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Mount Pinatubo volcano and its crater lake, created by its 1991 eruption.
Copyright 2001 AP. All rights reserved.
WCome back to Current Climate. The realization that pure, carbon-free hydrogen is produced naturally underground rocked the energy world a few years ago, with the US Department of Energy estimating that there could be trillions of metric tons of it in underground pockets around the world. The challenge was to find large enough deposits to make drilling for the universe’s most abundant element worthwhile.
Koloma, an energy startup that emerged from stealth four years ago, has been the leader in the hunt for geological hydrogen, backed by $400 million from investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Amazon. It scours the world for promising sites, sampling rock and geological conditions at locations in the US, Australia and other parts of the world, which CEO Pete Johnson declined to identify. But last week, her attention turned to the Philippines, where the country’s government granted her access to potential hydrogen drilling sites in Zambales province, west of Manila. This area, once home to two huge US military bases, is geologically active and famous for Mount Pinatubo, the powerful volcano that devastated the area when it erupted in 1991.
“The Philippines has the largest natural hydrogen seeps anywhere on the planet,” Johnson said. “We have reason to believe that these leaks are associated with very large accumulations.”
The 4,100 square kilometer parts of Zambales that Koloma has permission to explore are not “on the shoulder” of Pinatubo, but in the general area, he said. While it may prove to be Koloma’s first commercial production facility, confirming the amount of hydrogen that can be extracted there will take at least two years, he said. If Koloma finds the quantity it is looking for, it would be a major breakthrough for the natural hydrogen industry and a huge help for the Philippines, which is heavily dependent on imported energy.
“It is the fastest growing country in Asia, with an economy that is growing very fast and modernizing very fast. And their incremental power unit is diesel burning,” he said. “If your alternative is to import diesel or expensive LNG, and you have hydrogen that competes head-to-head with LNG costs, that would make sense. The next step would be for the Philippines to consider becoming an exporter of energy or energy products—possibly ammonia or something like that.”
Despite growing demand for energy worldwide, exacerbated by rising oil, natural gas and ammonia prices due to the US war with Iran, Johnson said the company is taking a methodical approach to finding the resource in large quantities to build a sustainable business.
“If we go crazy and start digging holes in the ground and praying for success and not doing the right things in the middle, that’s not going to be good for me, it’s not going to be good for shareholders and it’s going to be terrible for the industry,” he said. “I’d love to have a bunch of big springs in my portfolio right now. We’ve surfaced 90% plus hydrogen gas. We’ve tested it. We’ve verified it. We’ve found big accumulations. We’re not sitting on anything that’s big and commercial yet.”
The big read
TELO’s electric mini pickup is about the same size as BMW’s MINI Cooper.
TELO
Tesla founders support Anti-Cybertruck
Twenty years ago this month, Tesla introduced the world to the electric Roadster, the $100,000 sports car that ushered in the modern EV era. Now the company’s two original founders are betting on TELO, an EV startup with an aesthetic counterpoint to Tesla’s brutal Cybertruck rumble.
Instead of starting with another compact crossover chasing Tesla’s best-selling Model Y, San Carlos, California-based TELO – located in the same Silicon Valley office park where Tesla was headquartered when the Roadster was launched – is coming to market with a whimsical mini-truck the size of a MINI Cooper. Priced from $41,520, the MT1 looks like something out of the world of Japanese anime, with none of the militaristic menace of a Tesla pickup. But TELO borrows an important page from Tesla’s original playbook: start small and build slowly. CEO and co-founder Jason Marks told Forbes that the company initially plans to build just 500 units and then scale to 5,000 vehicles per year after a year or so. And even at that relatively low volume, he believes the company can turn a profit.
“A lot of electric vehicle companies that came after Tesla got to high-volume production out of the gate. But Tesla didn’t do that. If you look at their driver, they built 2,400 Roadsters. Then they built 10,000 Model S and then scaled from there,” said Marks, whose former Tesla co-founder is Tesla. “Our intent is very much the same. This first mid-market product we’re launching is really about showing the world that mini can be powerful. We’re not going to come out of the gate building a high-volume product.”
Read more here
Hot topic
Gene Berdichevsky, CEO and co-founder of Sila, to raise an additional $300 million to produce silicon-carbon anodes for high-power batteries
What is the purpose of this latest round of funding?
Two years ago, when we raised capital, we said we would finish the factory and start scaling up and producing, and we did just that. We started our operation [Moses Lake, Washington] at the factory late last year. We’ve been going through a commissioning, we’ve been going through some post-construction, hacking of the equipment if you will. Now we start ramping up. We make materials. We send early samples to customers. We’re not fully fleshed out yet, but we’ll have some announcements about that in the coming weeks and months. We’re in ramp-up mode, and it’s going really well.
This funding is really based on that. The point is to go from the first two gigawatt-hours of capacity we have at Moses Lake in phase one to tens of gigawatt-hours equivalent in phase two. It’s really just about developing phase two and continuing to work and ship everything from phase one.
The main target for your anodes was higher power electric car batteries. Is this still the case?
What’s happened operationally in the last year and beyond is that we have tremendous headwinds from what I would call the physical AI level becoming very important to the future of technology. So we don’t just make EVs. We support drone applications. We support satellite applications. We support all kinds of AI electronic devices. We have customers who want to integrate this technology for data centers to deal with some of the transient power from GPUs, robotics and space satellite communications.
What has been really interesting is that each of these sectors has recovered. Even for electric vehicles, we’re starting to see demand for batteries that will adapt well to autonomous taxis, where you need a much better lifespan. Ideally, you want to have a good recharge in them, or enough capacity to last a full day. So we’re starting to see some of that trickle back.
In many ways, the moment is all about artificial intelligence. But for AI to really have a huge impact on society, it will have to touch people beyond the screen. So whether it’s devices, consumer devices that need better power, delivery drones or first response drones or satellites for communication and other applications and robotics, of course, we’re starting to see that become much more important. And just like the conversation in artificial intelligence about dominance and leadership and having the technology to be ready for the 21st century, the same is happening in batteries.
If you don’t have that layer, if you don’t have high-performance batteries and all the required supply chain to make them, you might develop the best models in the world, but then what are you going to apply them to?
The beauty of our technology is that while you can tune it to optimize it for these different applications, it can serve them all, maybe with slightly different battery manufacturers that we work with. Some battery manufacturers really focus on AVs. others focus on more of these other applications. So it doesn’t really change our strategy. Our strategy continues to be to invent the best anode technology. Activate the best batteries in the world and increase them. We need to get to giga-scale.
Are you the only fully domestic manufacturer of anode batteries at this point?
We are definitely the first. Here we invented everything. It’s all American invented IP. And we’re focused on scaling in the U.S. We see a huge opportunity to do that. We believe that this is what is necessary for the country. We really think it’s the blueprint for how we should reindustrialize. You want technology that you invent here and you want to scale it here.
We spent 25 years globalizing and inventing here, then built it somewhere else. I think those days are numbered. Also, you can’t just copy what the rest of the world is doing in America. You have to invent. As Americans, we don’t like to be second. We don’t like to copy. We will have to invent.
What else are we reading?
A new iron ore mine could turn Minnesota into a green steel powerhouse? (Canary Media)
Climate change is exacerbating the drought across Europe, say scientists (Reuters)
“Five-alarm fire”: Western reservoirs feeding California fall to record levels (Los Angeles Times)
Oil companies have known about the danger of methane for decades on the planet, the papers suggest (New York Times)
