It was a mistake that was forward of its time.
Between 2002 and 2005, engineers with the Techint Group have been attempting to dial in a brand new electrical arc furnace for a steelmaker once they observed one thing odd. The carbon electrodes, quite than breaking down, have been rising bigger.
The crew had inadvertently created what’s often called a pyrolysis response, which is mainly burning one thing within the absence of oxygen. On this case, the furnace was splitting methane into pure hydrogen and pure carbon. The crew reported their discovery internally after which, mainly, forgot about it.
“Back then, nobody cared because nobody cared about methane pyrolysis, about hydrogen,” Massimiliano Pieri, CEO of Tulum Power, advised TechCrunch. The experiment was largely forgotten for the following 20 years.
However a few years in the past, traders for the Techint Group’s company VC arm, TechEnergy Ventures, have been scouring the panorama for brand new methods to provide hydrogen from methane with out the same old air pollution.
Techint’s traders didn’t need to look far. “Someone in the company realized, ‘But we already have that. We have this discovery,’” Pieri mentioned.
So the conglomerate dusted off the thought and spun out Tulum to show the unintentional discovery right into a viable enterprise. Just lately, Tulum closed an oversubscribed $27 million seed spherical led by TDK Ventures and CDP Enterprise Capital, the corporate solely advised TechCrunch. Doral Power-Tech Ventures, MITO Tech Ventures, and TechEnergy Ventures participated.
Tulum isn’t the one startup pursuing methane pyrolysis as a strategy to produce hydrogen. Fashionable Hydrogen, Molten Industries, and Monolith are amongst Tulum’s rivals. The response has attracted consideration for its skill to provide hydrogen from low-cost, broadly accessible pure gasoline with none carbon dioxide emissions. In pyrolysis, methane is damaged down within the absence of oxygen, the one merchandise are hydrogen gasoline and a mud of stable carbon, each of which may be offered.
However Tulum differs in a number of methods. For one, it doesn’t want to make use of costly catalysts to encourage the pyrolysis response, which a few of its rivals require. In its use of the electrical arc furnace, Tulum can be utilizing a broadly used — if modified — expertise.
“This gives you a big head start,” Pieri mentioned.
Tulum will use the seed funding to construct a pilot plant in Mexico alongside an current Techint Group metal plant. If all goes properly, the metal plant may purchase hydrogen and carbon instantly from Tulum to be used in its operations.
Pieri mentioned that at full-scale manufacturing, a business plant would generate two tons of hydrogen and 600 tons of carbon per day.
Tulum is hoping its business scale plant will produce one kilogram of hydrogen for about $1.50 within the U.S., the place electrical energy and pure gasoline are each low-cost. At that worth, it’s simply 50 cents extra than most hydrogen made out of pure gasoline immediately, and it considerably undercuts a few of the main inexperienced hydrogen strategies. That’s earlier than the corporate sells any carbon that its course of generates.
Not unhealthy for an nearly forgotten mistake.
