#255 Burning Aluminum is Clean & Replaces Fossil Fuels | Peter Godart (Found Energy)

Ever wonder how we are going to decarbonize heavy industry? Well, you won't have to wonder much longer. Today's guest has an incredible solution that is 1) drop in, 2) cost parity (or better), 3) has an existing supply chain, 4) overcomes any scarcity concerns, and 5) prevents users from changing anything they do. 

Our guest is Peter Godart, the Co-Founder of Found Energy. 

Some quotes to hook you:

- "We've developed what we call the world's first rechargeable fuel."

- "There's really no other technology that can store energy for this long and then be dispatched as easily."

- "Aluminum is just one of the best materials we have available to actually burn something."

- "If you don't have a green grid, actually exacerbates the issue. At least in the short term, makes things worse."

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📝 Show Notes:
Topics

1:04 Core technology & how it works?

4:58 Why is a new fuel source needed for industrial decarb?

13:00 What is "rechargeable fuel"?

19:08 Path to cost parity w/ fossil fuels

20:56 You can use aluminum waste!? 

26:24 Targe industries & markets

34:36 How to handle the supply chain? 

40:37 Energy density comparison to traditional fuels

50:51 Next milestones for scaling the technology

1:01:50 Timeline for commercial deployment

Links
- Connect with Somil | Connect with Silas
- Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn
- This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.

Chapters

• 1:04 Core technology & how it works?
• 4:58 Why is a new fuel source needed for industrial decarb?
• 13:00 What is "rechargeable fuel"?
• 19:08 Path to cost parity w/ fossil fuels
• 20:56 You can use aluminum waste!?
• 26:24 Target industries & markets
• 34:36 How to handle the supply chain?
• 40:37 Energy density comparison to traditional fuels
• 50:51 Next milestones for scaling the technology
• 1:01:50 Timeline for commercial deployment

Transcript

Silas Mähner (00:00.088)
Today our guest is Peter Goddard, the co-founder of Found Energy.

For that application, you really need fuel. You need to actually burn something. Our company is built around the fact that aluminum is just one of the best materials we have available to actually do that.

They have developed a method to burn aluminum to produce steam of the same exact heat that is used in all industrial steam use cases or situations today.

don't have a green grid, actually exacerbates the issue. At least in the short term, makes things worse. actually end up burning more gas, especially for those heating applications. We are producing a better product than the incumbent than fossil fuels. I don't think anyone would argue that pollution is good.

This may be the most incredible technology that we've had come on this podcast so far.

Peter Godart (00:44.206)
This is our goal is just to make energy supply chains better, more resilient, give more optionality, allow us to get energy from more places at a lower price and without the carbon emissions. This has always been the mission.

Silas Mähner (01:04.654)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Clean Techies, the best podcast for clean tech founders to learn from others. I'm Silas Maynard, clean tech headhunter at Earth Tech Talent. And today I'll be your host. All right, today our guest is Peter Goddard, the co-founder of Found Energy. And man, this is an incredible episode. At Found Energy, they have developed a method to burn aluminum. It's not technically burning, but it's basically burning, to burn aluminum. And this is IP that was actually discovered and developed in years from his time at the

NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and during his time in his PhD. And to put it bluntly, you can basically burn aluminum to produce steam of the same exact heat or as high that is used in all industrial steam use cases or situations today. And so doing this so-called waste product of this, it's not waste at all. It's just steam. So it's completely clean. So again, we're burning aluminum to produce steam so that you can produce any other goods that you want, whether that's food production, steel production, etc.

and the waste is just steam, right? There's nothing bad going into the air. So, perhaps this is, you know, maybe the most fascinating part of this is unlike fossil fuels, once you burn the aluminum and produce the steam, you can actually take the raw metals that are left over and recharge it, whereas the fossil fuel side of things, it's a lot of effort to, you know, basically get that waste out of the air because you're sending something into the air. There's nothing left to take and recharge. So yes, you did hear that correctly. You can take the leftover kind of raw aluminum, if you will, and

recharge it to be able to be burned again. It's not 100 % rechargeable, but you can recharge it to a large extent. So we spend our time today breaking down all of the advantages of this technology, how it plugs into existing industrial use cases, how they are building out the supply chain to manage this entire thing, and a few other kind of macro items around branding and policy. I will say this is definitely, I don't say this lightly, this may be the most incredible technology that we've had come on this podcast so far.

Even though it's little bit of a longer episode, please listen to it all the way through because this is just super fascinating and the way that this should change the world is really, really incredible. Before the show starts though, big shout out to Earth Tech Talent for sponsoring this episode. If you need help hiring top talent but don't want to pay absurdly high recruitment fees, reach out to Earth Tech Talent today. All right, enjoy the episode. All right, Peter, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? Yeah, thanks for coming out, man. We were able to schedule this in pretty quick time.

Peter Godart (03:24.652)
I'm doing great, thanks for having me.

Silas Mähner (03:29.656)
You've been getting popular on LinkedIn, seems. You've had some good videos on some of the climate transition stuff and how things are going. So maybe that's how we found each other probably, but I'm very excited to able to have you on. to try and jumpstart this conversation, I want to try to kind of hit a couple big things and just you tell me if I get any of these wrong, just so we can kind of catch people off of the context here and then we'll dive deeper into these. So Found Energy is your company and your company aims to replace the use of fossil fuels in industrial use cases.

like chemical engineering or chemical manufacturing, etc. with aluminum as a fuel, literally burning aluminum. You've raised over $20 million altogether and you've already deployed a few hundred kilowatt per hour pilot facilities and you originally started on this project during your time at NASA. Did I get everything right there? Anything you want to add?

Yeah, we're doing our first 100 kilowatt pilot right now.

You need first. Okay, awesome. So I got close then, all right. My research is close. Very good. on. Yeah, I just want to make sure we get to the meat and potatoes right away. So I mean, being in the Boston area, you've got a lot of really interesting people to speak with. think that it's such an interesting place to be with all the deep tech innovation there. So sometimes I'm tempted to just want to go there because I could interview people for days in Boston.

But now let's go through, give us a quick, I would say a thorough but very simple language explanation on how your tech works and why it's a good solution specifically for industrial decarbonization.

Peter Godart (04:58.07)
Yeah. So industrial decarburization is so difficult because it's very difficult to replace fossil fuels, in particularly for generating heat. know, the things that fossil fuels do really well are producing heat over a very wide range of temperatures, and they provide a nice transportable way of moving that energy and doing that. for applications that need high temperature heat, and especially those applications that

don't have access to a green grid, those are notoriously difficult to decarbonize via electrification. And so you have technologies like heat pumps, which work well to generate, I would say, low to moderate temperature heat, so up to 200, 300 Celsius. But that presumes that you have access to green electrons that you can use to run those heat pumps. Same thing with resistive heating. So joule heating, basically

dissipate thermal energy, you know, by running current through a wire, through a resistor, those can get to higher temperature heats. But again, you need those green electrons. And so we're going after those applications where you might not have easy access to a grid at all, let alone a green grid, or you just need higher temperatures. And so for that application, you really need a fuel. You need to actually burn something. You need to oxidize a material and release that embodied energy as heat. And

our company's built around the fact that aluminum is just one of the best materials we have available to us to actually do that.

Now explain how it works like when we say we're burning aluminum like you guys literally just like throwing this into the same exact kind of system that they have and then you know lighting it on fire effectively through chemical reactions.

Peter Godart (06:44.236)
Yeah, so mean, to burn something just means to oxidize it. You get it to undergo some chemical reaction with an oxidizer and then that takes your base material to some oxide of that material. then, you know, in the, you know, between the difference of sort of the, like the chemical potential energy that's released as heat. So when you burn carbon, you know, coal, you get carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a lot more stable than carbon. And so that difference in sort of stability.

is effectively the chemical potential energy and that makes that carbon dioxide vibrate really fast and that's literally what heat is. And so when you, can actually do the same thing with aluminum. You can burn aluminum and you get aluminum oxide. But if you just, you know, took your like the aluminum in your laptop and you just hold a flame to it, absolutely nothing happens. And that's because it forms a very stable oxide layer immediately when it's exposed to oxygen.

And that stops any further reaction from happening. And so we figured out kind of a workaround for this. Like it's actually very difficult to burn aluminum directly with oxygen. We actually first partially oxidize it with water, somewhat counterintuitively. We get aluminum to basically corrode really fast and it releases about half the energy as heat and the other half as hydrogen gas. It splits the water, produces hydrogen gas. Then we introduce oxygen and we burn.

that mixture of steam and hydrogen. So that net reaction looks the same. You're getting a high temperature flame, except what's actually burning that what's actually producing that heat is actually water vapor. It's actually superheated water vapor, so hot that it glows orange. And so you know, that net burning reaction is actually aluminum plus water plus air gives you superheated steam. And then our final spent fuel product is this material called aluminum hydroxide.

And then that is actually what's turned into aluminum in the first place.

Silas Mähner (08:41.664)
Interesting. Okay, so it goes back to the base version of what it is before it's created into aluminum.

Yeah, so if you go out and you want to make some aluminum, you dig up bauxite ore and then you first refine that into aluminum hydroxide and then you use electrochemistry to turn that into aluminum metal. You pump a bunch of electricity into it and remove the oxygen.

So then, I guess, probably the question on most people's minds is if you're doing this, the output is completely clean or do have to do carbon capture of any sort? The output is non-harmful to the climate?

Precisely, yeah. The output is literally just water vapor, and it's so hot that it can be used to drive industrial process.

Okay, yeah, this is really cool. I can I think it's so it's so weird to think I mean until you until you hear this this idea You're like, well, what's what's really going on here? It's such a counterintuitive Thing to think about when I when I heard this I was like man, what is he talking about? This guy's crazy But I also wanted to circle back on this point you mentioned which is you know, if we're gonna electrify everything that's all good and well But but the other point is how soon are we're get to a fully 100 % renewables grid even if you have an electric

Silas Mähner (09:49.546)
you know, version of it, how can you guarantee that the electricity is actually coming from renewables, right? This is a really good solution to that because you don't have to worry about it,

Yeah, exactly. And if you think about industrial heating, let's say you're burning natural gas. So, you know, if you're burning natural gas on site, you're basically going one to one. One joule of natural gas heating will go to one joule of, sorry, one joule of natural gas burning will go to one joule of natural gas heating for your application. But if you're using natural gas to make electricity on the grid and then using that electricity to make heat, let's, know, if you're doing joule heating, for example, resistive heating.

then you're actually taking one joule of natural gas energy, you're probably getting at most like 0.3 or 0.4 joules of electricity, and then you have to turn that back into heat. And so, you know, that means you have to burn more than two times the amount of natural gas to get the same amount of heating energy. And that's really the problem of not having a green grid. And so, you know, when you think about electrification,

The problem is if you don't have a green grid, actually, it actually exacerbates the issue. There's like a world in which electrification, at least in the short term, makes things worse. You actually end up burning more natural gas, especially for those heating applications. And then, you know, like you're seeing this now with data centers though, like we can't even, we can't even expand the grid fast enough to meet this new demand for electricity for data centers. And that's, you know,

Ignoring the fact that you know, we would then have to do that plus make it green to address all these new electrification applications So I just think it while it would be amazing It's just super unrealistic for us to expand the grid exactly like you're saying in at a time scale that would actually move the needle and so I don't I think it's very difficult to argue that it wouldn't it wouldn't be good to have alternative ways of moving energy around we're already so used to

Peter Godart (11:50.72)
moving energy around as fuels, right? I love this fact that we move 65 terawatt hours of energy as oil and gas every single day by boat. So you're taking this, you know, material that stores all this energy, putting it on a boat, shipping it from one continent to another, add all that up. That's a massive amount of energy that we're moving around. We're used to these types of supply chains. And so, you know, if we had a way of just turning that supply chain, making it that green,

That alleviates all of this all this, you know demand pressure on the grid currently

Yeah, that's a really, really good point here. the other thing you, we mentioned it, but you said that the leftover product can then be recycled and turned into fuel again.

Exactly. So this is really, you know, kind of the big idea here. And it takes a second to understand it. we've developed what we call the world's first rechargeable fuel. So because the spent fuel product, unlike carbon dioxide, is a solid, we can actually take that solid and we can turn that back to the original fuel by adding electricity.

So we think of this as a fully closed loop system where we effectively take this spent fuel product, which is aluminum hydroxide. You pump electricity into it. That turns it back into aluminum metal. We can do that at about a 70 % efficient process. So that is actually a best in class electro fuel. It doesn't need to be as efficient as a battery, which are, you know, have charging efficiencies, you know, well over 95%, but they're 40 times more energy dense.

Peter Godart (13:36.706)
than most electrochemical battery cells. And you can get high temperature heat directly by burning them. And they're a lot cheaper in terms of CapEx. If you had to build batteries that could store as much energy as we're moving around as oil and gas, you're talking literally trillions of dollars just to make those batteries, even though it doesn't cost very much to recharge them. So you have that sort of weird balance of CapEx and Opex.

to find a good ratio between them you're basically saying.

Exactly. So you batteries tend to be super high capex, very low op x and fuels are higher op x very low capex. So there, there's a lot of benefits to to that from just a financial engineering perspective, you they're a lot easier to finance. All that to say, you know, we think of what we're doing as a fuel, not a battery, even though it's rechargeable, like a battery, we call it a rechargeable fuel, we take aluminum hydroxide, pump electricity into it, make aluminum metal ship that

to our customers, burn that, and then we ship our spent fuel product back. And because we're talking about inert solids here, the shipping part is quite trivial. You have a lot of other fuels that people have been developing, like ammonia and methanol and a few others, which are actually toxic substances and quite dangerous to handle. So that adds to the cost. You've never heard of an aluminum spill.

Like we shipped 70 million tons of aluminum around globally already and like it's just a non-issue. Yeah

Silas Mähner (15:12.726)
I mean, because obviously, like, if you look at the other side of it, like with hydrogen, the storage and moving costs are very difficult. And then also the chemical and permitting requirements for all these other chemicals that could be very dangerous. So that's a really interesting point. guess, you know, I want to talk about a couple other aspects here, but it's very obvious to me that this is just a complete transformation of how industrial companies who are producing something would think about fuel, especially if it's, hey, we buy this.

and then basically like we're gonna pay a certain amount of money to recharge this fuel. How do you guys perceive this business model evolving? Will it just be like, hey, it's fuel as a service or they pay us a one-time fee and then every time they wanna reload this stuff, basically, we just do that for them? Like, how is that gonna look?

Yeah, I think you're hitting on a super important point here, which is like the adoptability of these new technologies. And in an ideal world, you're making this as seamless a transition as possible. You're really reducing the cognitive friction for these companies. Like, you know, let's say you're a big food and beverage company and you're making, you know, potato chips. You're using natural gas to heat up these big vats of oil. You know, ideally you want to be able to keep

as much of the same equipment as possible. And then behind the scenes you want to, you know, replace that fuel. So we think about everything from that lens. Like how can we, you know, basically, you know, bait and switch, like allow everyone to use their, their same existing technology stack. And then we're just fiddling with the, with the fuel behind the scenes. And so, you know, basically we, the first goal is to just deliver energy at the same price.

as they're currently paying. And because of the transportability of aluminum, you can actually, you have the flexibility to essentially make it wherever electricity is the cheapest and store it. You can even make it when electricity is the cheapest. So you can store it over long periods of time and then you can also transport it geographically. And so that gives us a lot of flexibility and basically arbitraging.

Peter Godart (17:22.798)
of green electrons in one place of the world at one time and delivering that as heat in another place at another time. And so, you know, that allows us to actually achieve cost parity with the incumbent fuels like natural gas, except we're doing that at, you know, basically zero carbon emissions.

Okay, so let's touch on a couple of these things. So I think we'll first go on the implementation. So number one, if a company, let's stick with the food and beverage example. If they want to implement this system, do they have to change anything about their facility or are they able to just kind of switch out the plumbing and bring the steam into the same exact spot with your item? Can your system go into their same exact system or does it go like next to it and then you just pipe in the steam?

So we basically attach what we call our aluminum water reactor, which is the size of a couple of shipping containers, which for a massive industrial facility is not that much. That's the only additional equipment that is needed. And that's likely something we provide anyway. And then the output of that essentially goes into a heat exchanger that is connected directly to their existing equipment.

Okay, so all of the kind of new stuff, you know, that's really on us to install and you know, demonstrate reliability. And then you know, from the customer's perspective, you know, maybe it's just a different heat exchanger than they were working with. But it's you know, otherwise, everything can be exactly the same.

So then on the cost side of that, I know you haven't gotten to commercial deployments yet, but is the objective that you would just say, hey, we're going to provide the fuel, so we'll take care of the upfront CAPEX costs. So it's literally as long as you're willing to work with us to install it, we'll take care of it, or will they be expected to pay the CAPEX?

Peter Godart (19:08.952)
So there's, we're just selling energy and, you know, rolled into the cost, just like what you're paying, you know, when you're at the meter electricity, the transmission costs, like the amortized capex is already baked into that price. But at the end of the day, we're really just selling energy.

Okay. And then so when it comes to the actual, because you said that you're able to get the cost parity from your calculations already, right? So it's not like something in the future will get there eventually, we can get to there now. So is the selling point that, hey, you can have the same exact kind of aspects of fuel. It's very easy for you to manage. You'll have the heat you need. No change in operations really once we get set up. And the price will be the same or are you selling it on the kind of this and as a clean fuel?

Or are you just selling it on like, we're actually gonna discount compared to what you're using with diesel or whatever.

Yeah, mean, we so a lot of folks have, you know, internal carbon emissions reductions price targets sort of built in like, you know, maybe it's $100 a ton that, they internally, you know, if they can sort of market their product as being green. So, you know, for some folks like, you know, we're able to charge a little bit more. And that just helps our margins. But we can easily get to cost parity with natural gas in most places.

Not all places just because it can be quite cheap. But in the places that we anticipate that we can hit cost parity, you're still talking like a hundred billion dollar fuel market. So it's really massive. that's still a fraction of the multi-trillion dollar global heat market. And as we come down our own cost curves, we can eat more and more into that. One thing I do want to mention is that early on, we're actually able to sort of subsidize

Peter Godart (20:56.586)
our own cost of production. So, you know, we can be profitable in the short term by actually not making our own aluminum to start, but by using low grade aluminum waste. You know, this is, you know, maybe a controversial thing to say, but, but it's true in that, you know, a vast fraction of aluminum metal that's, you know, discarded every year is actually not recycled. Even like a used beverage can.

at most can be like 60 % recycled. You know what they do, it's two different alloys. And so they they melt it down to make sort of neither of those alloys and they have to add pure aluminum back in and re dope it with the alloying elements. So like there's been some very successful, I would say propaganda in within the aluminum industry about like, you know, the infinite recyclability. What you know, and that's true, like if you just took aluminum metal, and there was nothing else in there, you can melt it down, you can reform it like that's just like,

what a metal is. But there's you're never just interacting with pure aluminum. You're interacting with like a very precisely engineered and tuned alloy for which if you change, you know, even point one weight percent of those alloying elements dramatically changes the chemical and material properties so that it would be basically useless for your application. So most aluminum ends up getting down cycled. So, you know, you're collecting end of life aluminum and then it sort of makes its way into like internal combustion engine blocks.

And like, actually a lot of things that we're just using less of in a system as a society. and so there's this, there's this metric called the scrap surplus. So this is like all of the aluminum that's collected, but cannot find a home in like engine blocks and these things that we're again, we're using less of, and that number, that Delta. And so that's aluminum that's actually collected, but sort of is just getting like, it's just accumulating in that loop is expected to grow to like tens of millions of tons.

over the next 20 years or so. And so that allows us to really get our foot in the door and sell even actually like undercut fossil fuels for a lot of applications. Like our first customers are going to get super lucky. they're going to get like fuel that is much cheaper than fossil fuels and completely carbon free. And then, you know, as we scale, we'll sort of come up to cost parity and perhaps a little bit above.

Silas Mähner (23:22.316)
Yeah, but the goal is probably initially just get as many deployments as you can, really, really sweeten the pot as much as possible to get those reliability metrics created. And then, then it becomes much easier for the industrial processes to say, Hey, we'll take this because for anybody who's not familiar, like if you are running some big production facility, even just, you know, hours of downtime is usually millions of dollars of lost, of lost money. So it's like, this has to be, there cannot be reliability issues. Right. So that's very interesting.

So you said that it's anticipated that the waste and the scrap aluminum is going to increase. Have we already been seeing that increase pretty rapidly in the past few years? Or is it just like, hey, this is what we'll likely have? it's already happening.

And these are just extrapolations. This is a peer reviewed journal, you know, like reviewing these extrapolation figures from current scrap surplus rates.

Okay, got it. And then, so just out of curiosity, are they having an issue getting rid of it so you can get it basically for nothing or do you still have to pay something to obtain it and then you can process it?

There's a very wide range in reality. So like if you go to like, you know, these big industrial machine shops that are making, you know, consumer products that have a little aluminum component in them, a lot of those are like little cast pieces of aluminum, and then they post machine them. So you end up with these, you know, machining chips that are all, they have multiple mixed alloys together. They have, you know, cutting fluids and oils mixed in.

Peter Godart (24:52.61)
Those folks are often paying someone to take their aluminum and dispose of it as hazardous waste. And so in that case, that feedstock actually has a negative cost. So you can actually just make money by taking that aluminum and doing nothing with it, let alone then turning it into a fuel and selling the energy and then making aluminum hydroxide and then even selling that too. So there our margins are extremely high. You're just basically printing money. But obviously like the scale that you can reach from dust.

just that application is limited, though actually quite a bit bigger than you would expect. And then, you know, as you're willing to tolerate a, you know, higher price for that aluminum, you know, you get access to increasingly pure feedstocks of aluminum. And then, you you still have like a lot of headroom before you're getting up to like use beverage cans, which we would honestly never go after because, you know, even though I'm sort of trash talking.

that early. Like that is a success story within aluminum recycling. So I totally think we should keep recycling our aluminum cans. But there's just like, you know, like, if you think of like aerospace grade aluminum, you know, you go out to the they call them the boneyards in Arizona, like basically Southwest United States, there's just like in massive plots of land where all of the old airplanes end up

that aluminum can never be turned back into aerospace grid. And so it ends up just sitting around doing nothing. Yeah. So like, you our vision is, basically take a chainsaw out into the desert.

Okay, interesting.

Silas Mähner (26:24.718)
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that have both the skills and mission alignment that your team is looking for. Yes, it does take time, but that's what we're here for. We'll find you the talent and you can focus on growing your business. And one more thing, we've priced our services so that every early stage clean tech startup can afford us. We're about half the price of traditional search firms while still maintaining that white glove service. Plus we specialize in supporting clean tech startups. This is all that we do. Since the very beginning of what we've been doing, it's all been clean tech. That plus the podcast gives us a very strong network in this particular space.

So if you're hiring, reach out today, connect directly with me on LinkedIn if you like, or go to earthtechtalent.com forward slash contact. That's earth with no A-E-R-T-H, techtalent.com forward slash contact. And we'll get started today. All right, back to the show. Yeah. Okay. So then maybe just list out, like, I guess, are there, what are the kind of core industries that can use this opportunity? Like it can kind of get this clean fuel. Like what are the core things you guys are going after?

So steel production, cement manufacturing, food and beverage, anything from mid to high temperature heating, ceramics production. That tends to be quite difficult to decarbonize. And if you can just replace the fuel, that solves a lot of their problems. They don't have to change their processes.

And that's a huge, that's a huge amount of global missions, right? Industrial processes that you guys can replace specifically.

Peter Godart (28:16.31)
it's about 20 % of all global carbon emissions.

Well, that's incredible. This is amazing, man. I can't believe we're, I'm so excited that we're able to talk to you at this early of the stage to see what this is gonna become. But a couple other things I wanna touch on here is are you specifically going after any one use case initially? And also are you targeting the US markets specifically initially?

Yeah. So the U S market is a, it's a great place for us to start it. Obviously it's massive and folks here are actually quite open to experimentation. it's actually, yeah, it sort of surprised me. you know, before I started doing this, but, you know, we've, we've been to Europe, we've been to Japan. you know, of all of the places where this technology would make sense, like the U S actually is, is a really great place to get started. People are really eager to try something new.

There just seems to be something like kind of inherently American about like testing new technologies and sort of being at the forefront that you don't see in your and I'm a European citizen as well. So I'm like, you know, I can say this, but you know, they tend to be much more conservative over there a lot slower to adopt. But that's a great market too, because they are very aligned in like in what I would think is a better long-term vision. I think things are quite divided in the US right now.

But that hunger for experimentation is there regardless of political stance. And so that's been really inspiring for us and we've been able to move really fast here.

Silas Mähner (29:46.318)
Okay, and then is there, does it really matter what use case you target initially or is it kind of like anything that needs steam?

So yeah, anyone that needs him, so there's like literally no shortage of folks that want to use, you know, between one and 10 megawatts, like even go to your like local brewery, you know, or a food and beverage, you're in Wisconsin, right? So like you have all these folks making cheese. And so like those would be great applications to pasteurize the milk you need. And so like literally no shortage, but also what's interesting is there's a lot of aluminum manufacturing happening in the US too.

capital.

Peter Godart (30:22.638)
or lot of like post machining of aluminum. And so, you know, this customer profile or this scrap source profile that was mentioned where you have to pay someone to take your aluminum waster away. There's actually like a surprisingly large number of these like giant machine shops that have this aluminum waste. And so they also need heat too. So a really fun like technology demonstration that's been, you know, very high margin for us.

is basically doing on-site aluminum waste to energy. This is not like our long-term vision at all, but is a really great way for us to test our technology. And folks that have this aluminum waste are very eager to test and use our product.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Like if the waste product is after it's been burned, after that's done and you can just recharge it, would you see it being done on site or not necessarily because the electricity costs are so high depending on their location that it might make more sense to just haul it away to a lower cost of electricity and water spot and then recharge it and bring it back?

Exactly. You would never do the recharging on site just because you you sort of run into like perpetual like the second law of thermodynamics. So, you you would it would always be like it's it's not a battery in that sense. Yeah, a battery is great. You leave it on site. You recharge it when electricity prices are really low and then you discharge it when electricity prices are high. Like that's what a battery does really well. It just can't like function as a fuel to generate these, you know, the heat that's needed.

and so that's where, like the fact that it is so easy to transport allows us to take it off site to where you have cheap electricity, turn that into a fuel, which you really can't make otherwise, and then bring that back. And, you know, to, to take this even one step further, like our vision is to even in the U S especially like basically repo repurpose all of the old coal transportation infrastructure. We built like most of the rail lines in the U S to move coal.

Peter Godart (32:28.846)
And aluminum has a very similar profile to coal in terms of energy density. It just doesn't release carbon emissions when it's burnt. And so, you know, we plan on basically packing these old coal trains full of aluminum and shipping that around the US.

Yeah, so the supply chain, I was going ask you about this next, the supply chain is not necessarily that, you don't have to build it from scratch per se, but you have to kind of re, because coal, I assume coal supply chains are sort of working around right now, but they're not like they used to be, correct?

Yeah, exactly. we're seeing a lot of stranded assets that were developed and deployed when coal was a lot more popular. frankly, coal kind of went out of style, you know, as natural gas got super cheap due to fracking. you know, like you've seen a huge decline in coal usage, mostly because of natural gas rising to prominence.

And so it's kind good timing for us to find a new use case for that.

If we get to a point where this is really just starting to replace oil and gas kind of writ large, are we gonna have to see just a lot of transformation back to like, you know, regular shipping instead of these like, you know, liquid type of shipping containers or methods like with pipelines? Or is that gonna be a challenge or, you know, should I go out and buy some old, you know, coal shipping boats and stuff and start making some money?

Peter Godart (33:53.556)
Yeah, I mean, these you can't get simpler than these bulk carriers. Yeah, these massive ships that are already used to move vast quantities around them. I mean, like the thing we move most around, I believe, is like stone and cement, like the most used product in the world. So like we're already used to moving like slurries and like powders and bulk solids. So like that is actually the thing we are already best at as a society. Moving liquids around is actually just like one step more complicated. Moving gases around is even more complicated.

Hydrogen and like liquid hydrogen is like kind of the it's like the the devil's intersection of all these things Where you not only have to move around a liquid it also has to be you know, like like cryogenic temperatures Yeah, this this basically solves most of those challenges

Okay, and then further on the supply chain piece. you're kind of, guess, maybe help us understand the vision of how you're going to go about this because depending on where your customers are based, et cetera, like you guys are going to be responsible for either taking in the waste aluminum from other people or at some point, you know, getting it out of the ground directly. Maybe you guys will do the mining yourself or just partner with other people. You'll power it and then you'll deliver it and then you also take the waste and you repower it and continue to the loop. Is that kind of what you see? Maybe kind of extrapolate on that a bit.

Yeah, exactly. mean, so the way to start is you basically identify the best places to make the fuel and you set up production plants there.

Which has to do with the abundance of the aluminum primarily or the cost of electricity?

Peter Godart (35:24.482)
the cost of electricity.

And where in the US is that right now?

tends to be where you have like high regions of solar irradiance for solar. But there's also like, you know, one example that I'm super excited about is like all the folks talking about nuclear fission. You know, when with this AI boom, again, you know, your nuclear fission has become sexy, which is really cool to see. And I'm excited about a future where, you know, we start building new nuclear fission plants.

Um, and you're seeing like Utah as a state trying to be a leader in this. Um, so, you know, imagine you, you overbuild a nuclear fission plant, you put it in the middle of nowhere. So people aren't worried about, um, you know, issues with, with nuclear waste, which actually is not really that big of an issue anyway. Uh, and you know, you, basically use that to make your fuel. So you have this really cheap, like base load electricity, uh, source.

You make your aluminum fuel there and then you start shipping that out. And so, you then you build your customer base, you know, based on proximity to that fuel production plant. And then, you you grow and you kind of build out a network organically that way. You you said this earlier, like, which is correct, which our goal is to deploy capacity. And so because we can also tap into, you know,

Peter Godart (36:53.282)
this is why the name of the company is found energy. We're sort of tapping into energy reserves hidden in plain sight. And that is that existing aluminum scrap supply chain. So we can sort of hijack some of that supply chain to supply customers really anywhere else as we're building up this, you what I would call the second phase of scale where we're actually making our own fuel. So we can build this organically and pretty flexibly. And like, you know, you're...

There are regions of the world where you find these heat users concentrated. They're like in places in the US where you have like, you know, more favorable, you know, tax environment, for example, or like regulatory environment for making these processing plants or like proximity to a river. So you have cooling. So you do see hot spots, but again, like, you know, like most major metropolis now has like a craft brewing scene and they're all using megawatts of heat. So you're really not going to find

a shortage of heat users anywhere.

Yeah, that makes sense. I can imagine that your biggest calculus is going to be, can we concentrate our sales efforts in one area and I try to like clean this up so that we can get a nice supply chain here and then obviously continue building out as necessary. But it's not like you have to go scouring the earth for people using this stuff, right? There's plenty of users everywhere,

Yeah, so I was about to say, we're really just focused on finding good customers to start with. Customers that are excited about trying something new, trying something better, and being a good partner as we scale this technology. And we're so flexible behind the scenes, it really doesn't matter where.

Silas Mähner (38:25.87)
Yeah, that makes sense. One other thing is, I don't know if you touched on this yet, but you kind of mentioned, I think, right at the beginning about storage of this stuff. So you can produce it in whenever you want, but can you talk about the storage kind of benefits of this versus fuel or traditional conventional fuel, I should say?

Yeah, great question. So even fossil fuels, like in theory are good at storing energy, like they're very energy dense, they're cheap. know, like fossil fuels are literally solar energy that's been stored over like hundreds of millions of years, right? It's like you have your plants and animals, you know, plants getting their energy from the sun and you had animals eating those plants and dying and then getting, you know, basically undergoing hydro liquefaction to turn into oils or gasification to turn into natural gas.

And so like all that is solar energy stored over millions of years. So like, it's actually like been one of the greatest success stories in energy storage, literally of all time. We're just depleting these, these stores faster than they can be made because they literally take million years to make. So that's where like fossil fuels are, are technically really good at storing, but once you take them out of the ground and you start exposing them to oxygen and, and, and water, like humidity, lot of liquid fuels go bad. like diesel fuel can absorb water, can go bad.

Natural gas is just a gas. Gas is difficult to store for long periods of time. this is where aluminum is quite interesting. The reason why people have not been able to use aluminum as a fuel is actually the reason why it's so good at storing energy. It's really hard to get it to undergo some chemical reaction. It just does not degrade. It's why we build so many things out of aluminum. Over 70 % of all aluminum that's ever been produced

is still in its application because it's so inert. And so that is a tough nut to crack from a technology perspective. That's why I started the company. That took me 10 years of working at NASA and doing a PhD to figure that out. But the flip side of that is that before we do our process, this stuff just doesn't degrade. So you can strategically bury aluminum reserves as energy reserves for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Peter Godart (40:37.336)
dump aluminum ingots off the coast of somewhere where you think you might need that energy 100 years down the road, fish it out, and then there you have these massive energy reserves. And so I think of this in a more practical sense as yearly storage or decadal storage. You have this cold snap in Texas a couple of years ago that completely blew out the grid. couldn't respond.

to the demand signal and it was a catastrophe. People without heating for like a week or two. This is one of the few materials that you could store for long enough for that to be impactful. There's really no other technology that can store energy for this long and then be dispatched as easily.

And then what about I don't know if you mentioned already, but the energy density aspect of this compared to like diesel or other liquid fuels.

Yeah, so it's actually two times the energy density. it's, you know, it takes up half the space as diesel for the same amount of energy.

Wow, that's amazing. There seems like to be no end to the benefits of this stuff, man. This is really cool. Okay, and then the one thing I'm then curious about beyond this is, you talked about abundance and we were basically, in your perspective, we're going to be running out of oil and gas. Maybe we'll find more reserves, but at end of the day, we're kind of depleting this. What about the abundance of aluminum? Like, what about globally? Like, who can access this? Is it just going to be something that only, you know, America can access? Like, what is the abundance of aluminum?

Peter Godart (42:11.852)
Yeah, it's literally the most abundant metal on Earth. It's like the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust. So there's really no shortage of aluminum. Unlike fossil fuels where you burn it and it turns it into constituent components that then go into the atmosphere. And then it's a gas. It's like flungible with the other gases that are in the atmosphere. And so you have to fight entropy to take it back to make it. And that's what plants are effectively doing.

you know, because we're recharging it, we're not really talking about like mining additional resources. And so like the vision of the company is to actually just be a no mine company. So I always say like aluminum is the, you know, it's the most abundant metal on earth, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to go and dig up all of the aluminum. I don't think that's a good idea. And because we're able to leverage aluminum waste, can basically bootstrap this network. So we're like taking in waste, we're building this up, you know,

year by year taking in more waste and then having that byproduct go into our own aluminum production. So we can actually build this company without having to mine additional aluminum. We're just using that surplus stock. every time we take a ton of scrap aluminum into our process, it stays there. We don't need to get more essentially. We can just build that loop.

So what about, I guess, there's all this kind of controversy to an extent like, hey, when we found places that had lots of oil, then wars started there, are there going to be, are there any areas of the world that don't really have access to aluminum? is this basically like, hey, this is actually a nice equity play as well?

Well, so yeah, mean, the idea is to democratize and increase access to green electricity, right? So that it's actually a benefit. So when you dig up aluminum, and these are great questions, because I'm not being specific here, there's just too much to get into. So I appreciate you asking this question. But like when you go and dig out aluminum, it's in its aluminum oxide form or hydroxide form.

Peter Godart (44:10.862)
And so unlike when you dig up oil and it's immediately flammable, that aluminum is not flammable. Like you need to actually recharge it immediately. So like if you come across like an aluminum, you know, cash in the earth, like it's not like you struck oil or struck gold. Like you then need to take that to a place where you can recharge it. So we're not thinking of it as like, you know, we struck aluminum, right?

Exactly. We're just taking this like really pedestrian material that is so widely available. It's inexpensive as a result. And then we're using that as the energy storage medium to then go and take, know, there's regions of the world where you have, you know, more or easier access to renewables like wind and solar. You have regions of the world that have like a more favorable regulatory environment. So it's easier to build nuclear and having a good way of transporting energy.

from those sites to literally anywhere in the world, that's what improves access to that renewable energy. That's what democratizes that renewable energy. So it's kind of the opposite.

Yeah, so my question is mainly thinking about like, you know, the developing countries, like if they were to go and build out these supply chains, maybe they should have access to aluminum in their country probably, right? They're not going to have to rely on somebody else to do it. Yes, they'll have to, you know, recharge it basically to make it into a fuel, but it's not like they're going to be reliant on somebody else for their aluminum supply, correct?

Exactly. So they can have like a much more diversified supply chain. Like even countries like Germany, it became over-reliant on natural gas supplies from Russia. And so, you know, with the Ukraine war, like they had to eat a massive price hike, like the cost of energy, almost more than doubled in that time period. And as that supply chain had to stabilize. But I'll even take this one step further.

Peter Godart (46:03.522)
This actually gives developing countries a new potential export. Like you can basically leapfrog, you know, current ways of making energy and overbuild and then export that excess as this material. Like this is what happened in Iceland, for example. Iceland has an abundance of hydropower and geothermal power. And so you actually had literally aluminum companies come into Iceland and be like, hey,

team.

Peter Godart (46:30.69)
will build out your entire infrastructure. will give everyone on the island access to this abundant electricity. And we're going to give you basically something you can sell to the rest of the world, which is aluminum. And because aluminum is so energy dense, it's literally a way of exporting that excess energy. So now you see Iceland benefiting economically and socially from the build out of an aluminum industry there. And so you can imagine doing this in many other places as well.

Interesting. Okay. So the next thing that really interests me is, you know, if you look at the oil and gas industry, there's not one player that runs everything, right? And this is like a whole, you know, network of companies and systems that supply. Obviously, there's a lot of them that are vertically integrated, but they are not one company that, you know, has oil and gas. And you guys are trying to build out something new that's going to kind of replace this. How do you think about trying to build a sort of ecosystem for this? Like, who can you partner with?

And how is this going to work? Because you guys have a unique IP, right? Like you said, the oil, the fuel doesn't come out ready to use. I guess there's some refining that has to be done. in this case, you have to create the fuel and then manage the supply chain. So how are you thinking about building out this infrastructure? Because one company, even if you're the best company in the world, you can only do it so fast. So how are you going to try to get other people involved to make this go a lot faster?

Yeah, we're all about collaboration. Like we don't want to vertically integrate from the get-go. We want to solve problems via partnerships wherever possible. What we're really good at as a company is developing technologies rapidly, solving kind of core issues, developing IP. We're not a global logistics company yet. You know, we're heading in that direction rapidly, but you know, we're also not a utility company. So we're not going to be investing our own resources.

building new energy generation assets, right? We're not going to be even like spearheading necessarily like aluminum fuel production itself, because there's actually a lot of technology that can already be leveraged to do effectively aluminum smelting, but in a completely carbon neutral way. So, you know, even to that end, we've actually established an industry group, our own industry group called the Global Aluminum Energy Alliance.

Peter Godart (48:50.17)
And that's actually a partnership amongst a lot of these other folks that have been and are looking at aluminum as a fuel. So, you know, we can leverage the ecosystem there, basically providing all of the infrastructure that any company using aluminum as a fuel would need in order to operate. And so that's like basically everything upstream of just burning it. And then, you know, even in the short term too, we're leveraging partnerships for

for making high grade aluminum hydroxide. So we have some other products to sell as well. We don't need to turn all of our aluminum hydroxide back into aluminum to start. There's actually an economic advantage to selling it to actually battery manufacturers that's used in high grade battery applications. It's used in fire suppressants as like additives to plastic, like the bed linings for trucks. if there's a fire, the plastic doesn't burn.

That's all aluminum hydroxide. And so we have partnerships basically peppered around our entire ecosystem here to just give us the best opportunity we can to succeed.

Because in general, the likelihood here, if I'm not mistaken, is that maybe somebody else will figure out how to do this process. But currently, you guys have the IP to be able to actually burn the aluminum. That's the kind of thing that's unique to you guys. The creation of the original product is not unique to you guys. So you're going to try to focus on where your expertise is and get as much of the market as you can. Because maybe somebody will figure that out later. But you're going to focus on just getting as much of the market as you can and building out the infrastructure first, correct?

Yeah, exactly. mean, like, you know, when when we discovered oil, like you then have to invent the internal combustion engine and all of the infrastructure, you know, needed to turn that into something useful for people. And so like, we're at that interesting, you know, inflection, I'm sorry, we're at that interesting inflection point where, you know, we have the opportunity to build that infrastructure ourselves. And that's what we're really good at. And that's what we're going to do.

Silas Mähner (50:51.758)
Yeah, so then what is the next step for you guys in terms of the scaling up as quickly as possible process? What's the next step here?

Yeah, so we have developed essentially our first commercial class aluminum water reactor, which is scalable to megawatts. So, you we're doing our first like subscale pilots now, which give us a lot of valuable information about how the technology works and helps us work out the kinks. And then we're going right to megawatt scale projects, likely in food and Bev, but, you know, TBD, but, you know, we expect by the end of next year,

to be deploying our first megawatt project. And that's where things get really interesting. know, this technology, these types of technologies scale up extremely well. Like whenever you have reactors, you benefit from like the square cube law. you you double the radius, right, of a sphere and you get R cubed times the volume. So...

These these scale up extremely they don't scale down to it. So you're never gonna see an aluminum powered car likely and that's a great idea But the bigger we go the better so like, you know We have our sites set on these factories that are that are consuming hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts of Industrial heat and so, you we need to be able to take a bite out of that

Okay. And then on the policy side, so to me, this is, I don't know how new this, this idea is, right? I've never heard of it until I met you. What does the policy side look like and how are you guys kind of trying to integrate with like the current DOE, which is, you know, seems to be very against electrification in general. So if you can do this, like they probably, you hopefully wouldn't have an issue with it. Like how do you, what's going on in the policy world and what are you guys trying to do to influence that to get this kind of really.

Silas Mähner (52:38.838)
as a nice solution because it sounds like an amazing solution to not have to do as much necessarily grid upgrades to be able to electrify in the first place.

Yeah, mean, so I mean, fossil fuels are heavily subsidized by the government, right? So like, this is not a new concept. Like at the end of the day, for something to be like truly scalable and like to actually come start replacing fossil fuels, like we will need government subsidies. Like that, that is just true. We're trying to make this work without like additional subsidies. Like you saw with the inflation reduction act, there was like massive hydrogen tax credits. You know, even when the administration was, you know,

bullish on that. I was set on figuring out how to do this where we did not have to rely on those because, four years go by, administrations change and those can go away. So we need to be resilient to like, you know, these like excessive subsidies and have to make it work without that. But still at end of the day, like we still we are speaking the same language as the current administration and the current Department of Energy, which is that energy supply chain

resiliency, security, this is really important stuff. And you need to have a stable energy supply chain to do literally anything in society. And so this is our goal is just to make energy supply chains better, more resilient, give more optionality, allows to get energy from more places at a lower price and without the carbon emissions. This has always been the mission of the company.

Yeah, I think it's I do think it's fascinating. This plays well into the next thing we could ask about is the branding aspect. So my understanding is you guys are really focused on kind of pitching this as clean fuel. I don't know if that's because you're trying to find early adopters of the technology who are interested in that. But how do you kind of mentally think about the branding and the pitching of the product from a clean tech perspective versus, this is just better product perspective? Because if you've got you want early adopters, but on the other hand, you want

Silas Mähner (54:39.64)
to get the current administration's DOE involved, for example, like how do you go about that and what kind of line do you walk?

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we are producing a better product than the incumbent than fossil fuels. I don't think anyone would argue that pollution is good. Right. And air pollution from burning natural gas and coal and diesel is bad. Like I think everyone agrees with that. and so like, you know, climate change is a loaded word or concept. Obviously it's like, it's even for people who, you know,

Understand the science and understand that like the global average surface temperature is increasing and that you know over time increases the the prevalence and the severity of natural disasters and Increases desert certification and like the Mediterranean and all this stuff like you know, even if you're like hip to all of that Yeah, it's actually still hard for a person to like have that emotional reaction and like really associate

those impacts to like their daily lives. just is really happening on a time scale that's difficult for people to really understand. That's happening like, know, things are happening more and more, like we're seeing more wildfires and still there's like, I think it's a bit of a distraction, you know, people who are debating, well, like, you know, forest fires always happen and then the other people be like, well, they're happening more frequently. you know, that's, it's just like the wrong conversation to have.

I think the right conversation to have is like, we can just improve this the way we're doing this. Like pollution is bad. Like it has a measurable negative impact on life expectancy and health outcomes. It has a measurable impact on the amount of money we spend as a society treating these negative health impacts. Like we should just improve that. should make cleaner fuels because they're better for communities. They're better for our society. And you know,

Peter Godart (56:36.686)
again, like we are just running out of the stuff. We are running out of fossil fuels. We are depleting that stored energy faster than it can be reproduced. And so like, there will come a time where we will need something else. And I don't want, you know, us to have to look back and be like, Oh, I wish we started working on this earlier. Like, no, we're working on it now. We're coming up with an alternative that can actually scale. has to be a material that has the abundance to scale. And, you know, if you look,

from a first principles lens at like, are our options? know, aluminum ends up being really, really one of the only, if not the only option.

Yeah, I mean, it's very fascinating because I'm trying to think about the, know, in the end, like even if you charge the exact same price that they're paying for conventional fuels right now, if you can say, hey, the reliability, like here's the data and the metrics, like you won't have any reliability issues and we're going do for the same price, but you're going to have clean air coming out your factories. I think that's probably going to be a good pitch. Like even if they're not the most PR savvy companies producing this, they're, mean, most of these big industrial producers are pretty PR savvy because they have to deal with

The local community is being pissed at them. So they probably be like, oh, this is amazing. Like, this would be a great pitch. And probably for their own talent wars, I'm assuming if we can get Gen Z to actually, you know, do, you know, non-white collar jobs at some point, that'll help with their talent attraction for their own needs because it'll be a clean production. So I do like this. I'm just always curious because I usually see people saying, hey, we're going to go in and we're going also be cheaper because that really sweetened the pot. But there's other, you know, there's other motivations besides just

just price too. So and that's not you know, hey, we're gonna solve climate change because usually they're just paying lip service. They're not necessarily that interested in solving it. So that's interesting. What are your I guess you already mentioned a couple maybe other recycling piece but like what are your I guess most heretical takes and when it comes to you know building in climate?

Peter Godart (58:27.614)
maybe this is less heretical now, but I used to always say there's no planet B. So I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab around 2015. that was where SpaceX had the whole colonized Mars campaign happening. I had a lot of friends and I collaborated with people at SpaceX all the time. one of my jobs at the Jet Propulsion Lab was actually piloting one of the Mars rovers, Curiosity. And so I had the privilege and...

sort of actually the burden of looking at Mars every single day, like really cool, but also like, like surprisingly boring as well. Mars is like a really barren place. It's super cold. Like the gravity is lower. So like your bones would atrophy if you were to, if you were to like spend time your muscles after your bones, bone density decreases. And so like, it's not a habitable, hospitable place. you know, the idea of like,

kind of giving up on this planet and going somewhere else, for me, it is just a complete non-starter. Like we really have to solve these problems. Like there are some existential like deadline looming in the distance. There's like the things that can just happen like massive solar flares, wipe out all communication. We get hit by a massive asteroid, like a black hole we didn't see coming from like wander its way into our solar system. Like, okay, you can't do anything about that.

Thanks.

Peter Godart (59:56.312)
But we have some serious deadlines like running out of like stored energy reserves, you know, increasing the global mean surface temperature to the point that it triggers some runaway reaction. have like essentially what happened on Venus where you have like a runaway greenhouse gas event, like very simple thermodynamics to see that that's a possibility. You know, there's a lot of problems we need to figure out here. And so like that's always, I think, been my heretical take is like, we need to solve these problems. We don't get a do-over.

You know, like we can maybe live in our like some of us can live in bunkers and like colonize like the ocean floors. But for the rest of us, you we need to do something here.

Cool man. Well, there's lots of other questions I would like to ask you but we're out of time so I'm just going to maybe close off a couple last things is as a first time founder in earnest, how do you look out for your blind spots where you're not sure?

So just being in community with other founders, folks that are farther ahead, or maybe a little bit behind, I think that's always been the most useful resource, and the most important resource for me is just being in that community. And then just surrounding yourself with the best advisors possible. And then I find on a daily basis, our company has about 36 employees. And so I find that

you know, people within the company are often really good at bringing blind spots to your tenter. If you foster an environment where feedback is not only, you know, welcomed, but actually rewarded. And so like on multiple occasions, like I've ended up promoting people, you know, pretty quickly when it was clear that they could give really insightful and accurate feedback that really had the company's best intentions. Even if it was stuff that was difficult to hear.

Peter Godart (01:01:50.294)
And so like I promote that actively in my company and have found that that's a really great way of finding those blind spots.

Okay, awesome. And yeah, this is something I was wondering about for early stage founders, because it's very difficult to be, to have the vision setting aspects and all of this kind of like fearless leader vibes versus, I also am humble enough to take, you know, take feedback from others. So I appreciate the answer. And then I guess you, I think you alluded to earlier, how, how soon are you guys aiming to get to your first true commercial deployment?

So we're doing our first actual commercial pilots, you know, the end of this year. So we're actually running it in our R &D center in Boston, collecting data, like literally as we speak. And so that's sort of the trial run for the almost the same exact system that will get copied and pasted to an industrial facility in the U.S. And then from there, we're, you know, we're doing project and site selection actively for our first megawatt projects.

And like I said, the goal is to get one of those out the door by the end of next year.

Okay, awesome. And then I guess final thing, where should people follow you? Where can they reach you? Any calls to actions for anybody?

Peter Godart (01:03:00.942)
Yep. Check us out on LinkedIn. You know, we're pioneering a new concept here. And so we've invested, mentioned this is the beginning of the podcast. We're investing in educational content that helps people understand just the general concept of fuels. What does it mean for something to be energy dense? What are the hidden energy and carbon costs of the products that we use every day? And how does that relate to

our future and how can maybe aluminum fuels participate in that. So check us out on LinkedIn, can check out my personal LinkedIn and the found energy LinkedIn and then just follow us on found.energy, join our newsletter and yeah hopefully you'll see us in an industrial facility near you sometime soon.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited, man. This has been probably one of my, I don't know, I usually hesitate to say this, but it's one of my favorite episodes that we've done so far. mean, just the pure innovation here and just like really, really like plugging into the way things work existing and not trying to convince everybody to change their ways. I just really like what you guys are doing. So I'll be very excited to continue following this and we'll have to have you on again soon so I can ask the rest of my questions.

Happy to come back.

Thanks, then.

Silas Mähner (01:04:38.038)
Again, everybody says this, but it's really, really helpful to help kind of hack the algorithm. We don't have a lot of marketing dollars going behind this. So let's get these solutions out in front of more people, especially on an episode like today with Peter, what they're doing. It's just super, super incredible. So do us a favor, drop us five stars and follow us on YouTube. We also love your feedback. So if you have any other future guests that you'd like to hear about, things that you didn't like about the episodes or things, know, topics that you'd like to have this covered in the future, drop us a comment on the LinkedIn post or in the sub stack post.

or you can reach out to SoMiller and myself directly and we'll take it from there. So thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for being a loyal listener of Clean Techies and we will see you next time on the show.