It was a mistake that was forward of its time.
Between 2002 and 2005, engineers with the Techint Group have been making an attempt to dial in a brand new electrical arc furnace for a steelmaker once they observed one thing odd. The carbon electrodes, slightly than breaking down, have been rising bigger.
The staff had inadvertently created what’s often called a pyrolysis response, which is principally burning one thing within the absence of oxygen. On this case, the furnace was splitting methane into pure hydrogen and pure carbon. The staff reported their discovery internally after which, principally, forgot about it.
“Again then, no one cared as a result of no one cared about methane pyrolysis, about hydrogen,” Massimiliano Pieri, CEO of Tulum Power, informed TechCrunch. The experiment was largely forgotten for the following 20 years.
However a few years in the past, buyers for the Techint Group’s company VC arm, TechEnergy Ventures, have been scouring the panorama for brand spanking new methods to supply hydrogen from methane with out the standard air pollution.
Techint’s buyers didn’t should look far. “Somebody within the firm realized, ‘However we have already got that. We now have this discovery,’” Pieri stated.
So the conglomerate dusted off the thought and spun out Tulum to show the unintentional discovery right into a viable enterprise. Lately, Tulum closed an oversubscribed $27 million seed spherical led by TDK Ventures and CDP Enterprise Capital, the corporate solely informed TechCrunch. Doral Power-Tech Ventures, MITO Tech Ventures, and TechEnergy Ventures participated.
Tulum isn’t the one startup pursuing methane pyrolysis as a method to produce hydrogen. Trendy Hydrogen, Molten Industries, and Monolith are amongst Tulum’s rivals. The response has attracted consideration for its potential to supply hydrogen from low-cost, extensively accessible pure gasoline with none carbon dioxide emissions. In pyrolysis, methane is damaged down within the absence of oxygen, the one merchandise are hydrogen gasoline and a mud of strong carbon, each of which might be offered.
However Tulum differs in just a few methods. For one, it doesn’t want to make use of costly catalysts to encourage the pyrolysis response, which a few of its rivals require. In its use of the electrical arc furnace, Tulum can also be utilizing a extensively used — if modified — know-how.
“This offers you a giant head begin,” Pieri stated.
Tulum will use the seed funding to construct a pilot plant in Mexico alongside an current Techint Group metal plant. If all goes nicely, the metal plant might purchase hydrogen and carbon immediately from Tulum to be used in its operations.
Pieri stated that at full-scale manufacturing, a industrial plant would generate two tons of hydrogen and 600 tons of carbon per day.
Tulum is hoping its industrial scale plant will produce one kilogram of hydrogen for about $1.50 within the U.S., the place electrical energy and pure gasoline are each low-cost. At that value, it’s simply 50 cents extra than most hydrogen produced from pure gasoline in the present day, and it considerably undercuts among the main inexperienced hydrogen strategies. That’s earlier than the corporate sells any carbon that its course of generates.
Not unhealthy for an nearly forgotten mistake.
