2024 MIT Sustainability Conference: Startup Exchange Lightning Talks - Helix Carbon

EVAN HAAS: Hey, everyone. Pleasure to be here. My name is Evan. I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Helix Carbon. And we're a climate technology company, obviously, like everyone else here, but we're specifically focused on carbon utilization.

And so I was a graduate student here in mechanical engineering and business, and this company is really one that was born kind of organically out of a lot of work we did here at MIT. So before coming to MIT, I worked in climate technology and consulting. But when I came here, I met David, my co-founder, who's in the back, and Ariel, who's a professor in the chemical engineering department here.

And we really wanted to focus on, OK, what is the biggest chunk that we can take out of global carbon emissions? And for us, the clear answer was heavy industry. It's centralized. It is high-scale. It's about a third of global emissions.

And it's an industry that is facing a lot of increasing global pressure because there's a lot of regulatory regimes, whether it's cap and trade systems, outright carbon taxes that are starting to affect, particularly in the US and particularly in Europe, the price and the cost to produce a lot of these industries.

And there's also a carrot as well. There's not just these global penalties, but there's also proven green premiums in heavy industry, whether it's for polymers or liquid fuels particularly, as well as for steel. If you look at steel alone, there have been multi-year, multi-megaton offtake agreements for massive green premiums for low-carbon steel. And there's also a revenue opportunity on the tax side. There's tax equity agreements that you can leverage.

So basically the bottom line is if you're an innovator here, there's a huge revenue opportunity as a player in heavy industry to lowering your carbon emissions. And what we wanted to do was really sit at the intersection of this. Can we take the carbon dioxide that is coming off these heavy industrial sites and convert it to something that is of value?

And for us, that looks like an electrochemical system that we developed here at MIT that takes carbon dioxide from flue gas, passes it through our system, and converts it to a series of value-added industrial gases. And of course, I think there's the energy efficiency benefit that we think we have over many others in this space. There's the fact that our systems don't rely on precious metals, and so they're a lot cheaper to build.

But also, it's not on this slide, but I think the biggest differentiator we have is we're the first system that actually has sort of industrially relevant lifetimes. There's a lot of folks who can achieve really good carbon utilization for tens or even hundreds of hours. But I think the differentiator our system really has against those is we can run for thousands of hours. And it finally makes this something that can be relied on as a source of a lot of these industrial gases.

And so we are taking this to market by partnering with existing industrial facilities. So we take in the carbon dioxide from your flue gas, convert it on site into one of several feedstocks that you may use-- carbon monoxide, ethylene, or methane-- and essentially just give that right back to you.

And this eliminates transportation costs. It insulates you from the volatility in where you're getting this today. So coal and natural gas, particularly natural gas prices, have been extremely expensive and extremely volatile over the past several years. And it's also a drop-in solution. If you're someone who is particularly in the iron or the polycarbonate or the polyurethane industry that uses carbon monoxide from natural gas today, this requires no operational disruption against your current systems.

And so we're building this by first going to a 10-kilowatt pilot that we're building today, actually here in Massachusetts at a biomass pyrolysis facility. And we're scaling up, so we're looking for partners to go to that next step. We're building a 100-kilowatt system slated for 2026 and getting to the megawatt scale in 2028. So if this is something that resonates with you and your companies and it's something that you would be interested in piloting with, we're continuing to look for partners in that sort of 2 to 200 kilogram to 2-ton-per-day scale.

As well as this is, broadly speaking, a pretty generalizable electrocatalysis platform at the end of the day. What we do is not just carbon conversion but chemical conversion and electrical chemical conversion. And so if there is a specific process that you're looking at that you want to electrify or you want to electrify more efficiently, we're also more than happy to work with you on customizing this platform to your needs.

So with that, thank you for your time. And we'll talk to you at our booth after.

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