1.23.24-Japan-Found-Energy

PETER GODART: Hello, everybody. Congratulations on making it halfway through this fire hose of information. I'm going to add to that a little bit. So please excuse me. My name is Peter Godart. I am the cofounder and CEO of Found Energy. I did my undergrad, master's, and PhD at MIT. And now at Found Energy, we are commercializing the innovations from my PhD work. Found Energy is a seed stage, venture-backed company based in Boston. We have a team of 15 employees and are rapidly scaling up.

So at Found Energy, we are focused on delivering low-carbon energy. And this is really important because we move a lot of energy around globally. Every single day, it's about 65 terawatt hours of energy as oil and gas. This is, to put this in perspective, Japan is about 2.6 terawatt hours of energy as oil and gas every single day. And this is a really critical global process that literally connects disparate parts of the world via the energy economy.

And as we transition to renewable energies, because we need to, we'll have to figure out a way of moving that energy around as well. Just like fossil fuels, renewable resources are not located in the same quantities everywhere. And if we have a flexible, fuel technology for moving that energy around, we can make this transition a lot more efficient and effective.

For heavy industry in particular, industries that use these fuels for producing heat, this is a particular bottleneck in the process of decarbonization. So at found energy we are flipping the script a little bit and thinking about what are some other ways we can move around energy from the ways you might have heard of. And we're focused on aluminum metal for a couple of different reasons.

For one, aluminum is actually the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust. It's the third most abundant element. It's extremely energy dense. If you look at this plot here of energy density by volume versus energy density by mass of a lot of common materials, we see that aluminum is a real standout. It's way at the top. It's actually two times more energy dense than even diesel. It's very easy to move aluminum around. We move 70 million tons around every year. And no one thinks that's ridiculous. And we can do this in a way that's cost competitive.

So what we do is we take aluminum. And we turn it into what we call a rechargeable fuel. You can use electrochemistry to take abundant aluminum oxide, turn that into aluminum metal by reducing it. And then, we oxidize that aluminum using water to produce a combination of steam heat and hydrogen gas.

This is a video here of a solid chunk of aluminum that's been treated with our catalyst technology that enables aluminum to react with water. And what you're seeing here in real time, this is not sped up, is this chunk of aluminum disintegrating into a nanostructured material that has very high surface area that can react very quickly. So while the energy density of aluminum is fixed, it's been a struggle to get the power density high enough to be really considered a fuel. And that's precisely the problem that I solved during my PhD and that we're scaling up now.

So with a fuel like aluminum, we can address decarbonization in a number of really large and polluting industries, like industrial heating globally, refueling long-haul trucks in the middle of nowhere, if you want to switch to hydrogen for example, or even decarbonizing maritime shipping.

We are working today by developing solutions for the aluminum industry to decarbonize as this is a really unique solution for them. For example, this is complicated so just bear with me for a second. In the top here is the standard way that aluminum oxide is produced. Companies will take in bauxite ore and some fossil fuel like methane or coal, undergo a couple thermal processes to turn that bauxite into aluminum oxide. That has some carbon intensity. And then also, they have to deal with the waste products from that bauxite, which is called red mud.

With our technology, we're converting these facilities to run on, actually, aluminum waste, which is not easily recycled. That reduces their bauxite inputs because we can actually just take that aluminum oxide product from the aluminum-water reaction and put that into the process. And the heat and the hydrogen can be used to replace the thermal inputs. And what you get is actually a validated carbon negative aluminum oxide product that has a fraction of the carbon emissions and the environmental impact from the red mud.

So we work with companies backwards. We say, what is your current cost of energy? In this particular case, it was about $45 per megawatt hour. This was in Europe. And we say, what scrap aluminum grade, with what incentives, and what price of the aluminum oxide will actually work to decarbonize your process without increasing the cost of energy? And we've been able to successfully do this across a number of big players in the aluminum industry.

So today, we are looking for pilot partners in Japan, ideally to start anyone who touches aluminum in any part of their business. We're also looking for manufacturing partners and just looking to be educated on potential applications for this novel way of moving energy around. We have solutions for, again, industrial heating, distributed energy systems, hydrogen transportation and storage, long-duration energy storage, and even waste management. So thank you very much.