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The Mount Pinatubo volcano and its crater lake, created by its 1991 eruption.
Copyright 2001 AP. All rights reserved.
Welcome back to Current Climate. The realization that clean, carbon-free hydrogen is produced naturally underground rocked the energy world a few years ago, with the U.S. Energy Department estimating there could be trillions of metric tons sitting in underground pockets around the world. The challenge has been finding large enough deposits that drilling for the universe’s most abundant element is worth the effort.
Koloma, an energy startup that emerged from stealth four years ago, has been the leader in the hunt for geologic hydrogen, backed by $400 million from investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Amazon. It’s been scouring the globe for promising sites, sampling rock and geologic conditions at sites in the U.S., Australia and other parts of the world the CEO Pete Johnson declined to identify. But last week, its attention shifted to the Philippines, where the country’s government granted it access to develop potential hydrogen well sites in Zambales Province, west of Manila. That region, once home to two massive U.S. military bases, is geologically active and famous for Mount Pinatubo, the powerful volcano that devastated the area when it erupted in 1991.
“The Philippines has the largest natural hydrogen seeps anywhere on the planet,” Johnson said. “We have reason to believe that these seeps are connected to very large accumulations.”
The 4,100-square-kilometer sections of Zambales that Koloma has permission to explore aren’t “right on the shoulders” of Pinatubo, but in the general region, he said. Though it may turn out to be Koloma’s first commercial production site, confirming how much hydrogen can be extracted there will take at least two years, he said. If Koloma finds the quantity it’s looking for, it would be a breakthrough for the natural hydrogen industry and a huge help to the Philippines, which is heavily reliant on imported energy.
“It’s the fastest-growing country in Asia, with an economy that’s growing really fast and modernizing really fast. And their incremental unit of power is made by burning diesel,” he said. “If your alternative is importing diesel or expensive LNG and you’ve got hydrogen that competes head-to-head against LNG costs, that’s going to make sense. The next step would be the Philippines thinking about being an energy or energy product exporter–potentially ammonia or something like that.”
Despite spiking demand for energy globally, made worse by surging oil, natural gas and ammonia prices due to the U.S. war with Iran, Johnson said the company is taking a methodical approach to finding the resource in large quantities to build a sustainable business.
“If we get antsy and just start poking holes in the ground and kind of praying for success and not doing the right things in the middle, that’s not going to be good for me, not going to be good for shareholders, and it would be terrible for the industry,” he said. “I would love to have a bunch of big gushers in my portfolio right now. We have brought 90% plus hydrogen gas to the surface. We’ve tested it. We’ve verified it. We’ve found large accumulations. We’re not sitting on something that’s big and commercial yet.”
The Big Read
TELO’s electric mini pickup is about the same size as BMW’s MINI Cooper.
TELO
Tesla’s Founders Are Backing The Anti-Cybertruck
Twenty years ago this month, Tesla introduced itself to the world with the electric Roadster, the $100,000 sports car that kickstarted the modern EV era. Now the company’s two original founders are betting on TELO, an EV startup with an aesthetic rebuttal to Tesla’s brutalist Cybertruck swagger.
Rather than start with another compact crossover chasing Tesla’s top-selling Model Y, San Carlos, California-based TELO – located in the same Silicon Valley office park where Tesla was headquartered when it launched the Roadster – is coming to market with a whimsical truck roughly the size of a MINI Cooper. Priced from $41,520, the MT1 looks like something from the world of Japanese anime, with none of the militaristic menace of Tesla’s pickup. But TELO is borrowing one important page from Tesla’s original playbook: start small and build slowly. CEO and cofounder Jason Marks told Forbes the company initially plans to make just 500 units, and then scale up to a 5,000-vehicle-per-year run rate after a year or so. And even at that relatively low volume, he thinks the company can turn a profit.
“A lot of EV companies that came after Tesla went right for high-volume manufacturing out of the gate. But that’s not what Tesla did. If you look at their playbook, they built 2,400 Roadsters. Then they built 10,000 Model S’s, and then scaled from there,” said Marks, whose cofounder, Forrest North, is a former Tesla engineer. “Our intention is very much the same. This first mid-market product we’re launching is really to show the world that mini can be mighty. We’re not going to come out of the gate building a high-volume product.”
Hot Topic
Gene Berdichevsky, CEO and cofounder of Sila, on raising an extra $300 million for production of silicon-carbon anodes for high-powered batteries
What’s the purpose of this latest funding round?
Two years ago, when we raised capital, we said we’re going to finish the factory and start ramping up and producing, and we’ve done exactly that. We started operations in [Moses Lake, Washington] at the factory late last year. We’ve been going through commissioning, going through sorts of post-construction, breaking in of the equipment, if you will. We’re now starting to ramp. We’re making materials. We’re sending early samples to customers. We’re not quite fully ramped yet, but we’ll have some announcements on that in the coming weeks and months. We’re in ramp-up mode, and it’s going quite well.
This financing really builds on top of that. It’s really about going from that first couple of gigawatt hours of production capacity that we have in Moses Lake in phase one and getting to tens of gigawatt hours equivalent in phase two. It’s really just for the development of phase two and to continue operations and get everything shipped from phase one.
The main target for your anodes was higher-powered electric car batteries. Is that still the case?
The thing that’s happened operationally over the last year plus is we’re getting tremendous tailwinds from what I would call the physical AI layer becoming really important to the future of technology. So we’re not just doing EVs. We’re supporting drone applications. We’re supporting satellite applications. We’re supporting all kinds of AI device electronics. We’ve got customers that are looking to integrate this technology for data centers to deal with some of the transient power from GPUs, robotics and space satellite communications.
What’s been really interesting is that every one of these sectors has picked up. And even for EVs, we’re starting to see demand for batteries that would tailor well to autonomous taxis, where you need much better cycle life. Ideally, you want to have good recharging on those or enough capacity to run a whole day. So we’re starting to see some of that trickle back.
In many ways, the moment is all about AI. But for AI to really have a massive impact on society, it’s going to have to touch people beyond the screen. So whether that’s devices, consumer devices that need better power, delivery drones or first responder drones or satellites for communication and other applications and robotics, of course, we’re starting to see that become much more important. And just like the conversation that’s happening in AI about sovereignty and having leadership and having the technology to be ready for the 21st century, the same thing is happening in batteries.
If you don’t have this layer, if you don’t have high-performance batteries and all of the requisite supply chain for manufacturing those, you might develop the best models in the world, but then what are you going to apply them to?
The beauty of our technology is that while you can tune it to optimize it for these different applications, it can service all of them, maybe with slightly different battery makers that we partner with. Certain battery makers are really focused on AVs; others are focused on more of those other applications. So it’s not really changing our strategy. Our strategy continues to be to invent the best anode technology. Enable the best batteries in the world, and scale that up. We have to get to giga-scale.
Are you the only fully domestic battery anode manufacturer at this point?
We’re certainly the leading one. We invented everything here. It’s all American-invented IP. And we are focused on scaling in the U.S. We see a tremendous opportunity to do so. We think this is what’s necessary for the country. We really think it’s the blueprint for how we need to re-industrialize. You want technology that you invent here, and you want to scale it here.
We spent 25 years globalizing and inventing here, and then building it somewhere else. I think those days are numbered. You also can’t just copy what the rest of the world does in America. You have to invent. As Americans, we don’t like to be second. We don’t like to copy. We’re going to have to invent.
What Else We’re Reading
Could a new iron ore mine turn Minnesota into a green steel powerhouse? (Canary Media)
Climate change exacerbating drought across Europe, scientists say (Reuters)
‘A five-alarm fire’: Western reservoirs that supply California fall to record low levels (Los Angeles Times)
Oil firms knew for decades of methane’s danger to the planet, documents suggest (New York Times)
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