It was a mistake that was forward of its time.
Between 2002 and 2005, engineers with the Techint Group have been attempting to dial in a brand new electrical arc furnace for a steelmaker once they seen one thing odd. The carbon electrodes, fairly than breaking down, have been rising bigger.
The group had inadvertently created what’s referred to as a pyrolysis response, which is mainly burning one thing within the absence of oxygen. On this case, the furnace was splitting methane into pure hydrogen and pure carbon. The group reported their discovery internally after which, mainly, 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 subsequent 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 provide hydrogen from methane with out the same old air pollution.
Techint’s buyers didn’t need to 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 concept and spun out Tulum to show the unintended 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 completely informed TechCrunch. Doral Power-Tech Ventures, MITO Tech Ventures, and TechEnergy Ventures participated.
Tulum isn’t the one startup pursuing methane pyrolysis as a strategy to produce hydrogen. Trendy Hydrogen, Molten Industries, and Monolith are amongst Tulum’s opponents. The response has attracted consideration for its capacity to provide hydrogen from low-cost, extensively out there 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 could be bought.
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 opponents require. In its use of the electrical arc furnace, Tulum can be utilizing a extensively used — if modified — know-how.
“This provides you an enormous 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 properly, the metal plant may purchase hydrogen and carbon straight from Tulum to be used in its operations.
Pieri stated that at full-scale manufacturing, a business plant would generate two tons of hydrogen and 600 tons of carbon per day.
Tulum is hoping its business 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 just 50 cents more than most hydrogen produced from pure gasoline as we speak, and it considerably undercuts a number of the main inexperienced hydrogen strategies. That’s earlier than the corporate sells any carbon that its course of generates.
Not unhealthy for an virtually forgotten mistake.