AI transcript
0:00:02 (upbeat music)
0:00:07 Pushkin.
0:00:10 If you’re looking for a new podcast,
0:00:12 but don’t know where to start,
0:00:14 here’s one you can add to your list.
0:00:16 The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:00:18 The Jordan Harbinger Show is aimed
0:00:20 at making you a better informed critical thinker
0:00:23 so you can get a sense of how the world actually works
0:00:26 and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
0:00:29 Jordan talks to everyone from neuroscientists to CEOs
0:00:32 to astronauts, authors, and performers.
0:00:33 You might enjoy Jordan’s interview
0:00:35 with historian Yuval Noah Harari,
0:00:39 the author of “Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind”
0:00:42 or his episode with fool me once author,
0:00:43 Kelly Richmond Pope,
0:00:46 on how fraud became a trillion dollar industry.
0:00:48 Whether Jordan’s conducting an interview
0:00:50 or giving advice to a listener,
0:00:52 you’ll find something useful that you can apply
0:00:54 to your own life in every episode
0:00:56 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:00:58 That could mean learning how to ask for advice
0:01:00 the right way, or it could just be discovering
0:01:04 a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world.
0:01:07 Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show,
0:01:12 that’s H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R on Apple Podcasts,
0:01:17 Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:01:22 Out of everything we cover on this show,
0:01:24 out of all the themes,
0:01:27 I do, I have to admit, have a favorite.
0:01:29 My favorite theme, my favorite thing we cover
0:01:32 is the energy transition.
0:01:33 There are a bunch of reasons
0:01:36 I love the energy transition shows.
0:01:40 One reason, the giant obvious global stakes, right?
0:01:42 Fighting climate change.
0:01:45 Two, the people working on the energy transition,
0:01:48 the people I talk to in these shows,
0:01:51 actually make me feel hope rather than despair.
0:01:52 It’s a big one.
0:01:54 And three, reason number three,
0:01:57 which is related to reason number two is,
0:02:01 there is just so much creativity in this field,
0:02:03 in this set of industries.
0:02:06 There’s so much of people looking at the world
0:02:09 and trying to think at a really basic,
0:02:12 fundamental kind of first principles level,
0:02:15 how can we solve these giant problems?
0:02:18 How can we get the carbon-free energy we need
0:02:20 at a price we can afford?
0:02:23 (upbeat music)
0:02:25 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem,
0:02:27 the show where I talk to people who are trying
0:02:30 to make technological progress.
0:02:32 My guest today is Peter Goddard.
0:02:35 He’s the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy.
0:02:37 Found Energy is in its early stages,
0:02:39 but the fundamental idea behind the company,
0:02:44 so creative and audacious, and frankly so intellectually fun
0:02:47 that I really wanted to talk to Peter.
0:02:49 Peter’s problem is this.
0:02:53 How can you use aluminum, just regular aluminum,
0:02:58 like from an empty can of Coke, as a new source of energy?
0:03:00 The idea of using aluminum as an energy source
0:03:02 first came to Peter, not as a way to deal
0:03:07 with problems on Earth, but to deal with problems in space.
0:03:09 Specifically, problems on Europa.
0:03:13 Europa, as you may already know, is an icy moon of Jupiter.
0:03:15 At the time the idea came to him,
0:03:19 Peter was working at JPL, at NASA’s Jet Probe.
0:03:21 NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
0:03:23 He was part of a team designing a spaceship
0:03:24 to send to Europa.
0:03:27 The idea was that the spaceship would land on the moon
0:03:30 and then drill down through the thick sheet of ice
0:03:34 to the water below to look for signs of life.
0:03:35 But drilling through all that ice
0:03:36 was gonna take a lot of energy.
0:03:39 And Peter and his colleagues were trying to figure out
0:03:42 how to send that energy all the way to Europa,
0:03:44 to this moon orbiting Jupiter.
0:03:45 – When you send something into space,
0:03:47 mass is super precious.
0:03:53 Every gram is very expensive in terms of payload.
0:03:57 And so we were sort of sitting around debating,
0:04:02 what could go in this little space in that spacecraft
0:04:04 that would pack enough energy.
0:04:07 So we’re talking about different lithium ion batteries,
0:04:08 for example.
0:04:11 And I’m sitting there realizing that we’re not really
0:04:13 thinking holistically enough about this problem
0:04:15 because the framing and the shell
0:04:18 and the structural members of the spacecraft
0:04:21 are made from aluminum, which is 20 to 40 times
0:04:25 more energy dense than those lithium ion batteries.
0:04:28 Like I’m looking at these renderings of the spacecraft
0:04:30 that are sitting on the surface of Europa
0:04:32 and then realizing like, oh my God,
0:04:34 most of this aluminum is doing absolutely nothing.
0:04:39 Like there’s basically, it’s microgravity on these moons
0:04:43 that they don’t need to withstand crazy forces
0:04:44 once they’re there.
0:04:46 They have to survive launch.
0:04:47 And then once they’re there and landing
0:04:50 and then once they’re there, it’s essentially doing nothing.
0:04:52 And I thought, this is insane.
0:04:57 Like why are we not utilizing this energy
0:04:59 just sitting around when every single gram
0:05:01 that you send into space is so precious.
0:05:03 So I pitched this idea of saying like,
0:05:07 what if we could consume that aluminum for energy
0:05:09 that would dramatically reduce the constraints
0:05:14 on what needs to go in that energy storage box there?
0:05:18 – And what was the response when you pitched that idea?
0:05:19 – The response was essentially,
0:05:22 that just might be crazy enough to work.
0:05:23 – Do they say that every day at JPL?
0:05:26 People love saying that at JPL.
0:05:28 – There’s a lot of out of the box thinkers over there.
0:05:31 It’s a wonderful place to work.
0:05:32 – So what happens?
0:05:33 You have this idea, what happens?
0:05:35 – Yeah, so we’re sort of sitting around
0:05:39 and bouncing ideas off one another.
0:05:43 I proposed this idea and people sort of dismissed it.
0:05:45 Immediately it then thought for a minute
0:05:48 and realized actually, there might be something here.
0:05:53 So I actually got some funds to start my own research lab
0:05:56 sort of within JPL to take a look at this.
0:05:58 I sort of cheekily called it
0:06:00 the self cannibalizing robot project.
0:06:02 – Because the spaceship’s gonna go to a moon of Jupiter
0:06:05 and then eat itself, burn itself up
0:06:07 to provide energy for its work.
0:06:09 – Exactly, it’s gonna consume
0:06:11 that super energy dense exoskeleton
0:06:12 that it no longer needs.
0:06:15 – Like what does that actually look like in your mind?
0:06:18 Like so this thing is there, it’s on this moon of Jupiter.
0:06:20 What actually happens?
0:06:22 – So to give you an example of how this might look.
0:06:26 So the spacecraft would have these aluminum landing legs.
0:06:29 They would land on the surface of this icy moon
0:06:32 and those legs would essentially corkscrew
0:06:33 into the ice.
0:06:35 And once they’re there,
0:06:37 they undergo this process called activation
0:06:39 where you have this large chunk of aluminum
0:06:41 and it can actually get broken down by water.
0:06:43 It’s basically a rusting process,
0:06:46 but accelerated like a million times.
0:06:49 And the process is exothermic as well.
0:06:51 So as that aluminum starts exothermically
0:06:53 it’s releasing heat reacting with that water.
0:06:55 It’s producing hydrogen gas.
0:06:57 These legs actually leave behind
0:07:00 these little underground caverns of hydrogen gas.
0:07:04 So the leg detaches, it degrades,
0:07:05 it disintegrates, it rusts,
0:07:08 and then it leaves behind this little cavern of hydrogen,
0:07:11 which then that robot or maybe other robots
0:07:15 can navigate over and tap into as a refueling station.
0:07:18 – Aha, so the landing legs decay,
0:07:22 they leave behind hydrogen and that hydrogen is fuel
0:07:24 that can then power the drill
0:07:26 that’s gonna go deep down into the ice.
0:07:28 – Exactly, or communications,
0:07:31 or imagery equipment.
0:07:32 – So did it get anywhere?
0:07:36 – So we ended up proving out
0:07:40 some of the core aspects of that technology.
0:07:42 The specific program I was working on,
0:07:44 the funding was sort of called into question.
0:07:47 These are big congressional,
0:07:49 it’s basically a line item in a congressional budget.
0:07:52 And for whatever reason that went away
0:07:54 and the interest waned.
0:07:58 – And do you leave when your project gets canceled?
0:08:03 – So yes, I ended up leaving and going back to school
0:08:06 to further this concept.
0:08:08 And I had found a professor
0:08:10 that I had worked with as an undergrad,
0:08:13 Doug Hart, who was really excited
0:08:15 to take this technology to the next level
0:08:18 where we could actually use it for earth applications.
0:08:23 – So use it for earth applications is a big difference.
0:08:25 Like you had a spaceship that eats itself,
0:08:28 which seems like very elegant and very reasonable, right?
0:08:29 ‘Cause the core idea is like,
0:08:31 oh, it’s really hard to get to Jupiter.
0:08:35 It’s really hard to get the marginal gram of stuff
0:08:37 to Jupiter, so if we can use the spaceship itself,
0:08:38 that’s amazing.
0:08:41 Like it’s not obvious to me that you’d be like,
0:08:42 oh, the Jupiter thing got canceled,
0:08:43 but let’s use it on earth.
0:08:46 Like why is that a, why does that even come to mind?
0:08:49 – So for one, I was really obsessed
0:08:52 with doing something earth related.
0:08:55 I spent all of my time, every waking second,
0:08:58 thinking externally, thinking about the solar system,
0:09:00 thinking about these other planets life elsewhere,
0:09:05 realizing how precious and special and interesting it is
0:09:08 that we have life on earth now,
0:09:12 and wanting to do something to preserve that,
0:09:17 just sort of a sense of like cosmic beauty, if you will.
0:09:19 – Like having looked at these other planets and moons
0:09:23 is like, boy, that’d be a way harder place to live than earth.
0:09:24 – Yeah, I mean, you know, you’re lived,
0:09:27 I was living in LA at the time and like there’s so much
0:09:30 to point to and think was sort of miserable
0:09:32 at the place, you’re stuck in traffic
0:09:34 and you look over and someone’s sort of screaming
0:09:37 to themselves in the car next to you and realizing,
0:09:40 you know, existence on life is really hard,
0:09:43 but when you spend so much time looking at existence
0:09:45 or the possibility of existence on other planets,
0:09:47 you realize, you know, we have it pretty good.
0:09:49 And, you know, we’ve spent actually literally billions
0:09:53 of years adapting to the gravity of earth
0:09:56 and to the pressures and to the temperatures
0:09:58 and, you know, why waste that, why waste that?
0:10:04 – So, okay, so you start looking down
0:10:08 instead of looking up, what happens?
0:10:11 – So I started thinking about, okay,
0:10:15 where else might we find energy
0:10:17 that’s being underutilized on earth?
0:10:22 And I realized that there was a lot of aluminum
0:10:25 sitting around doing nothing on earth.
0:10:27 You know, it’s, I looked into aluminum recycling,
0:10:30 realized that there’s a bit of greenwashing going on.
0:10:32 We don’t do as good of a job as we think.
0:10:34 And, you know, it’s just, it’s more difficult
0:10:38 to recycle aluminum than we’re led to believe often.
0:10:40 – Even aluminum cans, I would think aluminum cans
0:10:44 would all be uniform and therefore
0:10:46 relatively manageable to recycle, not so?
0:10:48 – Well, we’ve created an interesting problem
0:10:50 for ourselves there because an aluminum can
0:10:51 is actually two different outweighs.
0:10:55 There’s the sort of cap is a separate piece from the body,
0:10:57 which needs to be deep drawn.
0:11:00 And so you need basically different properties
0:11:01 for the manufacturing.
0:11:02 And, you know, when you open the can,
0:11:05 you want it to sort of snap open and be–
0:11:07 – It’s very satisfying that snap.
0:11:08 If it’s destroying the world,
0:11:10 that’s an unfortunate consequence.
0:11:12 – Exactly, but with the body,
0:11:14 you don’t want that snap when you’re manufacturing it.
0:11:17 And so they end up using two different alloys.
0:11:18 And so when you melt it back down,
0:11:21 you basically can only make one of those.
0:11:25 And you have to add some primary aluminum,
0:11:28 some virgin aluminum in order to do that,
0:11:29 ’cause you have to dilute out some of the impurities.
0:11:32 All that to say, it’s a much harder problem
0:11:35 than people think.
0:11:36 And what that means, practically speaking,
0:11:40 is that a lot of aluminum just ends up in landfills.
0:11:42 You know, it ends up getting exported to countries
0:11:43 where manual labor is cheaper,
0:11:47 so that they can pick out those impurities by hand.
0:11:49 Sorting is not quite there yet.
0:11:52 And so you end up with billions of tons of aluminum
0:11:55 that is underutilized.
0:11:58 – So let’s talk about aluminum for a minute,
0:12:00 because it’s really interesting, right?
0:12:03 Like there is this whole history of aluminum.
0:12:05 You know, if you go back a couple of hundred years
0:12:06 at this point, right?
0:12:10 This used to be this wildly precious metal,
0:12:15 because even though it’s super abundant in the earth,
0:12:18 it is pretty much always bound up
0:12:20 with something else, usually oxygen, right?
0:12:23 There was this moment that everybody writes about,
0:12:27 and I hope it’s true, where like Napoleon III, right?
0:12:31 The Napoleon after Napoleon, supposedly like for his like,
0:12:34 B-list guests would give them plates of like silver and gold,
0:12:37 but the A-list guests got the aluminum plates,
0:12:40 ’cause it was this wildly rare, beautiful thing.
0:12:42 But then somebody figured out
0:12:45 how to make aluminum much more easily, right?
0:12:46 – Yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:12:50 I mean, so if you think about like the ages of society, right?
0:12:52 There’s like the Stone Age,
0:12:54 and then there’s the Iron Age and the Bronze Age.
0:12:57 And you know, the order in which those occurred
0:13:02 are basically how close to that useful form
0:13:03 are they found in nature?
0:13:06 So obviously the Stone Age, trivial.
0:13:08 The Stone is a stone.
0:13:10 – Finding a rock is the easy part, yes.
0:13:12 – You put a rock on top of another rock,
0:13:13 you do that a couple more times,
0:13:17 and you’ve got Stonehenge, you’ve got houses,
0:13:22 you’ve got, you know, we were doing a good job stacking stones.
0:13:24 Slightly more complicated, you know,
0:13:28 you have metals that are more closely found
0:13:31 in their elemental form, so things like copper,
0:13:34 and then you have things that are not found as a pure metal,
0:13:38 but can be easily reduced.
0:13:41 So something like iron, for example, is a little bit easier,
0:13:42 where you can take the iron ore
0:13:45 and you can heat it up with some carbon,
0:13:48 usually just from some charcoal,
0:13:50 and get a workable metal there.
0:13:52 – But this is way more complex than stones.
0:13:54 We’ve made some technological progress there.
0:13:55 – Yes. – It’s a big leap,
0:13:56 maybe the biggest.
0:13:58 – It’s a huge leap.
0:14:00 And then you get to aluminum,
0:14:03 which despite being extremely abundant is,
0:14:08 like you said, is not found in its base metal elemental form.
0:14:11 It’s found as various aluminum oxides,
0:14:16 and aluminum binds super tightly to those oxygen atoms,
0:14:19 and so to rip them off requires a lot of energy.
0:14:21 – Right, and as I understand it,
0:14:25 because of that aluminum in its pure form was super rare
0:14:29 until well into the 19th century.
0:14:30 And then there was essentially
0:14:32 this technological breakthrough, right?
0:14:37 – Yeah, in the 1800s, independently an American scientist,
0:14:41 a Hall, and I believe a French scientist, Haroe,
0:14:45 both figured out an electrochemical process that worked.
0:14:50 And yeah, within the span of a couple of decades,
0:14:53 they were actually able to start making kilograms
0:14:54 and then tons of that material.
0:14:57 And Hall, by the way,
0:14:59 started the aluminum company of America, right?
0:15:02 Which is Alcoa, which is today still a giant company.
0:15:04 Like the dude who figured it out started that company.
0:15:07 He’s like, it’s like the Edison,
0:15:09 it’s like the GE of aluminum, right?
0:15:11 Like a guy figured it out and started a company,
0:15:13 and it’s still a giant company.
0:15:14 – Exactly.
0:15:19 And the US government was so proud of this achievement
0:15:24 that they cast, which at the time was,
0:15:26 I think the largest piece of cast aluminum,
0:15:28 which was like three kilograms,
0:15:32 they cast the point for the Washington monument
0:15:33 in Washington, DC.
0:15:34 – Huh.
0:15:37 Because aluminum was so fine and so modern,
0:15:40 and it was like the symbol of the age.
0:15:41 – Exactly.
0:15:43 And it had all these unique properties
0:15:47 that made it so valuable for just a very wide range
0:15:48 of applications.
0:15:51 – So you start with the work in space,
0:15:52 then you start looking at Earth
0:15:54 and seeing all this underutilized aluminum,
0:15:59 which you recognize as this incredible
0:16:01 potential source of energy.
0:16:03 Like, where does that all go?
0:16:04 Like, where do you land?
0:16:06 – So then I had to pivot a little bit
0:16:09 and look at a problem that, you know,
0:16:12 people care more about from a financial sense.
0:16:16 And that’s just this general idea of fuel
0:16:18 moving energy around.
0:16:21 And it turns out aluminum is really good for that.
0:16:24 – Uh-huh, because it is so energy dense.
0:16:29 Weirdly, if you can figure out a relatively straightforward way
0:16:32 of getting the energy out of aluminum,
0:16:33 when and where you want to,
0:16:37 then suddenly aluminum itself is this incredible fuel
0:16:38 that we just don’t think of as fuel.
0:16:39 – Exactly.
0:16:40 And, you know, aluminum is actually
0:16:42 the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust.
0:16:44 So it’s not something we’d run out of.
0:16:46 – So I get the idea, right?
0:16:47 At some point you start a company
0:16:50 and try and go from an idea to, you know,
0:16:54 a thing in the world, where are you now?
0:16:56 Like, what are you doing?
0:17:00 – So like countries like Germany or Japan,
0:17:02 you know, most of the energy that they consume
0:17:07 is fossil-based and a lot of it is imported.
0:17:09 And so because aluminum has these properties
0:17:11 where it’s energy dense, the production’s electrified,
0:17:15 it’s super abundant, it’s a great candidate
0:17:19 for replacing fossil fuels for those applications.
0:17:22 And so that meant that we needed to get the cost down
0:17:25 of using this process.
0:17:26 You know, when you’re essentially burning something,
0:17:29 it needs to be quite literally dirt cheap.
0:17:33 And, you know, we were doing some interesting things
0:17:35 with catalysts and promoters.
0:17:38 And, you know, whenever you’re doing industrial chemistry,
0:17:39 sort of the devil’s in the details
0:17:42 in terms of the cost drivers.
0:17:45 And so that gave me this new motivation
0:17:48 to start, you know, solving those correct problems,
0:17:51 so to speak, and that’s what ended up-
0:17:54 – Correct, because they’re correct in terms of the market.
0:17:57 Correct, because somebody might actually pay you
0:17:59 to do the thing at scale.
0:18:00 That’s what makes it correct.
0:18:03 – Yeah, it’s usually the thing that’s really hard
0:18:05 that’s standing in the way of someone actually using
0:18:07 this technology in a practical sense.
0:18:08 – Uh-huh.
0:18:11 And in this instance, what is the thing that’s really hard
0:18:14 that’s standing in the way of someone using this technology?
0:18:17 – It’s always cost at the end of the day.
0:18:18 Techno economics, right?
0:18:19 That term-
0:18:20 – Oh yeah.
0:18:23 – Talking to sort of energy transition people,
0:18:25 like techno economics is fundamentally
0:18:28 what the energy transition is about, right?
0:18:29 – It, exactly.
0:18:32 – Where are you now?
0:18:36 Like, specifically, do you have a sort of first use case
0:18:37 in mind?
0:18:40 – Our first, you know, beach head market, so to speak,
0:18:43 is actually in the aluminum industry.
0:18:45 It’s a way of enabling circularity
0:18:48 within the aluminum industry to solve this issue
0:18:51 that aluminum waste is not always efficiently handled.
0:18:55 So what we can do is we can take aluminum waste,
0:18:58 we can extract that energy to decarbonize
0:19:03 some of the last remaining truly fossil-based processes
0:19:04 in the aluminum industry.
0:19:06 – So just to be clear, this initial use,
0:19:08 you’re using the ideas to use scrap aluminum
0:19:12 as a source of energy that will be used
0:19:14 in making new aluminum?
0:19:17 – Exactly, or just in making aluminum oxide,
0:19:20 which can also go and turn it to other products as well.
0:19:25 – So, okay, so that is a weird, clever place to start.
0:19:28 Are you actually doing that?
0:19:31 – Yeah, so today we’re doing it on a small scale,
0:19:33 but it is, it’s definitely at a subscale.
0:19:34 So, you know, to give you a sense,
0:19:39 these plants are producing aluminum on such a scale
0:19:42 that they need megawatts of thermal power.
0:19:44 We’re still at kilowatt scale.
0:19:46 We’re maybe 20 to 50 X away
0:19:49 from really getting started in a meaningful way.
0:19:52 – Okay, so that’s the first one.
0:19:55 Like, what’s the less niche one
0:19:57 that’s a little bit farther out?
0:20:00 – Right, so what’s interesting, like on our global scales,
0:20:03 if we look at today’s aluminum supply chain
0:20:06 because it is very energy-intensive to make,
0:20:08 it’s essentially an energy supply chain.
0:20:12 So we can look at what countries are connected
0:20:15 by these aluminum flows and see that,
0:20:19 oh, actually, you can essentially just expand this
0:20:21 and then use it directly as an energy flow
0:20:23 in addition to just a material flow.
0:20:26 – Right, so if you’re making aluminum in Iceland
0:20:29 and sending it to Germany,
0:20:32 you’re functionally sending energy from the whatever,
0:20:35 geothermal vents in Iceland to Germany.
0:20:36 You just don’t know it
0:20:38 ’cause you think you’re sending aluminum cans.
0:20:39 Is that what you mean?
0:20:41 – Yes, although in Iceland, right,
0:20:44 they’re using more hydro to make their aluminum,
0:20:45 but similar idea.
0:20:48 So it’s actually this closed loop process
0:20:52 where you essentially recharge your aluminum oxide
0:20:53 in a place like Iceland.
0:20:57 You then ship just that metal in these big billets
0:21:02 to Germany, you use our process to turn that into heat,
0:21:05 and then you send that aluminum oxide essentially back
0:21:08 on the same boat, maybe that brought the aluminum
0:21:11 in the first place, and you repeat the process.
0:21:15 We’re actually calling it the world’s first rechargeable fuel.
0:21:17 – So you get, so let’s just talk through both
0:21:18 how you sort of recharge it,
0:21:20 which is basically how you make aluminum,
0:21:23 and then how you get the heat out of it, right?
0:21:24 How you get the energy out of it.
0:21:27 So just the basic like how you make aluminum,
0:21:29 you get bauxite out of the ground.
0:21:31 What do you do to make aluminum?
0:21:36 – So starting from bauxite, you heat it up,
0:21:39 you need to produce aluminum hydroxide,
0:21:43 and then you bake that and you drive off the water molecules,
0:21:45 and then you’re left with a particular grade
0:21:47 of aluminum oxide.
0:21:50 That then goes into your whole hurrow process
0:21:55 where they electrochemically split the aluminum
0:21:57 and the oxygen, and then you’re just left
0:21:59 with that metallic aluminum.
0:22:02 – Okay, just pure elemental aluminum.
0:22:03 – Yep.
0:22:07 – Okay, so now it comes to you, what do you do with it?
0:22:11 – So it’s proprietary, but it’s a surface treatment
0:22:15 to the aluminum that causes the aluminum
0:22:19 to break down along the microstructure
0:22:21 when it’s exposed to water.
0:22:26 – Okay, and then so once you’ve applied your secret sauce
0:22:29 to the aluminum, what happens in this universe
0:22:31 where you’re using it as a fuel source,
0:22:32 like what happened?
0:22:36 – So then you just have sort of this general purpose fuel,
0:22:39 which you can use to replace fossil fuels
0:22:40 for all sorts of applications.
0:22:43 Like I was saying earlier, you split water
0:22:46 when you let aluminum rust, and so then you have
0:22:49 the rest of that energy in the hydrogen.
0:22:51 You could then just burn that hydrogen,
0:22:53 and then that will just produce heat
0:22:57 at way above 1,000 degrees Celsius,
0:23:00 and starting with those high temperatures,
0:23:01 that gives you a lot of flexibility
0:23:06 to produce steam that can run turbo machinery,
0:23:08 but can also replace fossil fuels
0:23:11 for a lot of really high temperature applications.
0:23:12 – A hard problem, right?
0:23:15 Like steel, people talk about sort of decarbonizing steel
0:23:17 and these sort of industrial processes
0:23:18 that need really high temperatures
0:23:20 is a particularly hard problem
0:23:22 that you can’t do with sort of standard,
0:23:24 and so this could do that.
0:23:25 – Exactly, yeah.
0:23:27 – We’re just talking high temperature heat,
0:23:32 and any process that requires that would be a good candidate.
0:23:34 – Like you want it at a steel plant
0:23:35 in Germany or something.
0:23:38 You want it at a place where they need a lot of heat
0:23:40 and are importing fossil fuels to get it right now.
0:23:43 Like that’s the sort of obvious use case.
0:23:47 – Or using like local coal, but that’s exactly right.
0:23:50 (upbeat music)
0:23:53 – In a minute, why Peter’s plan might not work.
0:23:56 (upbeat music)
0:24:04 – If you’re looking for a new podcast,
0:24:05 but don’t know where to start,
0:24:07 here’s one you can add to your list.
0:24:09 The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:24:11 The Jordan Harbinger Show is aimed
0:24:14 at making you a better informed critical thinker
0:24:17 so you can get a sense of how the world actually works
0:24:20 and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
0:24:23 Jordan talks to everyone from neuroscientists to CEOs
0:24:26 to astronauts, authors, and performers.
0:24:27 You might enjoy Jordan’s interview
0:24:29 with historian Yuval Noah Harari,
0:24:32 the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind,
0:24:35 or his episode with fool me once author,
0:24:37 Kelly Richmond Pope,
0:24:40 on how fraud became a trillion dollar industry.
0:24:42 Whether Jordan’s conducting an interview
0:24:44 or giving advice to a listener,
0:24:45 you’ll find something useful that you can apply
0:24:48 to your own life in every episode
0:24:49 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:24:52 That could mean learning how to ask for advice the right way,
0:24:56 or it could just be discovering a slight mindset tweak
0:24:58 that changes how you see the world.
0:25:01 Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show,
0:25:06 that’s H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
0:25:10 iHeart Radio, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:25:18 So when you have your first reactors out in the real world
0:25:21 doing real work, like just help me picture it.
0:25:22 Like what is your first reactor out in the world?
0:25:23 What’s it gonna look like?
0:25:25 – Yeah, so for the first, you know,
0:25:26 megawatt scale systems,
0:25:30 we’re talking like a four foot by four foot cube.
0:25:33 – Okay, so quite small, that’s the size of the box.
0:25:35 And then dumb question,
0:25:38 is there like somebody like putting just like,
0:25:41 scrap aluminum into the box?
0:25:43 Like is it like a guy shoveling coal
0:25:44 on the railroad 200 years ago?
0:25:46 Like what’s going on?
0:25:49 – It’s not unlike that, let me put it that way.
0:25:53 And so there’s conveyor belts and sort of shredders
0:25:56 and basically all the standard equipment you would have
0:25:58 in the waste processing industry.
0:26:01 And then they’ll get to a form factor,
0:26:02 basically these pellets
0:26:06 that then get automatically fed into the box.
0:26:08 – What happens inside the box?
0:26:10 – So this is where a lot of interesting stuff happens.
0:26:14 This is where we actually are facilitating
0:26:17 an aluminum water chemical reaction.
0:26:19 And so you’re getting these big pieces of aluminum
0:26:20 that are going in,
0:26:22 that aluminum is getting broken down
0:26:26 at the microstructure by our activator compound.
0:26:28 And then it’s interacting with water.
0:26:33 So you can imagine it’s just in its simplest form,
0:26:37 it’s just essentially a vessel
0:26:39 where you’re mixing all these things together,
0:26:41 but easier said than done.
0:26:45 – Okay, and then what comes out of the box?
0:26:50 – So the box will fundamentally have two to three outputs.
0:26:54 So the first two are the sort of the energy,
0:26:56 the power outputs.
0:26:58 And so depending on the customer,
0:27:02 we’re able to provide energy as heat or hydrogen gas,
0:27:05 which can then be burned or some combination.
0:27:06 And so depending on that application,
0:27:09 you basically have a pipe that comes out
0:27:12 that has this energy containing gas.
0:27:15 Hot air, hydrogen gas, whatever they want.
0:27:16 – Exactly.
0:27:21 And then the other is this refined aluminum hydroxide,
0:27:23 which again, these companies that make aluminum
0:27:28 or use aluminum, at some point in the value stream,
0:27:31 upstream of that, they are sourcing this material.
0:27:33 And so this actually saves them having
0:27:35 to go and mine additional bauxite.
0:27:38 So if you look at this whole process
0:27:41 through the lens of making aluminum oxide,
0:27:42 it’s actually carbon negative.
0:27:46 So you’re getting this essentially the only carbon-free
0:27:48 source of aluminum hydroxide there is in the world.
0:27:50 There’s no other way to make this.
0:27:52 – Why might it not work?
0:27:56 – So we have very high confidence
0:27:58 in our go-to-market strategy,
0:28:02 which is using aluminum waste to decarbonize
0:28:05 these very specific industries.
0:28:08 But at some point you do run out of aluminum waste.
0:28:10 – Well, wait, so you’re just stipulating
0:28:13 that the aluminum waste part will work at scale
0:28:15 and the techno-economics will work.
0:28:18 Like might that part not work?
0:28:21 – Well, it’s so cheap.
0:28:23 You have a huge buffer for it to work even poorly
0:28:25 and it still makes sense.
0:28:28 – Say more about that.
0:28:30 – You know, like we’re talking like
0:28:32 really bottom of the barrel aluminum waste.
0:28:36 So this is stuff that in some cases,
0:28:38 companies are actually paying other peoples to take away
0:28:40 because it’s too contaminated.
0:28:41 And so…
0:28:43 – And can you use that?
0:28:45 That garbage aluminum?
0:28:49 Like you can use whatever crappy recycled aluminum
0:28:51 that’s a mess and that nobody wants.
0:28:56 You can use that efficiently and it works for you?
0:28:57 – Yep, yep.
0:28:59 We’re just, our process eats aluminum
0:29:01 and leaves everything else pretty much untouched.
0:29:05 – And is that the aluminum you’re using now?
0:29:10 – Yeah. So we’re looking at those low quality FeesDoc
0:29:13 and it’s a lot like food and beverage packaging
0:29:15 and stuff that’s contaminated
0:29:18 or maybe it’s like mixed with other metals or plastics
0:29:21 or organic contamination.
0:29:22 – It’s what I put out on the curb every week.
0:29:25 And I think there’s no way that can actually be useful.
0:29:27 They are probably just putting it in the garbage.
0:29:29 You’re saying that’s what you can use.
0:29:29 – Exactly.
0:29:30 – Yeah.
0:29:31 And how big is that?
0:29:34 I mean, that’s, if that works, that’s a lot, right?
0:29:36 Like if you’re just taking it as given
0:29:37 that that’s gonna work.
0:29:39 That’s a lot of success if that works, right?
0:29:42 Presumably that’s a very large market
0:29:44 for inputs for you, no?
0:29:44 – Totally.
0:29:47 Yeah. I mean, it’s a large market
0:29:52 but given the scale of the, you know, emissions globally,
0:29:56 it’s not really gonna put a dent in that.
0:29:59 It’s probably a good outcome for our company
0:30:01 and for definitely our customers who are using this technology
0:30:04 but it’s not the impact that I’m interested in.
0:30:05 – Specifically.
0:30:07 – It’s not gonna reduce the average temperature
0:30:09 of the earth in a hundred years.
0:30:11 – No, it’s gonna have more positive impacts
0:30:13 than just carbon emissions reductions
0:30:17 because you’re also cleaning up the mining industry
0:30:19 around aluminum oxide production.
0:30:22 – So this sort of recycled aluminum
0:30:27 that nobody else wants is enough to supply the energy
0:30:31 for this one piece of the production of new aluminum.
0:30:33 So, I mean, is that basically what you’re saying?
0:30:33 – Yep, exactly.
0:30:35 – But then we have the whole rest of the world
0:30:36 to worry about.
0:30:37 – Exactly.
0:30:40 – Okay, so tell me about the whole rest of the world.
0:30:44 So once you’re using all the crappy recycled aluminum
0:30:46 that nobody else wants and decarbonizing this piece
0:30:49 of the process of making new aluminum,
0:30:51 what’s the next move?
0:30:55 – Yeah, so the next move is to close the loop
0:30:56 as we like to say.
0:31:00 So that’s actually recharging the byproduct
0:31:04 of our own reaction, doing that in a place
0:31:06 where you have abundant renewables
0:31:07 and then sending it to a place
0:31:09 where you do not have abundant renewables.
0:31:13 And at that scale, then there’s no constraint
0:31:16 on the amount of aluminum that we have access to.
0:31:18 It’s literally the most abundant metal
0:31:20 in the earth’s crust.
0:31:24 – So in that universe, it’s sort of end to end.
0:31:25 You’re just in some clean way
0:31:27 that doesn’t entirely exist yet,
0:31:30 turning bauxite into pure aluminum,
0:31:32 which then is your fuel
0:31:33 and you’re sending it to wherever they need it
0:31:36 and you’re turning that aluminum into heat.
0:31:39 And then the product of that reaction
0:31:42 is what aluminum oxide that you’re sending back
0:31:45 to your clean plant and turning it back into pure aluminum
0:31:48 and just going back and forth like that, that’s the dream.
0:31:49 – Exactly, yep.
0:31:51 – And on the techno economic side,
0:31:53 maybe somebody will come up with something cheaper
0:31:55 or easier or something, right?
0:31:56 I mean, you’re not just competing
0:31:58 against what exists today.
0:32:00 You’re competing against all these other smart people
0:32:02 who are trying ultimately to solve the same problem
0:32:04 you’re trying to solve, but in different ways, right?
0:32:06 – You know, we’re not necessarily too worried about that.
0:32:09 In some ways, we will need multiple solutions.
0:32:11 So you need to get like maybe 10 kilograms
0:32:14 of aluminum reacting at once, easier said than done,
0:32:16 but you’re not talking massive systems.
0:32:19 And what that means is you can modularize.
0:32:21 So you can start rolling this out.
0:32:26 So we really only have to do a 50x scale up really well.
0:32:28 And then we can mass produce what we call
0:32:30 our aluminum water reactors.
0:32:32 – So it doesn’t have to be that big.
0:32:35 You just get a kind of little reactor
0:32:37 and then you put 20 of them right next to each other?
0:32:38 Is that what you’re saying?
0:32:39 – Exactly, exactly.
0:32:42 So you don’t take on that scale risk all at once.
0:32:46 So that’s, you know, again, like scaling up 50x
0:32:48 is also a major challenge.
0:32:49 – Non-trivial, yeah.
0:32:53 – And, you know, we have a big team
0:32:54 of really smart people working on it.
0:32:59 But, you know, thinking long-term,
0:33:02 there’s kind of a timing risk, I would say,
0:33:06 where as we scale these technologies,
0:33:09 you know, we need people to be ready to use them.
0:33:14 And while, you know, this early,
0:33:15 these early adopters in the aluminum industry,
0:33:19 they’re ready to use this tech now, roughly.
0:33:21 You know, as we go to decarbonize industrial heat
0:33:24 more broadly, you know, they may not be ready
0:33:28 to commit to a new unproven technology
0:33:29 with, you know, supply chain risk.
0:33:32 And basically the things that are standing in the way
0:33:35 of them moving to any other technology.
0:33:37 – Well, and there are industries
0:33:39 that operate at massive scale, right?
0:33:41 And you’re like kind of doing this little thing
0:33:42 and trying to scale it up.
0:33:46 And it seems like there’s like a chasm
0:33:50 you have to leap in some way to get from where you are
0:33:55 to like, you know, decarbonizing a steel plant or something.
0:33:56 – And, you know, we’re hedging that risk
0:33:59 by not starting there and starting with the folks
0:34:03 that have a reasonably high adoption readiness level
0:34:06 that is commensurate with our technology readiness level.
0:34:10 – So I wanna end the main part of the interview
0:34:12 on the like why it might not work
0:34:15 ’cause that’s kind of a attenuated bummer.
0:34:17 So like when you think happy thoughts
0:34:21 about the world 10 years from now.
0:34:22 Well, like what does it look like
0:34:24 and what does your place in it look like?
0:34:28 – You know, you look at replacing the fossil fuel supply chain
0:34:33 which has been developed and optimized and obsessed over
0:34:38 for, you know, basically a hundred years or more.
0:34:42 You know, you can’t just replace all of that with one thing.
0:34:44 This is a sort of everyone problem.
0:34:49 And yeah, you know, we, I love looking at this.
0:34:52 If you Google aluminum supply chain,
0:34:55 probably a map comes up showing these lines
0:34:57 going from places today with lots of renewables.
0:35:00 And, you know, I wanna see that turned into
0:35:02 the next energy supply chain.
0:35:03 That’s what excites me.
0:35:09 – We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:35:12 (upbeat music)
0:35:18 If you’re looking for a new podcast
0:35:19 but don’t know where to start,
0:35:21 here’s one you can add to your list.
0:35:23 The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:35:25 The Jordan Harbinger Show is aimed
0:35:27 at making you a better informed critical thinker
0:35:30 so you can get a sense of how the world actually works
0:35:33 and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
0:35:36 Jordan talks to everyone from neuroscientists
0:35:40 to CEOs, to astronauts, authors, and performers.
0:35:41 You might enjoy Jordan’s interview
0:35:43 with historian Yuval Noah Harari,
0:35:46 the author of “Sapiens,” a brief history of humankind,
0:35:49 or his episode with fool me once author,
0:35:51 Kelly Richmond Pope,
0:35:54 on how fraud became a trillion dollar industry.
0:35:56 Whether Jordan’s conducting an interview
0:35:57 or giving advice to a listener,
0:35:59 you’ll find something useful that you can apply
0:36:02 to your own life in every episode
0:36:03 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:36:06 That could mean learning how to ask for advice
0:36:08 the right way, or it could just be discovering
0:36:12 a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world.
0:36:17 Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show that’s H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R
0:36:21 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
0:36:24 or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:36:28 Okay, I wanna finish with the lightning round.
0:36:32 Is it right that you sort of remote control
0:36:36 drove the curiosity rover on Mars?
0:36:37 Yes, not just me.
0:36:40 I was on the team that did operations for curiosity,
0:36:43 and I was working on the arm specifically.
0:36:45 It takes about a hundred people every single day
0:36:46 to operate this thing.
0:36:51 Oh, so you like made the arm move and pick things up?
0:36:55 A part of the team that did that, but yeah, pretty much.
0:36:57 What’s your favorite part of Mars?
0:37:00 Well, there’s really only one interesting part of Mars,
0:37:04 in my opinion, which is the mountain.
0:37:05 Is there one mountain?
0:37:09 It’s not a mountain on Mars, it’s the mountain on Mars?
0:37:11 It’s like a bulge in the planet
0:37:14 that you could call a mountain.
0:37:16 But so if we agree that that’s a mountain,
0:37:19 it’s actually the largest mountain in the solar system.
0:37:21 What’s interesting to you about it?
0:37:24 The thing that was cool is that you can basically,
0:37:27 as you drive up, you sort of get a geological history
0:37:29 of Mars as you sample different rocks.
0:37:33 Curiosity was basically just driving up this thing
0:37:34 until it dies.
0:37:39 What’s your second favorite metal?
0:37:45 Probably, I would have to say iron,
0:37:47 just from its importance.
0:37:50 There’s a whole age.
0:37:54 I actually talked to a guy you probably crossed paths with,
0:37:55 Mateo Hadamillo.
0:37:56 At form energy.
0:37:57 At form energy, right?
0:38:00 He is using iron to make batteries.
0:38:02 And it’s, in a way, somewhat analogous
0:38:03 to what you’re doing, right?
0:38:06 Like, their batteries are essentially iron
0:38:08 that is rusting and unrusting
0:38:11 in the way that you’re rusting and unrusting aluminum, right?
0:38:13 Yeah, exactly.
0:38:14 They’re using a cheaper material,
0:38:16 but it’s also less energy-dense.
0:38:18 So it’s really wildly less, right?
0:38:21 Like their play is like, we don’t care about energy-dense.
0:38:23 It can be gigantic out of the desert.
0:38:24 They’re just going for cause.
0:38:26 And so it’s amazing for a stationary energy.
0:38:28 I think what they’re doing is cool.
0:38:30 I mean, it’s complimentary, right?
0:38:34 Like they are not going to generate heat to power a steel mill.
0:38:36 And you’re not going to be doing energy storage
0:38:38 at utility scale, right?
0:38:42 Yeah, and actually, it’s very complimentary in that
0:38:45 in order to do truly carbon-free aluminum smelting
0:38:46 with renewables like solar and wind,
0:38:48 you need to solve the intermittency issue
0:38:51 because these haul-hero cells run really hot.
0:38:57 So solar, wind, plus a form energy facility
0:39:01 could be an interesting way to enable more aluminum production.
0:39:03 Is there some engineer either living
0:39:06 or from history who you think everybody should know about?
0:39:10 I would say people these days don’t give enough credit
0:39:15 to the engineers from the Apollo era of NASA,
0:39:18 where we’re like obsessing over going back to the moon.
0:39:20 And we think what we’re doing now is impressive,
0:39:23 like sending people into space.
0:39:28 Like what we were doing back then with the tools that they had,
0:39:31 they did it basically on an iPhone, right?
0:39:33 Oh, way less than an iPhone.
0:39:34 Yeah, exactly.
0:39:37 I just think that’s insane and that it worked.
0:39:40 You know, we got people back from the moon.
0:39:41 Yeah, getting them there was the easy part.
0:39:43 Getting them back was hard.
0:39:44 Yeah.
0:39:51 Peter Goddard is the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy.
0:39:54 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:39:58 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sara Bouguere.
0:40:02 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:40:04 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week
0:40:07 with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:40:20 If you’re looking for a new podcast but don’t know where to start,
0:40:24 here’s one you can add to your list, The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:40:28 The Jordan Harbinger Show is aimed at making you a better-informed critical
0:40:32 thinker so you can get a sense of how the world actually works
0:40:34 and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
0:40:39 Jordan talks to everyone from neuroscientists to CEOs to astronauts,
0:40:40 authors, and performers.
0:40:44 You might enjoy Jordan’s interview with historian Yuval Noah Harari,
0:40:47 the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind,
0:40:52 or his episode with fool-me-once author Kelly Richmond Pope
0:40:55 on how fraud became a trillion-dollar industry.
0:40:58 Whether Jordan’s conducting an interview or giving advice to a listener,
0:41:01 you’ll find something useful that you can apply to your own life
0:41:04 in every episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:41:07 That could mean learning how to ask for advice the right way,
0:41:11 or it could just be discovering a slight mindset tweak
0:41:13 that changes how you see the world.
0:41:19 Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show, that’s H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R,
0:41:22 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
0:41:26 or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:00:07 Pushkin.
0:00:10 If you’re looking for a new podcast,
0:00:12 but don’t know where to start,
0:00:14 here’s one you can add to your list.
0:00:16 The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:00:18 The Jordan Harbinger Show is aimed
0:00:20 at making you a better informed critical thinker
0:00:23 so you can get a sense of how the world actually works
0:00:26 and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
0:00:29 Jordan talks to everyone from neuroscientists to CEOs
0:00:32 to astronauts, authors, and performers.
0:00:33 You might enjoy Jordan’s interview
0:00:35 with historian Yuval Noah Harari,
0:00:39 the author of “Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind”
0:00:42 or his episode with fool me once author,
0:00:43 Kelly Richmond Pope,
0:00:46 on how fraud became a trillion dollar industry.
0:00:48 Whether Jordan’s conducting an interview
0:00:50 or giving advice to a listener,
0:00:52 you’ll find something useful that you can apply
0:00:54 to your own life in every episode
0:00:56 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:00:58 That could mean learning how to ask for advice
0:01:00 the right way, or it could just be discovering
0:01:04 a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world.
0:01:07 Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show,
0:01:12 that’s H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R on Apple Podcasts,
0:01:17 Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:01:22 Out of everything we cover on this show,
0:01:24 out of all the themes,
0:01:27 I do, I have to admit, have a favorite.
0:01:29 My favorite theme, my favorite thing we cover
0:01:32 is the energy transition.
0:01:33 There are a bunch of reasons
0:01:36 I love the energy transition shows.
0:01:40 One reason, the giant obvious global stakes, right?
0:01:42 Fighting climate change.
0:01:45 Two, the people working on the energy transition,
0:01:48 the people I talk to in these shows,
0:01:51 actually make me feel hope rather than despair.
0:01:52 It’s a big one.
0:01:54 And three, reason number three,
0:01:57 which is related to reason number two is,
0:02:01 there is just so much creativity in this field,
0:02:03 in this set of industries.
0:02:06 There’s so much of people looking at the world
0:02:09 and trying to think at a really basic,
0:02:12 fundamental kind of first principles level,
0:02:15 how can we solve these giant problems?
0:02:18 How can we get the carbon-free energy we need
0:02:20 at a price we can afford?
0:02:23 (upbeat music)
0:02:25 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem,
0:02:27 the show where I talk to people who are trying
0:02:30 to make technological progress.
0:02:32 My guest today is Peter Goddard.
0:02:35 He’s the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy.
0:02:37 Found Energy is in its early stages,
0:02:39 but the fundamental idea behind the company,
0:02:44 so creative and audacious, and frankly so intellectually fun
0:02:47 that I really wanted to talk to Peter.
0:02:49 Peter’s problem is this.
0:02:53 How can you use aluminum, just regular aluminum,
0:02:58 like from an empty can of Coke, as a new source of energy?
0:03:00 The idea of using aluminum as an energy source
0:03:02 first came to Peter, not as a way to deal
0:03:07 with problems on Earth, but to deal with problems in space.
0:03:09 Specifically, problems on Europa.
0:03:13 Europa, as you may already know, is an icy moon of Jupiter.
0:03:15 At the time the idea came to him,
0:03:19 Peter was working at JPL, at NASA’s Jet Probe.
0:03:21 NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
0:03:23 He was part of a team designing a spaceship
0:03:24 to send to Europa.
0:03:27 The idea was that the spaceship would land on the moon
0:03:30 and then drill down through the thick sheet of ice
0:03:34 to the water below to look for signs of life.
0:03:35 But drilling through all that ice
0:03:36 was gonna take a lot of energy.
0:03:39 And Peter and his colleagues were trying to figure out
0:03:42 how to send that energy all the way to Europa,
0:03:44 to this moon orbiting Jupiter.
0:03:45 – When you send something into space,
0:03:47 mass is super precious.
0:03:53 Every gram is very expensive in terms of payload.
0:03:57 And so we were sort of sitting around debating,
0:04:02 what could go in this little space in that spacecraft
0:04:04 that would pack enough energy.
0:04:07 So we’re talking about different lithium ion batteries,
0:04:08 for example.
0:04:11 And I’m sitting there realizing that we’re not really
0:04:13 thinking holistically enough about this problem
0:04:15 because the framing and the shell
0:04:18 and the structural members of the spacecraft
0:04:21 are made from aluminum, which is 20 to 40 times
0:04:25 more energy dense than those lithium ion batteries.
0:04:28 Like I’m looking at these renderings of the spacecraft
0:04:30 that are sitting on the surface of Europa
0:04:32 and then realizing like, oh my God,
0:04:34 most of this aluminum is doing absolutely nothing.
0:04:39 Like there’s basically, it’s microgravity on these moons
0:04:43 that they don’t need to withstand crazy forces
0:04:44 once they’re there.
0:04:46 They have to survive launch.
0:04:47 And then once they’re there and landing
0:04:50 and then once they’re there, it’s essentially doing nothing.
0:04:52 And I thought, this is insane.
0:04:57 Like why are we not utilizing this energy
0:04:59 just sitting around when every single gram
0:05:01 that you send into space is so precious.
0:05:03 So I pitched this idea of saying like,
0:05:07 what if we could consume that aluminum for energy
0:05:09 that would dramatically reduce the constraints
0:05:14 on what needs to go in that energy storage box there?
0:05:18 – And what was the response when you pitched that idea?
0:05:19 – The response was essentially,
0:05:22 that just might be crazy enough to work.
0:05:23 – Do they say that every day at JPL?
0:05:26 People love saying that at JPL.
0:05:28 – There’s a lot of out of the box thinkers over there.
0:05:31 It’s a wonderful place to work.
0:05:32 – So what happens?
0:05:33 You have this idea, what happens?
0:05:35 – Yeah, so we’re sort of sitting around
0:05:39 and bouncing ideas off one another.
0:05:43 I proposed this idea and people sort of dismissed it.
0:05:45 Immediately it then thought for a minute
0:05:48 and realized actually, there might be something here.
0:05:53 So I actually got some funds to start my own research lab
0:05:56 sort of within JPL to take a look at this.
0:05:58 I sort of cheekily called it
0:06:00 the self cannibalizing robot project.
0:06:02 – Because the spaceship’s gonna go to a moon of Jupiter
0:06:05 and then eat itself, burn itself up
0:06:07 to provide energy for its work.
0:06:09 – Exactly, it’s gonna consume
0:06:11 that super energy dense exoskeleton
0:06:12 that it no longer needs.
0:06:15 – Like what does that actually look like in your mind?
0:06:18 Like so this thing is there, it’s on this moon of Jupiter.
0:06:20 What actually happens?
0:06:22 – So to give you an example of how this might look.
0:06:26 So the spacecraft would have these aluminum landing legs.
0:06:29 They would land on the surface of this icy moon
0:06:32 and those legs would essentially corkscrew
0:06:33 into the ice.
0:06:35 And once they’re there,
0:06:37 they undergo this process called activation
0:06:39 where you have this large chunk of aluminum
0:06:41 and it can actually get broken down by water.
0:06:43 It’s basically a rusting process,
0:06:46 but accelerated like a million times.
0:06:49 And the process is exothermic as well.
0:06:51 So as that aluminum starts exothermically
0:06:53 it’s releasing heat reacting with that water.
0:06:55 It’s producing hydrogen gas.
0:06:57 These legs actually leave behind
0:07:00 these little underground caverns of hydrogen gas.
0:07:04 So the leg detaches, it degrades,
0:07:05 it disintegrates, it rusts,
0:07:08 and then it leaves behind this little cavern of hydrogen,
0:07:11 which then that robot or maybe other robots
0:07:15 can navigate over and tap into as a refueling station.
0:07:18 – Aha, so the landing legs decay,
0:07:22 they leave behind hydrogen and that hydrogen is fuel
0:07:24 that can then power the drill
0:07:26 that’s gonna go deep down into the ice.
0:07:28 – Exactly, or communications,
0:07:31 or imagery equipment.
0:07:32 – So did it get anywhere?
0:07:36 – So we ended up proving out
0:07:40 some of the core aspects of that technology.
0:07:42 The specific program I was working on,
0:07:44 the funding was sort of called into question.
0:07:47 These are big congressional,
0:07:49 it’s basically a line item in a congressional budget.
0:07:52 And for whatever reason that went away
0:07:54 and the interest waned.
0:07:58 – And do you leave when your project gets canceled?
0:08:03 – So yes, I ended up leaving and going back to school
0:08:06 to further this concept.
0:08:08 And I had found a professor
0:08:10 that I had worked with as an undergrad,
0:08:13 Doug Hart, who was really excited
0:08:15 to take this technology to the next level
0:08:18 where we could actually use it for earth applications.
0:08:23 – So use it for earth applications is a big difference.
0:08:25 Like you had a spaceship that eats itself,
0:08:28 which seems like very elegant and very reasonable, right?
0:08:29 ‘Cause the core idea is like,
0:08:31 oh, it’s really hard to get to Jupiter.
0:08:35 It’s really hard to get the marginal gram of stuff
0:08:37 to Jupiter, so if we can use the spaceship itself,
0:08:38 that’s amazing.
0:08:41 Like it’s not obvious to me that you’d be like,
0:08:42 oh, the Jupiter thing got canceled,
0:08:43 but let’s use it on earth.
0:08:46 Like why is that a, why does that even come to mind?
0:08:49 – So for one, I was really obsessed
0:08:52 with doing something earth related.
0:08:55 I spent all of my time, every waking second,
0:08:58 thinking externally, thinking about the solar system,
0:09:00 thinking about these other planets life elsewhere,
0:09:05 realizing how precious and special and interesting it is
0:09:08 that we have life on earth now,
0:09:12 and wanting to do something to preserve that,
0:09:17 just sort of a sense of like cosmic beauty, if you will.
0:09:19 – Like having looked at these other planets and moons
0:09:23 is like, boy, that’d be a way harder place to live than earth.
0:09:24 – Yeah, I mean, you know, you’re lived,
0:09:27 I was living in LA at the time and like there’s so much
0:09:30 to point to and think was sort of miserable
0:09:32 at the place, you’re stuck in traffic
0:09:34 and you look over and someone’s sort of screaming
0:09:37 to themselves in the car next to you and realizing,
0:09:40 you know, existence on life is really hard,
0:09:43 but when you spend so much time looking at existence
0:09:45 or the possibility of existence on other planets,
0:09:47 you realize, you know, we have it pretty good.
0:09:49 And, you know, we’ve spent actually literally billions
0:09:53 of years adapting to the gravity of earth
0:09:56 and to the pressures and to the temperatures
0:09:58 and, you know, why waste that, why waste that?
0:10:04 – So, okay, so you start looking down
0:10:08 instead of looking up, what happens?
0:10:11 – So I started thinking about, okay,
0:10:15 where else might we find energy
0:10:17 that’s being underutilized on earth?
0:10:22 And I realized that there was a lot of aluminum
0:10:25 sitting around doing nothing on earth.
0:10:27 You know, it’s, I looked into aluminum recycling,
0:10:30 realized that there’s a bit of greenwashing going on.
0:10:32 We don’t do as good of a job as we think.
0:10:34 And, you know, it’s just, it’s more difficult
0:10:38 to recycle aluminum than we’re led to believe often.
0:10:40 – Even aluminum cans, I would think aluminum cans
0:10:44 would all be uniform and therefore
0:10:46 relatively manageable to recycle, not so?
0:10:48 – Well, we’ve created an interesting problem
0:10:50 for ourselves there because an aluminum can
0:10:51 is actually two different outweighs.
0:10:55 There’s the sort of cap is a separate piece from the body,
0:10:57 which needs to be deep drawn.
0:11:00 And so you need basically different properties
0:11:01 for the manufacturing.
0:11:02 And, you know, when you open the can,
0:11:05 you want it to sort of snap open and be–
0:11:07 – It’s very satisfying that snap.
0:11:08 If it’s destroying the world,
0:11:10 that’s an unfortunate consequence.
0:11:12 – Exactly, but with the body,
0:11:14 you don’t want that snap when you’re manufacturing it.
0:11:17 And so they end up using two different alloys.
0:11:18 And so when you melt it back down,
0:11:21 you basically can only make one of those.
0:11:25 And you have to add some primary aluminum,
0:11:28 some virgin aluminum in order to do that,
0:11:29 ’cause you have to dilute out some of the impurities.
0:11:32 All that to say, it’s a much harder problem
0:11:35 than people think.
0:11:36 And what that means, practically speaking,
0:11:40 is that a lot of aluminum just ends up in landfills.
0:11:42 You know, it ends up getting exported to countries
0:11:43 where manual labor is cheaper,
0:11:47 so that they can pick out those impurities by hand.
0:11:49 Sorting is not quite there yet.
0:11:52 And so you end up with billions of tons of aluminum
0:11:55 that is underutilized.
0:11:58 – So let’s talk about aluminum for a minute,
0:12:00 because it’s really interesting, right?
0:12:03 Like there is this whole history of aluminum.
0:12:05 You know, if you go back a couple of hundred years
0:12:06 at this point, right?
0:12:10 This used to be this wildly precious metal,
0:12:15 because even though it’s super abundant in the earth,
0:12:18 it is pretty much always bound up
0:12:20 with something else, usually oxygen, right?
0:12:23 There was this moment that everybody writes about,
0:12:27 and I hope it’s true, where like Napoleon III, right?
0:12:31 The Napoleon after Napoleon, supposedly like for his like,
0:12:34 B-list guests would give them plates of like silver and gold,
0:12:37 but the A-list guests got the aluminum plates,
0:12:40 ’cause it was this wildly rare, beautiful thing.
0:12:42 But then somebody figured out
0:12:45 how to make aluminum much more easily, right?
0:12:46 – Yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:12:50 I mean, so if you think about like the ages of society, right?
0:12:52 There’s like the Stone Age,
0:12:54 and then there’s the Iron Age and the Bronze Age.
0:12:57 And you know, the order in which those occurred
0:13:02 are basically how close to that useful form
0:13:03 are they found in nature?
0:13:06 So obviously the Stone Age, trivial.
0:13:08 The Stone is a stone.
0:13:10 – Finding a rock is the easy part, yes.
0:13:12 – You put a rock on top of another rock,
0:13:13 you do that a couple more times,
0:13:17 and you’ve got Stonehenge, you’ve got houses,
0:13:22 you’ve got, you know, we were doing a good job stacking stones.
0:13:24 Slightly more complicated, you know,
0:13:28 you have metals that are more closely found
0:13:31 in their elemental form, so things like copper,
0:13:34 and then you have things that are not found as a pure metal,
0:13:38 but can be easily reduced.
0:13:41 So something like iron, for example, is a little bit easier,
0:13:42 where you can take the iron ore
0:13:45 and you can heat it up with some carbon,
0:13:48 usually just from some charcoal,
0:13:50 and get a workable metal there.
0:13:52 – But this is way more complex than stones.
0:13:54 We’ve made some technological progress there.
0:13:55 – Yes. – It’s a big leap,
0:13:56 maybe the biggest.
0:13:58 – It’s a huge leap.
0:14:00 And then you get to aluminum,
0:14:03 which despite being extremely abundant is,
0:14:08 like you said, is not found in its base metal elemental form.
0:14:11 It’s found as various aluminum oxides,
0:14:16 and aluminum binds super tightly to those oxygen atoms,
0:14:19 and so to rip them off requires a lot of energy.
0:14:21 – Right, and as I understand it,
0:14:25 because of that aluminum in its pure form was super rare
0:14:29 until well into the 19th century.
0:14:30 And then there was essentially
0:14:32 this technological breakthrough, right?
0:14:37 – Yeah, in the 1800s, independently an American scientist,
0:14:41 a Hall, and I believe a French scientist, Haroe,
0:14:45 both figured out an electrochemical process that worked.
0:14:50 And yeah, within the span of a couple of decades,
0:14:53 they were actually able to start making kilograms
0:14:54 and then tons of that material.
0:14:57 And Hall, by the way,
0:14:59 started the aluminum company of America, right?
0:15:02 Which is Alcoa, which is today still a giant company.
0:15:04 Like the dude who figured it out started that company.
0:15:07 He’s like, it’s like the Edison,
0:15:09 it’s like the GE of aluminum, right?
0:15:11 Like a guy figured it out and started a company,
0:15:13 and it’s still a giant company.
0:15:14 – Exactly.
0:15:19 And the US government was so proud of this achievement
0:15:24 that they cast, which at the time was,
0:15:26 I think the largest piece of cast aluminum,
0:15:28 which was like three kilograms,
0:15:32 they cast the point for the Washington monument
0:15:33 in Washington, DC.
0:15:34 – Huh.
0:15:37 Because aluminum was so fine and so modern,
0:15:40 and it was like the symbol of the age.
0:15:41 – Exactly.
0:15:43 And it had all these unique properties
0:15:47 that made it so valuable for just a very wide range
0:15:48 of applications.
0:15:51 – So you start with the work in space,
0:15:52 then you start looking at Earth
0:15:54 and seeing all this underutilized aluminum,
0:15:59 which you recognize as this incredible
0:16:01 potential source of energy.
0:16:03 Like, where does that all go?
0:16:04 Like, where do you land?
0:16:06 – So then I had to pivot a little bit
0:16:09 and look at a problem that, you know,
0:16:12 people care more about from a financial sense.
0:16:16 And that’s just this general idea of fuel
0:16:18 moving energy around.
0:16:21 And it turns out aluminum is really good for that.
0:16:24 – Uh-huh, because it is so energy dense.
0:16:29 Weirdly, if you can figure out a relatively straightforward way
0:16:32 of getting the energy out of aluminum,
0:16:33 when and where you want to,
0:16:37 then suddenly aluminum itself is this incredible fuel
0:16:38 that we just don’t think of as fuel.
0:16:39 – Exactly.
0:16:40 And, you know, aluminum is actually
0:16:42 the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust.
0:16:44 So it’s not something we’d run out of.
0:16:46 – So I get the idea, right?
0:16:47 At some point you start a company
0:16:50 and try and go from an idea to, you know,
0:16:54 a thing in the world, where are you now?
0:16:56 Like, what are you doing?
0:17:00 – So like countries like Germany or Japan,
0:17:02 you know, most of the energy that they consume
0:17:07 is fossil-based and a lot of it is imported.
0:17:09 And so because aluminum has these properties
0:17:11 where it’s energy dense, the production’s electrified,
0:17:15 it’s super abundant, it’s a great candidate
0:17:19 for replacing fossil fuels for those applications.
0:17:22 And so that meant that we needed to get the cost down
0:17:25 of using this process.
0:17:26 You know, when you’re essentially burning something,
0:17:29 it needs to be quite literally dirt cheap.
0:17:33 And, you know, we were doing some interesting things
0:17:35 with catalysts and promoters.
0:17:38 And, you know, whenever you’re doing industrial chemistry,
0:17:39 sort of the devil’s in the details
0:17:42 in terms of the cost drivers.
0:17:45 And so that gave me this new motivation
0:17:48 to start, you know, solving those correct problems,
0:17:51 so to speak, and that’s what ended up-
0:17:54 – Correct, because they’re correct in terms of the market.
0:17:57 Correct, because somebody might actually pay you
0:17:59 to do the thing at scale.
0:18:00 That’s what makes it correct.
0:18:03 – Yeah, it’s usually the thing that’s really hard
0:18:05 that’s standing in the way of someone actually using
0:18:07 this technology in a practical sense.
0:18:08 – Uh-huh.
0:18:11 And in this instance, what is the thing that’s really hard
0:18:14 that’s standing in the way of someone using this technology?
0:18:17 – It’s always cost at the end of the day.
0:18:18 Techno economics, right?
0:18:19 That term-
0:18:20 – Oh yeah.
0:18:23 – Talking to sort of energy transition people,
0:18:25 like techno economics is fundamentally
0:18:28 what the energy transition is about, right?
0:18:29 – It, exactly.
0:18:32 – Where are you now?
0:18:36 Like, specifically, do you have a sort of first use case
0:18:37 in mind?
0:18:40 – Our first, you know, beach head market, so to speak,
0:18:43 is actually in the aluminum industry.
0:18:45 It’s a way of enabling circularity
0:18:48 within the aluminum industry to solve this issue
0:18:51 that aluminum waste is not always efficiently handled.
0:18:55 So what we can do is we can take aluminum waste,
0:18:58 we can extract that energy to decarbonize
0:19:03 some of the last remaining truly fossil-based processes
0:19:04 in the aluminum industry.
0:19:06 – So just to be clear, this initial use,
0:19:08 you’re using the ideas to use scrap aluminum
0:19:12 as a source of energy that will be used
0:19:14 in making new aluminum?
0:19:17 – Exactly, or just in making aluminum oxide,
0:19:20 which can also go and turn it to other products as well.
0:19:25 – So, okay, so that is a weird, clever place to start.
0:19:28 Are you actually doing that?
0:19:31 – Yeah, so today we’re doing it on a small scale,
0:19:33 but it is, it’s definitely at a subscale.
0:19:34 So, you know, to give you a sense,
0:19:39 these plants are producing aluminum on such a scale
0:19:42 that they need megawatts of thermal power.
0:19:44 We’re still at kilowatt scale.
0:19:46 We’re maybe 20 to 50 X away
0:19:49 from really getting started in a meaningful way.
0:19:52 – Okay, so that’s the first one.
0:19:55 Like, what’s the less niche one
0:19:57 that’s a little bit farther out?
0:20:00 – Right, so what’s interesting, like on our global scales,
0:20:03 if we look at today’s aluminum supply chain
0:20:06 because it is very energy-intensive to make,
0:20:08 it’s essentially an energy supply chain.
0:20:12 So we can look at what countries are connected
0:20:15 by these aluminum flows and see that,
0:20:19 oh, actually, you can essentially just expand this
0:20:21 and then use it directly as an energy flow
0:20:23 in addition to just a material flow.
0:20:26 – Right, so if you’re making aluminum in Iceland
0:20:29 and sending it to Germany,
0:20:32 you’re functionally sending energy from the whatever,
0:20:35 geothermal vents in Iceland to Germany.
0:20:36 You just don’t know it
0:20:38 ’cause you think you’re sending aluminum cans.
0:20:39 Is that what you mean?
0:20:41 – Yes, although in Iceland, right,
0:20:44 they’re using more hydro to make their aluminum,
0:20:45 but similar idea.
0:20:48 So it’s actually this closed loop process
0:20:52 where you essentially recharge your aluminum oxide
0:20:53 in a place like Iceland.
0:20:57 You then ship just that metal in these big billets
0:21:02 to Germany, you use our process to turn that into heat,
0:21:05 and then you send that aluminum oxide essentially back
0:21:08 on the same boat, maybe that brought the aluminum
0:21:11 in the first place, and you repeat the process.
0:21:15 We’re actually calling it the world’s first rechargeable fuel.
0:21:17 – So you get, so let’s just talk through both
0:21:18 how you sort of recharge it,
0:21:20 which is basically how you make aluminum,
0:21:23 and then how you get the heat out of it, right?
0:21:24 How you get the energy out of it.
0:21:27 So just the basic like how you make aluminum,
0:21:29 you get bauxite out of the ground.
0:21:31 What do you do to make aluminum?
0:21:36 – So starting from bauxite, you heat it up,
0:21:39 you need to produce aluminum hydroxide,
0:21:43 and then you bake that and you drive off the water molecules,
0:21:45 and then you’re left with a particular grade
0:21:47 of aluminum oxide.
0:21:50 That then goes into your whole hurrow process
0:21:55 where they electrochemically split the aluminum
0:21:57 and the oxygen, and then you’re just left
0:21:59 with that metallic aluminum.
0:22:02 – Okay, just pure elemental aluminum.
0:22:03 – Yep.
0:22:07 – Okay, so now it comes to you, what do you do with it?
0:22:11 – So it’s proprietary, but it’s a surface treatment
0:22:15 to the aluminum that causes the aluminum
0:22:19 to break down along the microstructure
0:22:21 when it’s exposed to water.
0:22:26 – Okay, and then so once you’ve applied your secret sauce
0:22:29 to the aluminum, what happens in this universe
0:22:31 where you’re using it as a fuel source,
0:22:32 like what happened?
0:22:36 – So then you just have sort of this general purpose fuel,
0:22:39 which you can use to replace fossil fuels
0:22:40 for all sorts of applications.
0:22:43 Like I was saying earlier, you split water
0:22:46 when you let aluminum rust, and so then you have
0:22:49 the rest of that energy in the hydrogen.
0:22:51 You could then just burn that hydrogen,
0:22:53 and then that will just produce heat
0:22:57 at way above 1,000 degrees Celsius,
0:23:00 and starting with those high temperatures,
0:23:01 that gives you a lot of flexibility
0:23:06 to produce steam that can run turbo machinery,
0:23:08 but can also replace fossil fuels
0:23:11 for a lot of really high temperature applications.
0:23:12 – A hard problem, right?
0:23:15 Like steel, people talk about sort of decarbonizing steel
0:23:17 and these sort of industrial processes
0:23:18 that need really high temperatures
0:23:20 is a particularly hard problem
0:23:22 that you can’t do with sort of standard,
0:23:24 and so this could do that.
0:23:25 – Exactly, yeah.
0:23:27 – We’re just talking high temperature heat,
0:23:32 and any process that requires that would be a good candidate.
0:23:34 – Like you want it at a steel plant
0:23:35 in Germany or something.
0:23:38 You want it at a place where they need a lot of heat
0:23:40 and are importing fossil fuels to get it right now.
0:23:43 Like that’s the sort of obvious use case.
0:23:47 – Or using like local coal, but that’s exactly right.
0:23:50 (upbeat music)
0:23:53 – In a minute, why Peter’s plan might not work.
0:23:56 (upbeat music)
0:24:04 – If you’re looking for a new podcast,
0:24:05 but don’t know where to start,
0:24:07 here’s one you can add to your list.
0:24:09 The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:24:11 The Jordan Harbinger Show is aimed
0:24:14 at making you a better informed critical thinker
0:24:17 so you can get a sense of how the world actually works
0:24:20 and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
0:24:23 Jordan talks to everyone from neuroscientists to CEOs
0:24:26 to astronauts, authors, and performers.
0:24:27 You might enjoy Jordan’s interview
0:24:29 with historian Yuval Noah Harari,
0:24:32 the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind,
0:24:35 or his episode with fool me once author,
0:24:37 Kelly Richmond Pope,
0:24:40 on how fraud became a trillion dollar industry.
0:24:42 Whether Jordan’s conducting an interview
0:24:44 or giving advice to a listener,
0:24:45 you’ll find something useful that you can apply
0:24:48 to your own life in every episode
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0:25:01 Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show,
0:25:06 that’s H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
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0:25:18 So when you have your first reactors out in the real world
0:25:21 doing real work, like just help me picture it.
0:25:22 Like what is your first reactor out in the world?
0:25:23 What’s it gonna look like?
0:25:25 – Yeah, so for the first, you know,
0:25:26 megawatt scale systems,
0:25:30 we’re talking like a four foot by four foot cube.
0:25:33 – Okay, so quite small, that’s the size of the box.
0:25:35 And then dumb question,
0:25:38 is there like somebody like putting just like,
0:25:41 scrap aluminum into the box?
0:25:43 Like is it like a guy shoveling coal
0:25:44 on the railroad 200 years ago?
0:25:46 Like what’s going on?
0:25:49 – It’s not unlike that, let me put it that way.
0:25:53 And so there’s conveyor belts and sort of shredders
0:25:56 and basically all the standard equipment you would have
0:25:58 in the waste processing industry.
0:26:01 And then they’ll get to a form factor,
0:26:02 basically these pellets
0:26:06 that then get automatically fed into the box.
0:26:08 – What happens inside the box?
0:26:10 – So this is where a lot of interesting stuff happens.
0:26:14 This is where we actually are facilitating
0:26:17 an aluminum water chemical reaction.
0:26:19 And so you’re getting these big pieces of aluminum
0:26:20 that are going in,
0:26:22 that aluminum is getting broken down
0:26:26 at the microstructure by our activator compound.
0:26:28 And then it’s interacting with water.
0:26:33 So you can imagine it’s just in its simplest form,
0:26:37 it’s just essentially a vessel
0:26:39 where you’re mixing all these things together,
0:26:41 but easier said than done.
0:26:45 – Okay, and then what comes out of the box?
0:26:50 – So the box will fundamentally have two to three outputs.
0:26:54 So the first two are the sort of the energy,
0:26:56 the power outputs.
0:26:58 And so depending on the customer,
0:27:02 we’re able to provide energy as heat or hydrogen gas,
0:27:05 which can then be burned or some combination.
0:27:06 And so depending on that application,
0:27:09 you basically have a pipe that comes out
0:27:12 that has this energy containing gas.
0:27:15 Hot air, hydrogen gas, whatever they want.
0:27:16 – Exactly.
0:27:21 And then the other is this refined aluminum hydroxide,
0:27:23 which again, these companies that make aluminum
0:27:28 or use aluminum, at some point in the value stream,
0:27:31 upstream of that, they are sourcing this material.
0:27:33 And so this actually saves them having
0:27:35 to go and mine additional bauxite.
0:27:38 So if you look at this whole process
0:27:41 through the lens of making aluminum oxide,
0:27:42 it’s actually carbon negative.
0:27:46 So you’re getting this essentially the only carbon-free
0:27:48 source of aluminum hydroxide there is in the world.
0:27:50 There’s no other way to make this.
0:27:52 – Why might it not work?
0:27:56 – So we have very high confidence
0:27:58 in our go-to-market strategy,
0:28:02 which is using aluminum waste to decarbonize
0:28:05 these very specific industries.
0:28:08 But at some point you do run out of aluminum waste.
0:28:10 – Well, wait, so you’re just stipulating
0:28:13 that the aluminum waste part will work at scale
0:28:15 and the techno-economics will work.
0:28:18 Like might that part not work?
0:28:21 – Well, it’s so cheap.
0:28:23 You have a huge buffer for it to work even poorly
0:28:25 and it still makes sense.
0:28:28 – Say more about that.
0:28:30 – You know, like we’re talking like
0:28:32 really bottom of the barrel aluminum waste.
0:28:36 So this is stuff that in some cases,
0:28:38 companies are actually paying other peoples to take away
0:28:40 because it’s too contaminated.
0:28:41 And so…
0:28:43 – And can you use that?
0:28:45 That garbage aluminum?
0:28:49 Like you can use whatever crappy recycled aluminum
0:28:51 that’s a mess and that nobody wants.
0:28:56 You can use that efficiently and it works for you?
0:28:57 – Yep, yep.
0:28:59 We’re just, our process eats aluminum
0:29:01 and leaves everything else pretty much untouched.
0:29:05 – And is that the aluminum you’re using now?
0:29:10 – Yeah. So we’re looking at those low quality FeesDoc
0:29:13 and it’s a lot like food and beverage packaging
0:29:15 and stuff that’s contaminated
0:29:18 or maybe it’s like mixed with other metals or plastics
0:29:21 or organic contamination.
0:29:22 – It’s what I put out on the curb every week.
0:29:25 And I think there’s no way that can actually be useful.
0:29:27 They are probably just putting it in the garbage.
0:29:29 You’re saying that’s what you can use.
0:29:29 – Exactly.
0:29:30 – Yeah.
0:29:31 And how big is that?
0:29:34 I mean, that’s, if that works, that’s a lot, right?
0:29:36 Like if you’re just taking it as given
0:29:37 that that’s gonna work.
0:29:39 That’s a lot of success if that works, right?
0:29:42 Presumably that’s a very large market
0:29:44 for inputs for you, no?
0:29:44 – Totally.
0:29:47 Yeah. I mean, it’s a large market
0:29:52 but given the scale of the, you know, emissions globally,
0:29:56 it’s not really gonna put a dent in that.
0:29:59 It’s probably a good outcome for our company
0:30:01 and for definitely our customers who are using this technology
0:30:04 but it’s not the impact that I’m interested in.
0:30:05 – Specifically.
0:30:07 – It’s not gonna reduce the average temperature
0:30:09 of the earth in a hundred years.
0:30:11 – No, it’s gonna have more positive impacts
0:30:13 than just carbon emissions reductions
0:30:17 because you’re also cleaning up the mining industry
0:30:19 around aluminum oxide production.
0:30:22 – So this sort of recycled aluminum
0:30:27 that nobody else wants is enough to supply the energy
0:30:31 for this one piece of the production of new aluminum.
0:30:33 So, I mean, is that basically what you’re saying?
0:30:33 – Yep, exactly.
0:30:35 – But then we have the whole rest of the world
0:30:36 to worry about.
0:30:37 – Exactly.
0:30:40 – Okay, so tell me about the whole rest of the world.
0:30:44 So once you’re using all the crappy recycled aluminum
0:30:46 that nobody else wants and decarbonizing this piece
0:30:49 of the process of making new aluminum,
0:30:51 what’s the next move?
0:30:55 – Yeah, so the next move is to close the loop
0:30:56 as we like to say.
0:31:00 So that’s actually recharging the byproduct
0:31:04 of our own reaction, doing that in a place
0:31:06 where you have abundant renewables
0:31:07 and then sending it to a place
0:31:09 where you do not have abundant renewables.
0:31:13 And at that scale, then there’s no constraint
0:31:16 on the amount of aluminum that we have access to.
0:31:18 It’s literally the most abundant metal
0:31:20 in the earth’s crust.
0:31:24 – So in that universe, it’s sort of end to end.
0:31:25 You’re just in some clean way
0:31:27 that doesn’t entirely exist yet,
0:31:30 turning bauxite into pure aluminum,
0:31:32 which then is your fuel
0:31:33 and you’re sending it to wherever they need it
0:31:36 and you’re turning that aluminum into heat.
0:31:39 And then the product of that reaction
0:31:42 is what aluminum oxide that you’re sending back
0:31:45 to your clean plant and turning it back into pure aluminum
0:31:48 and just going back and forth like that, that’s the dream.
0:31:49 – Exactly, yep.
0:31:51 – And on the techno economic side,
0:31:53 maybe somebody will come up with something cheaper
0:31:55 or easier or something, right?
0:31:56 I mean, you’re not just competing
0:31:58 against what exists today.
0:32:00 You’re competing against all these other smart people
0:32:02 who are trying ultimately to solve the same problem
0:32:04 you’re trying to solve, but in different ways, right?
0:32:06 – You know, we’re not necessarily too worried about that.
0:32:09 In some ways, we will need multiple solutions.
0:32:11 So you need to get like maybe 10 kilograms
0:32:14 of aluminum reacting at once, easier said than done,
0:32:16 but you’re not talking massive systems.
0:32:19 And what that means is you can modularize.
0:32:21 So you can start rolling this out.
0:32:26 So we really only have to do a 50x scale up really well.
0:32:28 And then we can mass produce what we call
0:32:30 our aluminum water reactors.
0:32:32 – So it doesn’t have to be that big.
0:32:35 You just get a kind of little reactor
0:32:37 and then you put 20 of them right next to each other?
0:32:38 Is that what you’re saying?
0:32:39 – Exactly, exactly.
0:32:42 So you don’t take on that scale risk all at once.
0:32:46 So that’s, you know, again, like scaling up 50x
0:32:48 is also a major challenge.
0:32:49 – Non-trivial, yeah.
0:32:53 – And, you know, we have a big team
0:32:54 of really smart people working on it.
0:32:59 But, you know, thinking long-term,
0:33:02 there’s kind of a timing risk, I would say,
0:33:06 where as we scale these technologies,
0:33:09 you know, we need people to be ready to use them.
0:33:14 And while, you know, this early,
0:33:15 these early adopters in the aluminum industry,
0:33:19 they’re ready to use this tech now, roughly.
0:33:21 You know, as we go to decarbonize industrial heat
0:33:24 more broadly, you know, they may not be ready
0:33:28 to commit to a new unproven technology
0:33:29 with, you know, supply chain risk.
0:33:32 And basically the things that are standing in the way
0:33:35 of them moving to any other technology.
0:33:37 – Well, and there are industries
0:33:39 that operate at massive scale, right?
0:33:41 And you’re like kind of doing this little thing
0:33:42 and trying to scale it up.
0:33:46 And it seems like there’s like a chasm
0:33:50 you have to leap in some way to get from where you are
0:33:55 to like, you know, decarbonizing a steel plant or something.
0:33:56 – And, you know, we’re hedging that risk
0:33:59 by not starting there and starting with the folks
0:34:03 that have a reasonably high adoption readiness level
0:34:06 that is commensurate with our technology readiness level.
0:34:10 – So I wanna end the main part of the interview
0:34:12 on the like why it might not work
0:34:15 ’cause that’s kind of a attenuated bummer.
0:34:17 So like when you think happy thoughts
0:34:21 about the world 10 years from now.
0:34:22 Well, like what does it look like
0:34:24 and what does your place in it look like?
0:34:28 – You know, you look at replacing the fossil fuel supply chain
0:34:33 which has been developed and optimized and obsessed over
0:34:38 for, you know, basically a hundred years or more.
0:34:42 You know, you can’t just replace all of that with one thing.
0:34:44 This is a sort of everyone problem.
0:34:49 And yeah, you know, we, I love looking at this.
0:34:52 If you Google aluminum supply chain,
0:34:55 probably a map comes up showing these lines
0:34:57 going from places today with lots of renewables.
0:35:00 And, you know, I wanna see that turned into
0:35:02 the next energy supply chain.
0:35:03 That’s what excites me.
0:35:09 – We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:35:12 (upbeat music)
0:35:18 If you’re looking for a new podcast
0:35:19 but don’t know where to start,
0:35:21 here’s one you can add to your list.
0:35:23 The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:35:25 The Jordan Harbinger Show is aimed
0:35:27 at making you a better informed critical thinker
0:35:30 so you can get a sense of how the world actually works
0:35:33 and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
0:35:36 Jordan talks to everyone from neuroscientists
0:35:40 to CEOs, to astronauts, authors, and performers.
0:35:41 You might enjoy Jordan’s interview
0:35:43 with historian Yuval Noah Harari,
0:35:46 the author of “Sapiens,” a brief history of humankind,
0:35:49 or his episode with fool me once author,
0:35:51 Kelly Richmond Pope,
0:35:54 on how fraud became a trillion dollar industry.
0:35:56 Whether Jordan’s conducting an interview
0:35:57 or giving advice to a listener,
0:35:59 you’ll find something useful that you can apply
0:36:02 to your own life in every episode
0:36:03 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:36:06 That could mean learning how to ask for advice
0:36:08 the right way, or it could just be discovering
0:36:12 a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world.
0:36:17 Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show that’s H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R
0:36:21 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
0:36:24 or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:36:28 Okay, I wanna finish with the lightning round.
0:36:32 Is it right that you sort of remote control
0:36:36 drove the curiosity rover on Mars?
0:36:37 Yes, not just me.
0:36:40 I was on the team that did operations for curiosity,
0:36:43 and I was working on the arm specifically.
0:36:45 It takes about a hundred people every single day
0:36:46 to operate this thing.
0:36:51 Oh, so you like made the arm move and pick things up?
0:36:55 A part of the team that did that, but yeah, pretty much.
0:36:57 What’s your favorite part of Mars?
0:37:00 Well, there’s really only one interesting part of Mars,
0:37:04 in my opinion, which is the mountain.
0:37:05 Is there one mountain?
0:37:09 It’s not a mountain on Mars, it’s the mountain on Mars?
0:37:11 It’s like a bulge in the planet
0:37:14 that you could call a mountain.
0:37:16 But so if we agree that that’s a mountain,
0:37:19 it’s actually the largest mountain in the solar system.
0:37:21 What’s interesting to you about it?
0:37:24 The thing that was cool is that you can basically,
0:37:27 as you drive up, you sort of get a geological history
0:37:29 of Mars as you sample different rocks.
0:37:33 Curiosity was basically just driving up this thing
0:37:34 until it dies.
0:37:39 What’s your second favorite metal?
0:37:45 Probably, I would have to say iron,
0:37:47 just from its importance.
0:37:50 There’s a whole age.
0:37:54 I actually talked to a guy you probably crossed paths with,
0:37:55 Mateo Hadamillo.
0:37:56 At form energy.
0:37:57 At form energy, right?
0:38:00 He is using iron to make batteries.
0:38:02 And it’s, in a way, somewhat analogous
0:38:03 to what you’re doing, right?
0:38:06 Like, their batteries are essentially iron
0:38:08 that is rusting and unrusting
0:38:11 in the way that you’re rusting and unrusting aluminum, right?
0:38:13 Yeah, exactly.
0:38:14 They’re using a cheaper material,
0:38:16 but it’s also less energy-dense.
0:38:18 So it’s really wildly less, right?
0:38:21 Like their play is like, we don’t care about energy-dense.
0:38:23 It can be gigantic out of the desert.
0:38:24 They’re just going for cause.
0:38:26 And so it’s amazing for a stationary energy.
0:38:28 I think what they’re doing is cool.
0:38:30 I mean, it’s complimentary, right?
0:38:34 Like they are not going to generate heat to power a steel mill.
0:38:36 And you’re not going to be doing energy storage
0:38:38 at utility scale, right?
0:38:42 Yeah, and actually, it’s very complimentary in that
0:38:45 in order to do truly carbon-free aluminum smelting
0:38:46 with renewables like solar and wind,
0:38:48 you need to solve the intermittency issue
0:38:51 because these haul-hero cells run really hot.
0:38:57 So solar, wind, plus a form energy facility
0:39:01 could be an interesting way to enable more aluminum production.
0:39:03 Is there some engineer either living
0:39:06 or from history who you think everybody should know about?
0:39:10 I would say people these days don’t give enough credit
0:39:15 to the engineers from the Apollo era of NASA,
0:39:18 where we’re like obsessing over going back to the moon.
0:39:20 And we think what we’re doing now is impressive,
0:39:23 like sending people into space.
0:39:28 Like what we were doing back then with the tools that they had,
0:39:31 they did it basically on an iPhone, right?
0:39:33 Oh, way less than an iPhone.
0:39:34 Yeah, exactly.
0:39:37 I just think that’s insane and that it worked.
0:39:40 You know, we got people back from the moon.
0:39:41 Yeah, getting them there was the easy part.
0:39:43 Getting them back was hard.
0:39:44 Yeah.
0:39:51 Peter Goddard is the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy.
0:39:54 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:39:58 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sara Bouguere.
0:40:02 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:40:04 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week
0:40:07 with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:40:20 If you’re looking for a new podcast but don’t know where to start,
0:40:24 here’s one you can add to your list, The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:40:28 The Jordan Harbinger Show is aimed at making you a better-informed critical
0:40:32 thinker so you can get a sense of how the world actually works
0:40:34 and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
0:40:39 Jordan talks to everyone from neuroscientists to CEOs to astronauts,
0:40:40 authors, and performers.
0:40:44 You might enjoy Jordan’s interview with historian Yuval Noah Harari,
0:40:47 the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind,
0:40:52 or his episode with fool-me-once author Kelly Richmond Pope
0:40:55 on how fraud became a trillion-dollar industry.
0:40:58 Whether Jordan’s conducting an interview or giving advice to a listener,
0:41:01 you’ll find something useful that you can apply to your own life
0:41:04 in every episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show.
0:41:07 That could mean learning how to ask for advice the right way,
0:41:11 or it could just be discovering a slight mindset tweak
0:41:13 that changes how you see the world.
0:41:19 Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show, that’s H-A-R-B-I-N-G-E-R,
0:41:22 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
0:41:26 or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust. It’s cheap, ubiquitous, and surprisingly energy dense. Peter Godart is the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy. Peter’s problem is this: How can you use aluminum as a source of clean, renewable energy?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.