Energy Tech Startups

0:00 Welcome back to the show. Today we have Jared Moore from Liquid Charge, CEO and founder. He's going to talk to us about the company, but he's also going to talk to us about his book. And because

0:11 Nada is off, I guess, hanging out with cool people on spring break, by cool people, I mean, her kids, we have Camilo Smith here with us to show us how real radio gets done, but also to help

0:25 co-chair the show. Camilo, do you want to say hi? How you doing? I'm a longtime Houston journalist, really glad to be here. Thanks for the invite, Jason. Cool. And I guess let's talk a little

0:37 bit about the book, Jared. You said you liked writing it, did not like promoting it. Well, I loved writing it. I had fun with it. The whole book is told from a vlog perspective, and I kind of

0:49 made up these characters, and I had this plot and vision, but when I created the characters, that's what gave me the passion to actually write and have fun and just like think about what. what

0:60 these guys would say. And it's about three brothers, and I happen to have two older brothers. So it was kind of easy for me to write from that perspective. So it's more of a fictional account then.

1:13 Yeah, it's a science fiction book about energy and politics 100 years from now. And basically what happens is these aliens visit Earth and they see that we're having trouble with global warming So

1:26 they offer us a really cheap plant that can be turned into biofuel. And it's called super corn. But

1:35 these aliens, they want something too. They want15 trillion worth of uranium. And this is a sci-fi book where economics actually matters. And so coming up with15 trillion worth for these aliens is

1:51 very difficult because we have like100

1:55 trillion in debt and our interest rate's really high. So we have this huge interest payment to pay. So basically this younger brother who is unemployed, he starts a vlog and his vlog is basically

2:13 trying to take down his older brother who's present in the United States. And then the other brother is a famous race car driver. And so that becomes very central to the plot. So I've given away a

2:26 lot about the book, just then, but the ending is not, like nobody has seen the ending yet. Like my mom, my brothers, my best friends, colleagues, mentors, none of them saw it coming. So I'll

2:40 try to leave that cliffhanger out for you. There you go. That you won't see the ending coming, it's only 200 pages. Easy reading. Yeah, no, it's a great little take. At the beginning, you

2:52 thank your mom and your dad And what role do they play in your current journey? Well, thanks for the question. Well, I had, you know, I had great parents, of course, but they're both teachers

3:04 and my dad's eighth grade science teacher, or he was for 39 years. So he got me interested in sci-fi and, you know, I'm always trying to be a science communicator, like my dad. So,

3:20 you know, I just felt like it was appropriate to thank them at the beginning of the book And to be honest, the move of just having, thanks mom and dad. I saw that on somebody else's PhD thesis.

3:34 So his name's Russell Meyer, but anyway. Yeah, that was just a quick thank you. And I guess what drove you or inspired you to publish the book now, what was that journey like? Okay, so during

3:47 the pandemic, I saw a lot of bad TV. I mean, like, What was that show, Tiger King? Like once you watch that, you have no more standards. So I just keep watching all this stuff and I just

4:01 thought this is pretty low quality and I'd like to kind of try my shot at science fiction. And so I had this vision that I had been staring at called Thermal Hydrogen, which is a big energy vision.

4:14 And so I just had this really clear vision of what the future might be. And so I just decided I'd create a plot around this vision and help to explain it, but also to have fun. Because like, you

4:29 know, my dad's eighth grade science teacher. He wanted me to watch Bill and I, you know, 'cause it's important to have fun while you're learning. And that's what, that's to me, kind of what I

4:38 was trying to do with the book is like, have some fun reading this, learn a couple of things, and you won't see the ending coming. So, and I had fun writing it, so it's all good. Bill and I are

4:49 the science guy. Yeah, exactly, yeah Okay, TBC should have grown up. I guess, I mean, he's not, he's around, but he doesn't have the show anymore, says kind of a shame. Yeah. Yeah. I,

5:01 you know, it's interesting because I feel like a lot of these entrepreneurs in the climate tech space, you kind of have to have a sci-fi kind of mind to come up with some of these ideas. And I'm

5:12 interested in the kind of the, you know, relationship between having to think, you know, in terms of, you know, science fiction, carbon sequestration. I mean, do the two kind of, you know,

5:24 mix or do they benefit each other? No. Well, you're asking really good questions. Yes. And in fact, I was showing people my vision in Washington, DC. in 2016, 2017,

5:41 2018. And some of them even kind of just dismissed me saying this is science fiction And

5:47 I'm like, that's not an insult to. I time over reality becomes fiction mean science because me,

5:53 the head iPads and eye watches on Star Trek, long before Steve Jobs. So,

6:01 it's easy to envision things, and then once you envision them, it's inspirational. So, I mean, that was kind of put the idea in my head to write the sci-fi book. If someone was gonna try to

6:14 insult me and tell me it's a sci-fi, I'm like, well, I might have a little fun with it and you can watch me. But then other people would tell me there's nothing new in this vision. So I just

6:25 thought, well, if there's nothing new and it's science fiction, well, gee, it might have a good chance of actually happening. So those were

6:34 the reasons I wrote the book and during the pandemic, I had a lot of time to think and be creative. So I figured if I was ever gonna check off this write a novel, if I was ever gonna check that off

6:44 my bucket list, it was during the pandemic. Did you have to, how did the, I guess, let's go. Did you just kind of write it all in one go? Did you have an editor? How did that happen? Good

6:56 question.

6:59 So I had a couple of false starts where I tried to, I read the book Jurassic Park and I read the book The Martian and because I just wanted to see like this is what it looks like written before it's

7:12 on the screen because to me the point was to make this into a movie And I tried to write it from a third person perspective just like Michael Crichton and I just like couldn't do it. And then I just

7:27 thought and as actually when I was on a plane ride to San Francisco for the accelerator indie bio for my company, I just thought, why don't I just write this from a vlog perspective? Kind of like

7:40 they're doing in the book The Martian. I actually had a vlog once. It's like my message to the world. So once I put it into this block vlog form and once I made it about three brothers like It just

7:51 happened spontaneously. Like, I didn't even have to try. Like, I'm sitting around waiting for meetings to happen. Like, I get a couple pages out, you know, then a couple pages out here and

8:02 there. And then I spend the night reviewing it. And, you know, I hired someone to edit it, but even after they edit it, like I took a lot of time to edit it after that. So, it kind of took a

8:15 year to write it and get it published

8:20 Yeah, I just keep thinking, is that how different is that from creating a company? Is that like getting a company off the ground? What was it like getting your startup?

8:30 I'd say it's not, not as hard, and not as hard as starting a company. I was gonna say the same number of all starts though, sometimes, right? Well, that's absolutely true.

8:41 But I guess, you know, when you start a company, you need to fundraise, you need to provide a vision

8:51 But you need a partner and you need a co-founder because no investor just wants to give money to one person and put all their faith in that one person. So the book is very individual and you know

9:06 it's it doesn't have

9:09 you know you don't have board meetings with the book you don't have to answer to anybody with the book and so publishing on Amazon is just really easy you put it up there And I I I said finishing a

9:21 book is kind of like running a marathon like even if you get in last place people still congratulate you but that's not the case in business your investors be very very very upset with you if you come

9:32 in last place and in fact you'll have to quit so.

9:35 Different kind of challenge but you know it does it does take grit and kind of creativity to get started mhm What so speaking of like the measures of success so like for a company it's about. you

9:51 know, creating shareholder value or driving stock price or something like that. When you put out a book into the world, what was your personal measure of success to say, I'm glad I did this.

10:04 That's a very good question.

10:08 Obviously, I wanted to make a little money and that didn't happen.

10:14 But I also wanted to make it into a movie, which I think is still out there In fact, my mentor from ExxonMobil just finished reading it last week and he texted me and he didn't see the ending coming.

10:27 He was very surprised by it. He suggested I make it into a movie. So, I was just so thrilled to get his feedback because he got all the lessons of the book and I didn't have to give it away to him

10:41 and he didn't see the ending coming

10:44 still. So, in my mind, like I got him. So I want to do that to more people. And so the success to me is when I hear the feedback from people that say things like, You were fair to both political

11:02 sides. I didn't see the ending coming. And there was nothing in your book that it was really unrealistic other than the aliens arriving. And that has been very fulfilling to me. And I'm really

11:14 glad I wrote it just to get the feedback from the people I know who say they got it And so I'm going to keep going with it. And I'm thinking of other sci-fi plots in my mind, but nothing's really

11:28 inspired me to this point. But I got a couple of ideas. And I guess that's the point of a book you're trying to change people's perspective, right? And that's the measure that you've given them

11:37 that kind of mind shift.

11:40 Yeah, exactly, yeah. Because if you read it,

11:46 you'll think you'll know where I'm going, but then you'll be surprised. No, we're gonna have to get the whole thing out.

11:54 And that's what makes it hard to promote 'cause I can't give away the ending 'cause pretty much everybody wants to see the ending before but I thought Greetings Lunar Colonists would give away the

12:03 middle because an alien comes and says, Hello. So that's as much as I'll give away. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, okay. How the sneaky feeling this is gonna, when the aliens do land, this is gonna be the

12:16 podcast that they listen to first Yeah.

12:20 It's like, how do we deal with people? Yeah, the trillion dollar, the trillion dollar is what grabs me there. How are we gonna come up with that? 15 trillion. 15 trillion. And those are the

12:32 numbers we talk about in the energy transition, right? So it's not that insurmountable. When we talk about like 20 or 40 trillion over the next 15 years, it's kind of what we gotta do. Right,

12:42 yeah. And I think, you know, we're talking about 100 years So the US economy should be a hundred trillion dollar economy. Yeah. So, you know, when I was a kid, we used to talk in billions.

12:53 Yeah. Right. Until TARP came along, we never talked in trillions. Mm-hmm. But after 2008, oh, another trillion here, another trillion there, and people just don't even think about it. Yeah.

13:02 I think I saw the new budget that was released was like a seven trillion dollar budget over ten years. Like, man, these are numbers. Yeah. You sound familiar? Yeah. It's hard to fathom. So

13:13 let's talk about the company a little bit I know you've taken a few different iterations of

13:18 that as well. You went

13:21 to Indibio, which is one of the best accelerators out there. So you guys can see Jared's face. We get these chairs in the studio that just sometimes drop you while you're sitting. And he went for

13:33 a little bit of roller coaster ride just now. I'm back. But no, tell us about kind of what the big insight you've seen around liquid charge and what you're trying to build Well

13:48 out of my mo as far as just generally kind of like my view on climate change is that we need emissions-free liquid fuels and liquid fuels can be stored densely and piped along distance for almost no

14:04 cost. And they, in my opinion, are the perfect complement to the grid to keep the grid well utilized. So if we can keep the grid well utilized, we can electrify more because electricity will have

14:14 lower cost And so my aim with this company, Liquid Charge, is a fuel cell range extender that runs on a liquid fuel ethanol or methanol. Those are cheaper than hydrogen. And we reform this, feed

14:29 it to a fuel cell, and then this fuel cell is special because it can handle reformate, and then it takes the hydrogen out of a diluted stream So it leaves behind pure CO2, which we're going to

14:42 store on the vehicle in liquid form again. And so it goes right back into the fuel tank and then that CO2 will eventually get either recycled or sequestered. So I think these liquid fuels are a

14:54 perfect complement to EVs so that we don't have to do fast charging or people that don't wanna live their life from one level to charge or to another at grocery stores or wherever, they can just use

15:07 this fuel cell and it's just as convenient as going to the gas station only your vehicle will still be all electric and it'll be emissions-free. So that's the insight that I'm after and yeah,

15:22 there's been a couple iterations so far though.

15:27 So I think the piece here is, as much as there's a lot of excitement about hydrogen and other kind of energy carriers that the reality is hydrocarbons are fantastic at carrying energy and hydrogen

15:39 around. It's just that pesky CO2, right? Yeah, exactly instead of trying to define. an entire new system to manage just the hydrogen. We're kind of saying, let's take our existing

15:49 infrastructure and solve the CO2 capture part, which happens at the end.

15:56 And we already get, we already get ethanol, right? Like E85 is already 85 ethanol at the gas station. So you're gonna go that extra 15 to make it all ethanol. What, why haven't people tried to

16:10 solve the CO2 problem before? Like what, what's new or different today that enables us to

16:18 try to tackle that, that part of the problem? Well,

16:24 I mean, when he first created this energy system a hundred years ago,

16:31 I mean, there were papers written about the greenhouse effect in the late 1800s, but it wasn't really top of mind. Nobody really cared about it until James Hansen in 1988. came to Congress and

16:40 said, this is going to be a huge problem. So CO2 coming out of the smokestack wasn't as much of an issue. But with climate change, it's now an issue. And kind of my big insight is that CO2

16:54 capture is as hard as it is dilute. So CO2

16:59 in the atmosphere is the hardest. CO2 coming out of a smokestack is like 15, still pretty hard, but doable And what comes out of my fuel cell is almost pure CO2, it's already concentrated. And so

17:12 that's kind of

17:14 how I think emissions-free liquid fuels can be made cheap, is that it's easy to capture something if it's already concentrated. You just have to change the phase. So once you get the phase change,

17:26 it's easy to handle. So going back to your original point, Jason. It's much easier to handle pure CO2 in liquid form than it is hydrogen. Mm-hmm. I mean, every single diner in America has soda.

17:40 That comes from liquefied CO2, okay? So it's not hard to handle at all, and it's actually pretty safe, you know, if you had a leak, just, you know, don't breathe in too much CO2. So

17:55 I think it's just a much cheaper way to go, but nobody's really thought of that, and myself included because everybody thinks CO2 bad, so don't create it And my opinion is CO2 is not bad, diluted

18:09 CO2 is what's bad, that's what's going to cost. So

18:14 that's my angle with this global warming problem.

18:19 Is there another way you could explain that the diluted CO2? Sure. In those terms. Thank you for the question. All right. So when you

18:29 combust hydrocarbon,

18:32 the atmosphere is 80 nitrogen. So the nitrogen doesn't do anything in that combustion reaction. It just passes through. So what comes out of your combustion reaction is water CO2 and mostly

18:44 nitrogen. So it's like 85 nitrogen coming out of the smoke stack. All right. So if you wanna put CO2 underground, you can't capture all that nitrogen and put that underground. Well, the other

18:55 issue is you'd have to liquefy the nitrogen, which takes a ton of energy. Yeah, exactly. So you either have to liquefy all the nitrogen or take it out somehow And that's what's called carbon

19:05 capture. So the emissions-free fossil fuel has taken on this acronym called carbon capture and sequestration. All right, carbon capture is the part where you're purifying the CO2 from the stream.

19:20 And that's the vast majority of the cost. Once we get a liquefied,

19:26 handling it and taking it to a sequestration site and putting it back underground, that's not a very large cost.

19:33 By creating situations with pure CO2, you're getting rid of most of the cost of emissions-free fossil fuels. So that's the reason why this dilution effect is so important. And we're talking about

19:48 CO2 in the atmosphere. That's 400, we're measuring it in parts per million, 400 parts per million. So that makes it even more difficult. So that's why we can't just turn back the clock by just

19:60 taking CO2 out of the atmosphere 'cause that's like the most expensive way to get it. So

20:06 important distinction that took me like 10 years to kind of come around to in my energy career. So just to like break it down. So you said, okay, you can get out of 100 kind of out of your fuel

20:17 cell tailpipe. If you go to like an emission stack, like a factory, like emission stack or a power plant emission stack, that's 15. And when you say 400 parts per million, if I'm doing it out

20:30 there, that's 04 004. 004. you're really doing a ton of work to like, sieve out this 004 from the 9996.

20:41 Yeah, exactly. And so the logic is let's just do that before it gets hard. In thermodynamics,

20:47 there's an amount of work required to separate gases, and it's called the entropy of gas mixing. Okay, so like, let's talk about Skittles, for instance. Like if you mix them all up and told your

20:59 kid to separate them, they would take them some work, right? Do they just eat the ones they separate, 'cause that might influence their ability to do the work? I'll leave that at the

21:10 end of

21:12 the day, 'cause I don't know what they're doing. They'll bill not energy. Yeah, exactly. So if they're already all pre-organized, you don't have to do any work to separate them. So that's like

21:16 the most basic way to explain this and how it was explained to me in thermodynamics. So the idea of carbon capture is you gotta have something that grabs the CO2, but then you gotta have something

21:28 releases the CO2 and it takes work to release the CO2. and from like a solvent. And that's the way we're doing it. Now we put the solvent into a smokestack that stuff grabs a CO2 and then we heat

21:40 up that solvent and that releases the CO2. So in my fuel cell, we don't have to do this though because the CO2 is like 80, 90 percent. And when you chill the CO2, that will change the partial

21:58 pressure of the gas, but we still will have the opportunity to liquefy enough of it to take out the CO2. So it's got to be high concentration, so you can just chill it. And because if it's not

22:10 high concentration, you just try to chill it, all you'll do is change the partial pressure and it won't work. So those are the reasons why it's got to be such highly concentrated CO2 to reduce the

22:21 cost. And the key of the chilling is that you're reducing the volume by like a thousand times, right? So you don't have to carry around a blimp behind you Yes, exactly. So that's the other thing

22:30 that people. Damn, you guys asked good questions, sorry. That's the other thing that people don't understand about CO2 and what I didn't understand, you know, 15 years ago, when I first heard

22:40 about it, I thought, what are these guys doing? They're just shoving gas into a cave, like that's not gonna work, but you take CO2 gas, you liquify it, it becomes like 500 times smaller, and

22:52 then you can pump it just like any other liquid. And when you pump it underground, it's taking up just a fraction of the space, and we have all this space underground because we've been drilling

23:05 for so long. So nobody asked about that vacuum that was left, well, we can fill that with CO2. And you can also put CO2 in saline. I think someone, I'm not kidding, Caldera did a calculation,

23:17 and he said the CO2 in the atmosphere, if you liquified it, it would only be like, less than an inch or something like that. Mm-hmm, or on the earth Yeah, yeah, like it would just be like this

23:27 really, really small layer. So when you think about, you know, 400 parts per million and it's liquefied, which makes it 500 times smaller, like it's just really not that much volume when you

23:37 liquefy it. So I appreciate it. Yeah, and I guess the other way to say that is, is we're reverse drilling with the CO2. That's another like layman's term to kind of explain the sequestration

23:49 phenomenon. Yeah, I guess it makes sense if you think about it, like all the hydrocarbon came from down there. You're pulling it up. This should be the same amount of room to put more liquefied

23:53 carbon back. Especially now that you've stripped out all the hydrogen and other stuff that comes up with it,

24:05 so. Yeah, and after we're done with all the oil and gas wells or saline aquifers, and after we're done with that in like thousands of years, there's ocean space.

24:19 So we got enough CO2 space. Like it's gonna be our grandchildren's problem to what happened. What happens after we run out of

24:26 CO2 space? Cool.

24:32 I am, I'm really curious, you know, because there are a lot of range extender, um, for CVs. I'm sorry, am I saying that right? There's a lot, there's a lot of, um, entrepreneurs working on,

24:44 on, you know, startups that are looking at, uh, CO2 sequestration, um, you know, range extending of C of, uh, EVs. So what is sort of the, you know, how do you sort of get above what's

24:56 already out there? What's your main selling point for what differentiates, um, liquid charge from a lot of the others right now? All right. Thanks for the question. Um,

25:06 so I think the only thing that really is competitive with, you know, our, our marginal cost would be at home charging. Mm hmm. So that's available on like 15 cents a kilowatt hour, maybe a lot

25:18 more in California, but nevertheless, it's very convenient. You're just at home charging. You're going to work. You come back home. You charge there. We can't compete with that. Mm hmm

25:30 anything else, we're very competitive. because the fuel is so cheap to distribute. And unlike engines, we're using this in a fuel cell. So engines are inefficient, they have to be, and fuel

25:47 cells also have waste heat, but they're not nearly as inefficient. So this is a huge step up as far as efficiency, which means we're gonna have a much lower marginal cost than any petroleum-based

25:58 engine, because our fuel costs are similar, but we're more efficient, all right? So that's competing with our carbon infrastructure, but when it comes to future technologies like fast charging,

26:11 that takes up the cost of your charging by like two to four times. So

26:18 people who advocate for EVs, they really don't like to talk about that part. And only 50 of people have access to overnight charging. So it's gonna be a huge problem that half of people on charging,

26:32 that's two to four times as much, okay? The other options that are out there, hydrogen, costs a lot to distribute. Even if you get the cost down, in Texas, we have hydrogen available for a

26:44 dollar a kilogram already, but still distributing that to a gas station and selling it to people would be quite expensive, way more expensive than ethanol is right now. So that's the only thing out

26:55 there that's, running on molecules that gets the same efficiency as S, but it's gonna cost probably twice, at least 50 more, but probably twice as much in the long run as opposed to the ethanol or

27:08 methanol fuels. So that's our competitive edge versus everybody else. And as far as home charging is concerned, since we're just doing a range extender, you can charge it home if you want to as

27:18 well. It's just a range extender. So that's why I can't look away. I just think I'm very competitive across the board So how do people buy the liquid charge system? Is there something you attached

27:32 to the back of your Tesla? I know you were looking at buses at one point as well. No, we're still starting with the larger vehicles just because it's gonna be, it is hard to, the hardest market

27:43 to compete in is light duty vehicles. So that's my ultimate dream is to make it to light duty vehicles, but we're starting with large vehicles and large fleets. 'Cause those are the most charging

27:54 intense applications. And so, you know, more charging intense applications means more expensive electricity. So that's where we can compete. What's what charging intense application? Just to

28:06 explain. Something that you're gonna require a lot of

28:12 power every day. Like a bus goes 18 hours and it is an enormous vehicle. And then it has six hours to charge overnight before it starts it all over again. Like that's charging intense. You're

28:27 going to have to do

28:29 a megawatt hour of charging over six hours. And then you're going to have 50 buses arriving the same location to do that. Like it only takes a handful of fast chargers to really overwhelm a grid.

28:42 Like two Teslas fast charging in a parking lot take up as much electricity as the Walmart does. Just one fast charging gas station takes up about as much power as a small town, like 10, 000 people

28:55 So we're talking about enormous amounts of power that are going to be expensive to install and then difficult to utilize well because you only have six hours to charge. So you can't have a 50

29:08 utilization rate if you only have six hours a day to charge. So to put this in perspective, a megawatt is what it's like 750

29:16 horsepower. Am I doing my math right? And so that's the equivalent. I might be going the other way. It might be a thousand horsepower, 1300 horsepower. Jared's going to go check my math.

29:27 I think it's a 750 watts per horsepower is the way it goes. Okay Google, how many horsepower is it? He's gonna start jogging me right here. He's a thousand megawatts.

29:43 What did we come in out to?

29:46 1 million, 13 million. Okay, so it's a hundred - Horse powers. Okay, I think

29:52 you said a thousand megawatts. Okay, so a megawatt, what you articulated before is right, you got to charge this thing with a megawatt charger for about six hours to make up for 18 hours of work

30:02 and put in perspective, it's kind of like you're going and putting power into this thing like a 1, 300 horsepower engine, right? Yeah. Going, going, going When really like the duty cycle is

30:13 such that you need like a three to 400 horsepower system launch running, right? And so that, which is the size of the engine that's in the buses today is kind of what I'm going at. And so because

30:26 you're concentrating the charging time, essentially overnight over a short period, it's kind of the same net power going out throughout the day, but it's that concentrated time of charging that

30:38 really puts the strain on the grid When you're putting fuel in a system, you're - you know, you fill the thing up in like 30 minutes. That's a lot of power you're actually dumping into the fuel

30:47 tank realistically. That's what makes a range charger really effective 'cause you can feed that 200, 300 horse back kind of as needed. Yeah. Instead of trying to fill it up in this short time,

30:60 right? Yeah, so that was a long analogy to get started. Sorry. I might have to cut a little bit out there. But let me

31:09 try to kind of put some numbers around what you just said. I meant to say you need a megawatt hour of energy and you have six hours to charge then. So on average, that would be a charging rate of

31:21 166 kilowatts, which is probably something closer to 200 horsepower. And so, what you were saying is exactly right, Jason. You've got this kind of large distribution of electrical power that

31:36 cannot be utilized very often. So that's gonna make it necessarily expensive. And what people take for granted is like your home uses like one to 10 kilowatts. But when you fill up your car at the

31:49 gas station we're talking to speeds above one megawatt with that liquid going into your car. People don't appreciate that huge power. And like I was saying at the beginning of this podcast, storage,

32:00 piping and distribution are almost free. I mean, those are 19th century technologies when it comes to liquids So it's extremely fast and effective, unlike fast charging. So that's the big

32:15 advantage, in my opinion, why Thomas Edison lost, why we're driving internal combustion engines. So I'm just curious, can we just take a back to

32:30 the beginning of what's

32:34 your background in this and where did you learn to keep all these big numbers in your head?

32:40 So

32:42 my backstory is

32:46 I really got into energy because of 911. And when I grew up,

32:54 in the 90s, there was a lot of war movies and my dad narrowly missed the Vietnam draft and some of his friends did not. So I was very conscious of the military growing up

33:09 And then 911 happened and then I just became obsessed with energy. And then that kind of grew into an obsession with climate change.

33:19 Once that started becoming more known in the 2000s. Like Al Gore's movie got my attention. I'm gonna tell you like, I agree with everything you said, but he got my attention. And so after that,

33:30 I just thought, wow, our national security depends on us not using oil and our economy or its health depends on us, emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. Like we have huge, huge, huge changes that

33:43 we need to make. So that's why I went into mechanical engineering. That's why I took a job developing solar power in California after I graduated. And then after that, I went back to grad school

33:55 to get a PhD in engineering and public policy. And then after that, I moved to Washington DC to be a consultant. And then when I was consulting for these clients, they always want to know what's

34:05 next. And I didn't know what to tell them. So that's why I got into hydrogen so much And then I just kind of went my own direction. That's a great demand. It got way too technical. Like people in

34:17 Washington DC tell me if it doesn't fit on a three by five card written in huge Sharpie marker, don't even try to get it across. Don't even try to share that. It's got to hit the sound bite. Yeah,

34:29 yeah. Exactly. I mean, they talk to a lot of people every day. I'm not saying I could keep that up. So you got to keep a simple message for them And, um, Yeah, they're not ready for hydrogen,

34:42 let alone all of my ideas about hydrogen. So instead of keeping on a three by five card, you wrote a book. So I'm not sure you picked the last little book. Exactly. But tell us about the kind of

34:54 fundraising journey that's taken you from, I think you said you were in DC. You didn't start at the business in DC. And then you went to Indie Bio, which is in California, if I remember. And

35:04 then you came to Houston. So tell us about that journey Well,

35:11 I was trying to advocate for thermal hydrogen like 2018, 2019. What is thermal hydrogen? It's a broader vision for emissions-free liquid fuels. If you Google it, you can read the papers. But I

35:23 figured out that was going to be an impossible task. And I need to focus on one thing. So I said this fuel-cell range extender is a great place to start. Because actually I had coffee with

35:35 Jiggersha who told me, You need to look at using the ethanol, it's already out there. And so that got me down the ethanol trick. So I had a lot of trouble raising money and then out of nowhere in

35:47 late 2021, IndyBio gave me an offer. I thought it was fake. I literally didn't believe this was a real thing until I got into the virtual accelerator and saw everybody else online. 'Cause I had

36:01 never heard of them and they reached out to me. So I got this funding through IndyBio. I had a co-founder. We went through the accelerator in San Francisco It was virtual, Omocron interrupted our

36:11 accelerator big time. And so we graduated, got that funding, and then unfortunately my co-founder decided to quit, but it was actually kind of a blessing because I brought him in to be a solid

36:28 oxide fuel cell expert and now we're not using solid oxide fuel cells anymore. We're gonna try high temperature PIM fuel cells. And the other reason it was a blessing for him to quit because it gave

36:37 me an opportunity to. apply to Greentown Labs. So, I mean, just as soon as this guy quit, I applied

36:44 to Greentown Labs for the day was over. I do remember that. Like, are you serious? Yeah, 'cause I applied once and I didn't make it.

36:57 got So a much better I, application thought as you're I, gonna try again. I

37:02 wanna move the company down to Houston. It's a CO2 sequestration company, so nobody knows more about that than people down here in Houston. And I also wanted to come down here and recruit out of

37:16 this extraordinary, talented engineering pool. And that's worked out well. I've got a new co-founder, used to work for Shell. He's been down here in Texas this late '70s. He's got a PhD from AM,

37:30 so

37:32 I think I got myself a good co-founder So, so far I've been very pleased with Houston.

37:41 I'm wondering if you could break down a little bit about the high temperature pimp fuel cell that you mentioned. How's that different from an S, S-O-F-C? All right, yeah. Good question again,

37:51 guys. All right, solid oxide fuel cell is a ceramic fuel cell and it operates at a temperature of

38:02 900 degrees Celsius. So what I was so attracted to about this fuel cell is that it actually filters pure oxygen So that's the carbon capture phenomenon we were talking about before, 'cause if you

38:13 filter pure oxygen, then you are not allowing nitrogen to get into the

38:20 reactants. So that means you're creating pure CO2. All right, so the problem with solid oxide fuel cells though, is that they're ceramic, they're extremely brittle, so they're not really ready

38:30 yet for the mobile application. I mean, some people are making stronger fuel cells, but they're not quite ready. And the other problem is, you can't really do roll-to-roll processing with them.

38:40 And so the proton exchange membrane fuel cells can do roll-to-roll processing. And that's what makes batteries so cheap is that you just have a roll and you cut it and that's your fuel cell. Okay,

38:53 and that's what I would say you get so much higher volume. Yeah, much higher volume, lower cost. Can't do that with the solid oxide fuel cell. So I discovered what a high temperature PIM fuel

39:03 cell was as opposed to a low temperature PIM. So low temperature PIM is what everybody else is using. It's lower than 100 degrees Celsius. And it can only handle pure hydrogen. So that's the

39:15 reason we're not using it, because we've got to feed reformate into this fuel cell. And what's reformate? Reformate is what comes out of your reforming process. And that means

39:30 when we're reforming ethanol into hydrogen CO2 and, there's a lot of things also coming out that aren't hydrogen and CO2, and the low temperature PEM fuel cell can't even handle that CO2. Wait, so

39:44 let me step back. So you got a process that sits in front of the fuel cell called a reformer. I assume a machine that does that, and what you put the ethanol in, and then you heat it up. Yeah,

39:54 do a partial oxidation process over a catalyst, and that reforms it into hydrogen and CO2. It's not perfect, so. And then that then feeds into your own panel. That goes into the fuel cell Yeah,

40:05 and so we can't use a low-temperature pen fuel cell because of that, because it's, you know, the reforming's imperfect, plus you have all that CO2. So this high-temperature pen fuel cell can

40:15 handle the reforming, can handle the CO2, methane, all kinds of other stuff, basically

40:23 what's not sulfur, it can handle. And what is really great about this fuel cell is that at the same time it's removing hydrogen So it goes from mostly hydrogen to mostly CO2. So we've got our

40:36 concentration problem solved. And then like the icing on the cake with the high temperature pen fuel cell, it operates at almost 200 degrees Celsius. Oh, so hot. I thought you were gonna say much

40:46 hotter. No, but still 200 degrees Celsius is good. Yeah. It's a lot better than 80. So that means your heat exchange is gonna be a lot more effective because there's a greater temperature

40:57 difference. And

40:60 that also means we can use the heat to do something, which we use it

41:06 for an ammonia-based chiller, which is what chills are CO2 into a liquid. So that waste heat actually gets turned into very cold temperature, negative 30 degrees Celsius with an efficiency of like

41:19 25. So pretty terrible, but it's free heat.

41:24 So it's just a bunch of heat exchangers, no compressors. So less pneumatic work. Yeah. And so, Do you source the fuel cells from somebody else? Or is

41:34 that, you know, how does that work? Yeah, well, our plan right now is to outsource the fuel cell production. High temperature PIM, it's having a moment right now.

41:45 Zero VIA just got named like one of the top companies out there, I forgot to publish that list, sorry, I forgot. But,

41:53 so what are some notable PIM suppliers? So you said zero VIA is one? Well, they're a company that's using high temperature PIM, Advent is another company that's manufacturing it, but all of these

42:04 patents come out of BASF. Oh, okay. So, there's been some big companies, and basically though what's happening is, it hasn't scaled up yet, but it's a lot of the same chemistry as low

42:18 temperature PIM. So the supply chain is all right there, which is what got me so excited. 'Cause when my old co-founder quit and I looked in the solid oxide fuel cells, I'm like, Oh my God, this

42:27 is a point like nobody even wants to talk to me. People are talking me out of this. That's like the worst thing I could ever have happened. So, but when it comes to low temperature pimp, people's

42:36 attitude or high temperature and people's attitudes are, I can build you a manufacturing plant. We have the patents, we have the materials, we have the experience, we can do that. All we have to

42:44 do is scale it up. So that's what really convinced me that this is the way to go. It's not as efficient, but it's so much easier and it's gonna cost a lot less. So to anchor this and what people

42:58 know, what is a Bloom box? Okay, so Bloom is a company that's kind of a pioneer, solid oxide fuel cells. So they're SOCs, okay. And that's stationary distributed power for like data centers.

43:12 Very different,

43:15 and that's part of why you can work is, it doesn't move, so it doesn't have to do with like the vibration of mobility. That's exactly right. Got it, that's exactly right. Okay

43:24 How's the, how's been the fundraising trip? Abysmal. Well, tell us about why it's been abysmal.

43:37 Mainly because what I'm doing is really out of strip with the mainstream and just about every, nobody has ever accused me of not having an original idea. They're all saying like nobody else is doing

43:50 this, Jared. Why are you doing this? Nobody's talking about ethanol. Nobody wants to do, well, some people want to do fuel cells, but not very many, but nobody else wants to do mobile carbon

43:59 capture other than Saudi Aramco. So that makes them very uncomfortable, plus there's all these subsidies for fast charging and for hydrogen. And so that's really, nobody wants to fight the

44:14 government. It's hard enough, and you have to fight the government on top of that. Plus right now we're looking at 60 interest rates,

44:23 which makes it really, really hard for early stage company So the ironic thing about that is. When I started this book, interest rates were 1. And I thought, how high can I make interest rates

44:37 and be realistic? And I thought 8 was the highest I could go. We're already at 6. Yep, yep, yep. So it's not fully science fiction, right? Yeah, which is the other reason why I'm like, I

44:47 gotta get this book out, like, I was right. When you mentioned mobile, mobile, was it mobile carbon sequestration? Mobile carbon capture Mobile carbon capture, did you explain that earlier?

45:02 'Cause I think I might have missed that. No, yeah, what happens after you've captured it, essentially, right? Yeah, 'cause you're saying that's what differentiates other forms, but 'cause I'm

45:12 visualizing what this mobile thing is, what is this? Well, mobile carbon capture is kind of a phrase that I think Saudi Ramco came up with, because they were doing carbon capture on diesel trucks

45:26 and a company called Remora is now doing this.

45:30 They basically just capture the CO2 off the stack and carry around the CO2 and then take it to a gas station for eventual sequestration.

45:41 I'm doing that, but I don't have the carbon capture process per se because I'm creating the CO2 in pure form. They're kind of, Saudi Aramco has kind of been pioneering this idea that you could

45:55 exchange CO2 at a gas station You know, if you look up the phrasemobile carbon capture in Aramco, you can see the work that they've done. And

46:05 so I guess this is, it should be strategic for traditional energy companies to look at this because it enables them to continue producing oil, which they produce, but solves a big key challenge in

46:20 the value chain of like, how do we actually capture the carbon? And so for you, the storage is on the vehicle. Right. What happens to that storage when it gets full? Let's start there. Okay,

46:35 so the CO2 goes back into the gas tank, basically. The gas tank has a separator and the separator moves like a piston cylinder. So as the fuel is used, the CO2 back fills the anti-space. All

46:50 right, so from there, this liquid CO2,

46:54 you hook up an extra gas hose at the gas station It goes into the CO2 storage from there. And then from there, the CO2 will go via an 18-wheeler to either a market opportunity or sequestration. So

47:08 CO2

47:12 infrastructure is like a10 billion industry right now, mainly for various uses of CO2 like soda. So that's already built out, but the issue is gonna be getting the CO2 to a sequestration

47:27 opportunity. You can find that in Texas, but. A lot of other paces, we don't have CO2 pipelines, so that's gonna be a bit of a challenge, but there's also a huge market for CO2, so we can sell

47:39 to that for the time being.

47:42 And so I assume you empty the CO2 every time you feel a lot, that's kind of the ratio of storage you need? Yeah, that's exactly right. The CO2 is a little bit larger than the ethanol, but only

47:52 marginally so. You just design that into the tank. That's exactly right. Okay.

47:59 Do you have more? That was interesting in this question right here. Go for it. The success of your startup, what sort of, 'cause I know when you're applying to a place like Greentown, you have

48:07 to talk about how you're gonna scale up and sort of what are the challenges to scaling what you're working on. I'd say the

48:19 challenge is getting people out of the electrify everything mindset. I mean, I'm electrifying the drivetrain, but we're using a liquid fuel. And I think that people really associate any liquid

48:29 fuel fossil fuels. And so, you know, they just kind of dismiss it right then.

48:36 And I just think, you know, like, I think if you had a room full of engineers and you said, Hey, would you rather, would you rather build CO2, recollections or recollection stations or fast

48:49 chargers? I think they'd all choose the CO2. But that's really not something where people have their mindset right now. So I have to get over that, I have to scale up this high temperature pin,

49:03 which I'm getting help doing. I mean, there's other people looking at that. But then basically, we need to get serious about sequestering CO2. It's still too difficult. I feel like in 2024, we

49:16 should have been much further along by now. Because it doesn't matter where you are in the political spectrum. We need to sequester CO2, it's already in the atmosphere, so.

49:28 We need to make this easy to do. If we want people to do it. So to me, that's the biggest challenge, other than just how hard it is to balance your books when it comes to running a company. I

49:40 mean, that's hard too. But the big grand challenge is just getting people out of the mindset of electrifying everything and then getting them on board with sequestering CO2. To me, those are the

49:52 two biggest red blocks. Well, we're coming up on a little bit on time. So I wanna talk a little bit about Houston Now that you're here, how did you find the Houston innovation ecosystem? You've

50:02 been here for, what, 18 months now? Yeah, I've been here for about a year and a half.

50:08 I have been so impressed. I really like green town labs. I really like the island. And I really like what you're doing, Jason. I mean, you're hustling your ass off. You're creating, you know,

50:23 another ecosystem.

50:26 I just feel like Houston has a can-do attitude, you know, and it's really refreshing 'cause in Washington DC, it's easy to get negative. And

50:38 the price is right down here. People like businesses, people like

50:44 engineering, you know, like this is like the biggest concentration of chemical engineers in the world. So I had like, I just been so impressed that everybody is so encouraging and wants to build

50:58 something, you know, this is a hard tech town, this ain't San Francisco. All right, and it's now Washington DC. And as an engineer, I am really loving it. And I also love, I just love how

51:11 easy it is to live in Houston and also the food's unbelievable. So I'm gonna stay.

51:20 And for other reasons I like that the hard tech town. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I want to know what food you you're seeking out while you're here What's the well? That's funny story. I love the

51:30 text mix but you can get anything and I love that text mix is mixed with a lot of things But to be honest with you I become obsessed with grilling because I have a backyard now Hmm and the weather

51:42 allows you to grill a year round around here. So like I'm going to Costco and freezing meat And I'm grilling all the time. Yeah, I'm loving that. Here's his next book. It's gonna be a cookbook

51:55 High-five grilling But I'm

51:59 curious. Where are you from though? What do you claim is your background? Yeah, born and raised in Indiana Indianapolis and I went to college in Indiana, too So I didn't leave Indiana until I

52:09 moved to California in 2004. I Figured it was Midwest because you said soda

52:15 As opposed to pop or pop

52:19 I'm from New Jersey, so we call it something different, but soda, I feel, is that? Actually, in the Midwest, people say pop. Do they say pop? Yeah, and I consciously had to purposely say,

52:28 get out of that and say soda. Okay, you're right. That would be very accessible. That was the switch. Had to hide my Midwestern accent there. What do you call a water fan? Let's go with - Water

52:37 fan? No, not a bubbler. No, I never heard a bubbler. What's a bubbler? A bubbler? Yeah.

52:45 I think that's technically a southern thing, but who knows? I never heard of that. So before we got on the show, you were talking about, looking for Jujitsu gym, is that like a, are there some

52:56 hidden gems around Houston that people should know about? Man, I wouldn't know. I'm looking

53:01 for my brother. My brother is a mixed martial artist. Still does Jujitsu. Yeah, so he's coming to Houston next month. And so I was asking Colin, like, can you get my brother into this, into a

53:12 gym around here? And then we discussed whether I would do it My brother said if you're only gonna do it one time. Don't do it. Just get your ass kicked. Yep. So don't do it

53:22 So we don't have one of those yet for the audience When you think about the Houston ecosystem, are there any gaps that you you you wish were filled?

53:34 Well, I kind of wish the Austin financial Excitement would move to Houston meet me like the venture capital. Yeah, like the yeah the venture capital scene like that's That's mainly present in San

53:48 Francisco in New York and to a lesser extent, maybe Miami, but

53:54 You know, I like to see capital come here. I'd like to see more VCs in Houston and I mean it kind of seems like that's gonna happen Right. I mean Elon Musk is putting his money in Texas. So, you

54:04 know, you might happen. Okay I guess as we wind up is there anything that the audience can do to support you in your goals Question number one is where do they find your book? I guess. Books

54:17 available on Amazon just punch in greetings lunar colonists and you'll find it and Yeah, if you are if you are interested in startups and kind of fuel cells and liquid fuels COT sequestration, you

54:30 know I'm not hard to find and Yeah, I think You know if you just Are interested in energy and don't want to read something too technical. Maybe a little fun Maybe even funny my book would be a good

54:43 place to start Cool, and and where can they find you on the internet? My Twitter handle is Jared J-A-R-E-D underscore T-H-2

54:55 Full names Jared more so you can find me on LinkedIn as well. All right. Cool. Well, thanks for being with us Well, thank you guys for having me. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.

55:02 Likewise