9.26.23-Sustainability-Found-Energy

PETER GODART: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Peter Godart. I am the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy where we are delivering low-carbon energy. And the delivery is really important because the way we do it today is with oil and gas. We move 65 terawatt hours of energy as oil and gas every single day. And that's just by boat. And this gives entire countries this operational flexibility that they've come to rely on in order to source their energy to run heavy industry and the various components of society that make up everyday life.

As we transition to renewables, we will have-- and we have today-- a similar problem where we will need to move that energy around. If you can hook up power lines, if you can use that energy on site, that's amazing there. Are a lot of cases where you simply can't. And so fuels can really act as a bridge for delivering renewables to wherever they're needed on Earth. And we're seeing today that this is one of the major bottlenecks for decarbonization of heavy industry, particularly around thermal energy decarbonization.

So at Found Energy, we've taken a first principles look at the problem, and we've honed in on aluminum as an ideal replacement fuel for fossil fuels. And we do this in such a way that turns aluminum into the world's first rechargeable fuel. And this has a lot of benefits.

Aluminum is abundant. It's the most abundant metal on Earth. It's the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust. It's energy dense. It's actually more energy dense on a volume basis than fossil fuels.

It's metallic aluminum. It's very easy to transport. It's stable. And we can do it in a way that's actually cost competitive with fossil fuels. And I'll give you an example in a little bit.

But fundamentally how this technology works, we take aluminum, we oxidize it with water, and that produces heat and/or hydrogen, depending on your needs. And that takes that aluminum to aluminum oxide. And then somewhere where there's cheap abundant renewables, you can actually use existing electrochemistry to turn that aluminum oxide back into aluminum.

Our core technology was developed during my PhD at MIT where we figured out how to very rapidly enable aluminum to react with water. Here you see a marble-sized piece of aluminum that's been treated with our catalyst that enables this reaction to happen. These bubbles you're seeing are hydrogen. This causes water to penetrate the microstructure of the aluminum and cause that aluminum to disintegrate via a process we call fractal exfoliation. And this is all in real time, so you can get a sense for just how fast this reaction is.

And a technology like this that's power-dense, safe, energy-dense, and easy to use can unlock decarbonization for some really big industries for whom the lack of a low-carbon fuel is a real bottleneck-- industrial heating, but also long-haul trucking and maritime shipping where you simply cannot just hook up a power cable to these assets.

As an example, we are currently using our technology to help the aluminum oxide industry decarbonize as a way of bootstrapping this fuel network. Currently, aluminum oxide production is a massive industry with a lot of thermal energy needs and a lot of thermal energy related carbon emissions. A lot of it's using methane to provide heat for calcination processes and also some other thermal processes associated with the Bayer process. And what these companies can do instead is they can take actually aluminum waste as their feedstock and use the hydrogen that's produced to wean themselves off of natural gas and then also use the steam that's produced as a byproduct of this reaction to decarbonize some ancillary processes. And so as a result, we can generate the same aluminum oxide but at a much lower carbon intensity with also a greater reduction in red mud, which is the the tailings of the bauxite refining that's used as their feedstock today.

And because of the way the economics work out, because we're able to take low-grade aluminum waste, we can actually enable customers to save on their emissions and their energy bill by developing valuable co-products that they otherwise would have to make or source elsewhere. So we are looking for pilot partners, manufacturing partners, and just folks who want to educate us on their problems and how we might be able to solve them using aluminum as a fuel. We're focused on industrial heating, hydrogen transportation and storage. We basically use aluminum as a virtual hydrogen carrier, which makes the storage and transportation a lot more flexible. And we're also looking at long-duration energy storage as well as waste management via our ability to take in low-grade aluminum.

So thank you so much. Looking forward to chat.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Thank you, Peter.