11.8.22-Tokyo-Showcase-Syzygy-Plasmonics

LYNN FROSTMAN: Good morning, everybody. It's my pleasure to tell you a little bit more about Syzygy Plasmonics today. We are electrifying the chemical reactor industry. This will allow us to help drop emissions and improve efficiencies in the near future. We are proud to be affiliated with MIT as one of the Engine's portfolio companies.

So I'm going to start off by talking just a little bit about the chemical industry. This is obviously a very highly simplified view of that industry. And the main point here is that there are some key intermediate molecules, things like hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, that are then used to make a plethora of things that we use in our daily lives and are the foundation of our modern society. So if you want to have an impact on the sustainability of the chemical industry, one of the best ways to have that impact very quickly is to target these intermediate molecules and improve their sustainability.

Now, the problem is that the traditional chemical industry is powered by catalysis. And that catalysis needs a lot of heat to generate those chemical reactions. Right now, we estimate that process of using heat to generate these chemical reactions results in about a gigaton of CO2 emissions each and every year.

And so where we come in is we have developed a new way of doing these reactions. We can use light instead of heat to drive these reactions and thereby eliminate that need to combust fossil fuels to generate the heat. Thereby we are able to electrify the process of catalysis, using lower emissions, electricity, and thereby reducing cost as well.

So how do we do this? We have two key technologies or two key innovations. The first is the world's most stable and active photocatalyst. Those of you who've been around for a while know that photocatalysts have been known of for decades. But this innovation has come through work at Rice University where they have developed a new type of photocatalyst that is substantially more effective and substantially more stable.

And it is a platform technology. We can run a whole series of different reactions with these types of catalysts. We're choosing to focus initially on reactions that make hydrogen, because obviously there's a huge demand for hydrogen in the coming energy transition, and also looking at reactions that allow us to make synthetic fuels, again, as part of the energy transition. But there's many other reactions that we can run.

The second innovation is around the reactor. In order to get light inside the reactor we had to develop a completely new type of chemical reactor. And again, because we operate without all that heat, we can operate at lower temperatures, lower pressures. That allows us to use less expensive materials. So we are estimating that all in our technology should allow a 25% cost reduction in this equipment, as well as thereby improving emissions.

So let me talk about a couple of use cases. If you've spent any time studying the energy transition and have thought about hydrogen, you recognize the fact that hydrogen is very hard to transport. Several parts of the world, particularly here in Japan, Korea, as well as in Europe, are looking at using ammonia as the main way of transferring hydrogen around the world. But then you've got to convert the ammonia back to hydrogen.

So one of our use cases is to use our reactor to convert ammonia to hydrogen. We get very good efficiencies with this, and, again, very low emissions. This is going to be the basis of our first commercial technology. And we're proud to have recently announced a joint development agreement with LOTTE-- sorry, LOTTE Chemical, LOTTE Fine Chemical, and Sumitomo corporation of Americas to do a demonstration of a reactor in South Korea.

This will be taking place sometime in late 2023. And it will be using the ammonia decomposition to hydrogen for that. We're really pleased that both LOTTE and Sumitomo have chosen us as part of their journey towards lower emissions.

And a related use case is that of decarbonizing ports. So again, if you are bringing in ammonia into the port, you can then convert that ammonia to hydrogen locally and use that hydrogen to drive fuel cell vehicles, fuel cell forklifts, trucks, and cranes. This would basically eliminate any emissions, or harmful emissions, in those port areas.

So how do we think we fit in the market? Our core technology is the catalyst and the reactor. Everything else we're going to be partnering with strategic partners. So our reactors will be put into reactor banks. These will be modular, so that they'll be easy to install and maintain. So we'll be looking for partners to help us design and build these reactor banks.

We're also looking for partners to design and build the larger balance of plant and help us integrate into either existing facilities or new builds. And this basically will allow us to deliver a fully-operational facility to the operators who are using that, then, to either generate hydrogen or synthetic fuels. We are very excited, as I said, about our initial partnerships.

But we are continuing to look for more partners. So if you are interested at all in our technology I'd welcome the chance to speak with you at the showcase a little bit later on. I'd also be interested in what other types of reactions you're curious about and where we might be able to go together. Thank you very much for your time.