It was a mistake that was forward of its time.
Between 2002 and 2005, engineers with the Techint Group had been making an attempt to dial in a brand new electrical arc furnace for a steelmaker once they seen one thing odd. The carbon electrodes, reasonably than breaking down, had been rising bigger.
The workforce 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 workforce 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 Vitality, 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, had been scouring the panorama for brand spanking new methods to provide hydrogen from methane with out the standard 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 mentioned.
So the conglomerate dusted off the concept and spun out Tulum to show the unintended discovery right into a viable enterprise. Not too long ago, Tulum closed an oversubscribed $27 million seed spherical led by TDK Ventures and CDP Enterprise Capital, the corporate solely informed TechCrunch. Doral Vitality-Tech Ventures, MITO Tech Ventures, and TechEnergy Ventures participated.
An illustration reveals Tulum Vitality’s pilot plant.Picture Credit:Tulum Vitality
Tulum isn’t the one startup pursuing methane pyrolysis as a option to produce hydrogen. Trendy Hydrogen, Molten Industries, and Monolith are amongst Tulum’s rivals. The response has attracted consideration for its means to provide 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 will be offered.
However Tulum differs in a number of 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 — expertise.
“This offers you an enormous head begin,” Pieri mentioned.
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 straight from Tulum to be used in its operations.
Pieri mentioned 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 worth, it’s simply 50 cents greater than most hydrogen created from pure gasoline right this moment, 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.
