundant, more reliable than the incumbents. Why that’s possible today, when it wasn’t necessarily possible 10 years ago, is that technology has significantly shifted. Renewable electricity costs have gone down more than anybody anticipated.”
In addition, she said, computational costs, synthetic biology, and DNA sequencing are more economical, following Moore’s law, enabling wider investigation of potential chemical production solutions to undercut fossil fuels on accessibility and price.
The war in Europe is driving governments and corporations to search out ways to secure, optimize, and localize their energy supply chains, Kolster said. She called out specific cases, sharing that Lowercarbon is “working with companies that rely on engineered enzymes to produce chemicals and bypass fossil fuel inputs entirely. That puts them in a better position from cost and reliability of supply-chain standpoints.”
Realizing that technologies need to achieve commercial scale with the tailwinds of newfound generational urgency has also shaped decision-making in private institutions.
“There’s a greater willingness to act on the discoveries made in the lab and corporate skunkworks,” noted panelist Aruna Ramkrishnan, co-founder and CTO of Copernic Catalytics. “The level of awareness around climate at the decision-making level of academic institutions, private corporations, and investors has increased exponentially,” she said.
Green hydrogen production startup Verdagy’s CEO Marty Neese backed that up with the staggering statistics of renewable deployment and added that coherent government policy and incentives sweeten the green hydrogen deal for historically slow-moving institutions.
“We now have north of 400 gigawatts of announced projects and hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus in multiple geographies — government and private enterprise — around the world,” he said. “Against this backdrop of overwhelming demand, you’ve got factors like policy and technology. Solar and wind are racing down the cost curves. This intersection of forces creates tailwinds to get hydrogen moving at scale.”
Focusing on key problems for maximum impact
Although the motivations for scaling new technologies outside the lab are lining up en masse in our current era of climate tech, parsing the problem of decarbonizing our world into discrete focus areas is no easy task. The convergence of scientific discovery and industrial application is key to focusing our efforts, Chiang explained. He leads MIT’s Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry in the study of electrochemical solutions to the clean production of major industrial and construction materials concrete, steel, ammonia, and ethylene.
“Ethylene production historically has been a thermal process to crack hydrocarbons like naphtha,” Chiang explained, and shared a schematic for how we might use methane, oxygen, and water matched with a solid state oxygen conductor that can dose the oxygen to control such a reaction. The result could be much cleaner ethylene — the precursor to plastic used for bags and bottles.
The technology works and the science is sound, but worldwide production of solid-oxide fuel cell assemblies might amount to a few gigawatts, he noted. “To have real impact, we need to get to at least a few terawatts of capacity. Who will it be that scales solid-state electrochemical devices of this nature to terawatt scale?” This focused understanding of which key industrial chemicals and precursors represent high-emitting targets for replacement by new processing techniques in the lab helps clarify problem areas. Using this framework, Chiang points to the scaling of solid oxide production as a potential step tounlock the deployment of new chemical decarbonization technologies at scale.
Ramkrishnan, whose company works to accelerate the development of energyefficient catalysts for bulk chemical processing for fuels, said catalysts today are innovated in industry using the same process that has been followed for a century: “heavy reliance on intuition, trial-and-error, and testing of tens of thousands of materials in the lab until something clicks.”
She shared that Copernic Catalysts is bringing the discipline into the 21st century by applying computational tools like Density Functional Theory to these age old materials. Ramkrishnan explained. “We’re combining that with AI and algorithms to make sure we harvest the tons of data that are available…and apply it to a number of chemicals that have a large footprint in the chemicals industry today.” This merging of new computing tools with a clear vision of the real world use cases for catalysts is what drives Copernic’s potential for huge impact. Their first target is catalyzing ammonia production — a hugely emitting process in its current state, which, if improved from an emissions and efficiency perspective, could hold the key to a lower carbon future and unlock the hydrogen economy.
Ramkrishnan shared a practical perspective on Copernic’s ammonia focus, stating, ““Ammonia is a versatile molecule, which can serve as an energy carrier — especially for hydrogen, which is relatively more difficult to transport. It has a high density and is easy to liquify for transport,”
“At Copernic, we’re looking at thermochemical pathways, which are what the industry runs on today,” she said. “ They use heterogeneous catalysis for production of most chemicals. It scales well, volumetrically, rather than having to number-up. That gives you economies of scale — for every additional unit of chemical, you can make it cheaper and cheaper.”
Practical guidelines for achieving scale
“Scalability requires companies and the investors who support them to consider two additional questions,” Neese said. “One, do you have the right technology platform for scale at the product level, and two, do you have the right approach to scaling that product from a capacity-per-gigawatt perspective?
“What does the capex per gigawatt cost? These are problems that have to be solved rapidly, technically, and commercially at the same time.”
In the short term, scaling some carbon-mitigating production processes may require government intervention, Kolster explained. “To produce sustainable aviation fuel, you need to capture CO2 at a much higher level than we are doing today,” she said. Hydrogen is also a critical component of these processes that must be commercialized to move away from oil-derived kerosenes and gasolines.
“Currently hydrogen production is pretty dirty; it makes up about one percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” Kolster noted. “Converting all aviation fuel from hydrogen would absorb the entire demand and it would need to be converted to an electrolysis pathway. That kind of scale-up is unprecedented and we would need to think about how to incentivize it. For founders tackling green chemical markets where their technology needs to scale in an unprecedented manner, it certainly pays to align with existing incentives and advocate for new ones.”
Assuming electrolyzer technologies are not sufficiently scalable to meet the demand for hydrogen, Verdagy approached the problem by determining how large an electrochemical cell it could technologically develop and run at scale.
“If you’re trying to solve giga-scale problems, starting from maximum pixel size and working back to find the largest increment of capacity that can be reduced to practice will get you there faster,” Neese said. “We have gone for a very large cell — three meters square — enabled by membranes, running at high-current density, and dynamically capable of coupling with renewables. That gives us a scalable building block to replicate. And if you can do it at the cell level, you can do it at the electrolyzer level, which means you can do it at the platform level.”
Following this mantra, Verdagy expects to get to giga-scale plant size in two years by bringing on 100,000 square feet of electrolyzer cells every six months. At the end of that timeframe, the company would have commissioned 50 electrolyzers running 8,000 cells.
“That is similar to the utility-scale power evolution of the 2010s,” Neese said. “That industry went from tens of megawatts to hundreds to gigawatts really rapidly.”
Striking a different tone from Neese’s ambition to build the foundational units of future green hydrogen production, Ramkrishnan at Copernic seeks to coalesce with industry standards as they exist today. She sees a path to improve processes which are working rather well at the “giga-scale,” rather than seeking to disrupt the industry by introducing new technology that would require additional infrastructure investment.
“That’s an important consideration as we think about the energy transition,” Ramkrishnan noted. “You have to make sure the assets on the ground are repurposed and put to use, not abandoned. We have a short time to act, so we’re not working on development and scale-up of various types of technology that may take decades (to become viable). We need to be conscientious about mitigating CO2 from the atmosphere as early as possible. Every molecule that stays in the atmosphere is going to continue to worsen the problem of global warming.”
It was a pleasure to host some of the sharpest minds working on technologies to transition us to a low carbon future for hydrogen and chemical production during this session of TDK Ventures’ Energy Week 2022. Although the problems of climate change are daunting, we have never been in a better position to keep building tailwinds, solving key problems, and scaling solutions practically than we are today. With Yet-Ming, Clea, Marty, and Aruna at the helm of such exciting initiatives, we can’t help but feel that the sun is rising on a decarbonized future.
Thanks for taking the time to read, and don’t hesitate to reach me on LinkedIn if you’d like to engage more on this subject, or any other topics related to deep technology innovations for the energy transition. You can also watch a recording of the full panel session on YouTube!
