Decarbonizing Industry: AtmosZero's Game-Changing Technology Explained
[Music] hi everyone this is James from the control listen podcast brought to you by octopart today I have with me Ashwin selvie uh he is from a company called Atmos zero he's uh the global head of Business Development and the co-founder of the company thank you so much ashon for coming on the show it's great to talk to you hey James thanks for having me here and hello podcast for listeners welcome um just for to start I guess do you want to maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and a bit about what you do at the company yeah sure um so I'm Ashman salie like you mentioned uh co-founder and chief commercial officer for at maero U Got a background mechanical engineering and I've been doing climate Tech kind of work for almost 20 years now wow um I'm gonna get into this later but I I do have a question about how how it's changed uh over that 20 years uh to start I guess we should probably learn a bit about the company do you want to tell us a bit about what the company does sure and there's been a lot of change in the last 20 years I'm happy to talk about that great ammo zero what we do is focus on decarbonizing hard to decarbonize sectors specifically we focus on the industrial sector we make Steam generating heat pumps because industry itself is a large large emitter of emissions and it's been notoriously hard to decarbonize because you can't just take the process that makes food and decarbonize that that and have that scale to something that makes chemicals right right but the real unifying thread there is heat and in particular steam uh if you can decarbonize steam you can decarbonize you know two more than two gigatons of CO2 emissions per year it's huge opportunity and what we're doing is focusing on a technology that can be standardized and scalable so that we can deploy uh very quickly and in large numbers of technology that can rapidly help decarbonize the industrial sector that's awesome very exciting stuff do you see that sort of like an untapped Market something that's it's it's been there this whole time we just didn't think about really you know harnessing it that's a great question so in the industrial sector when I speak about industrial sectors we're talking about like manufacturing we're talking about Pulp and Paper food and beverage and that could be like breweries meat packing chemicals Pharmaceuticals all these kinds of things that touch your life every day like to the beer you drink to the toothpaste that hopefully you use this morning uh it's all touched by steam effectively industrial heat right and so there's been opportunities that we've looked at before to be able to uh decarbonize various spots of heat here and there it's never really been kind of a unified approach it's always been kind of Custom Engineered solution here Custom Engineered solution there U maybe it depends a little bit too much on local economics there's never been kind of like this standard boiler you know today's boilers are just something you can buy and come in a standard spec that you can just install with the same connections and the same outputs uh it's always been a little bit here and there we're working on making a standard boiler but without any on-site emissions and ultra high efficiency that can be electrified and really make uh these Technologies cost competitive with today's technology oh that's very exciting I guess before you get too deep into it you uh should maybe explain what industrial decarbonization is yeah yeah like I men um you know the industrial side you know they there's so many different processes that exist but there's so much of it that depends on heat they need heat to do something at altering chemical States or physical States and heat is best transferred by steam there's a lot of energy density in Steam uh because you're taking water from liquid form making it into a vapor and using that to really bring things like large kettles of liquid up to a boil very quickly uh which is important for in manufacturing time and so when I speak about industrial decarbonization I'm spe speaking specifically on the heat side because that's what we're focused on as a large untapped potential there's obviously other sides to it too and and the way that I'm talking about it is how do I eliminate point source emissions for manufacturing facilities that have carbon but also things like KNX or socks that help uh reduce the local air quality impact from combustion onsite it's interesting we we had a a guest a while back who did something similar not with uh boilers though but uh it was basically some panels that you could put into your uh combustion based uh equipment I guess that saved or stored and created 30% more energy from an existing um you know combustion reaction so it's interesting that this company is springing up in a bunch of different industrial areas now including yours who are saying hey we don't have to reinvent the wheel we can just make the wheel infinitely more efficient while we figure out renewable energy side of things you know I love that you said that because when we started at maero you know back in 2022 we're not here trying to be perpetually an R&D World we're working on things that can scale into industry and into customers hands as quickly as possible so that we can have near-term real world impacts like right now right you know so within starting the company two and a half years ago we're actually going to have our first commercial product out the door in just a few months from now in March 2025 and that's just showing you exactly like the focus that we approach this problem with saying we're going to leverage as much like supply chain and established industry as possible invent a couple things that enable our Tech so that you know we can actually get it out in the market to do things that other people can't do and really put this out in the field so I really like that perspective of like let's not reinvent the wheel let's get the wheels on the road yeah exactly it's just you have this existing infrastructure which you can use to make a huge impact in in you know uh fighting climate change uh why not harness it while we do the other work in the background that's exactly right yeah um so I guess what's the difference between boiler 2.0 and a standard boiler yeah yeah so um you know standard boilers today it's it's those fossil fired assets so you know predominantly in the US it's natural gas uh some places overseas it can still be using liquid fuels uh or even coal uh they're burning a fossil fuel ultimately to make water hot and convert that into steam then they use that steam somewhere in their manufacturing process sterilization boiling whatever it is uh to do something else useful with it right it's really that formation of steam that we're focused on and instead of burning a fossil fuel we actually have a heat pump based solution that takes heat from a heat Source whether that's air or whether that's water and uses electricity to upgrade that heat to then use that heat to to make Steam use that heat to boil water into steam and use that steam the same exact way that you're using it with fossil fire boilers today nothing in your process or facility has to change I literally just plug my steam into your uh process and it works the same exact way the way thing that we're doing is eliminating the consumption of on-site fossil fuels and eliminating the process of making on-site emissions uh because now we're an electrified solution and by using a heat pump solution ution we super super high efficiency for example today's natural gas boilers have a huge range of efficiency some people advertise 90% efficiency we've measured things in the field around 60% our solution can be upwards of 200% efficient because we're sourcing heat from somewhere so we pay for one unit of energy in we get two units of energy out because the other unit of energy is coming from air or water and that's effectively for free we're not paying for that right right it's also neutral that's exactly right yeah um what's sort of the cost of this boiler compared to Standard Market boiler yeah it's interesting that you say that right because if you're talking to customers today uh that are trying to decarbonize your real solution the only real commercially viable solution today uh is an electric resistive or electrode boiler so going back to that example of you know you pay for one unit of energy in you get two units of energy out for for my heat pump uh traditional boilers you pay for you know one unit of energy in you get 085 units of heat out electric boilers are more efficient electric resistive boilers are more efficient one unit of energy in one unit of heat out roughly but that means you're paying electrical prices instead of natural gas prices so your your cost is rather High to operate right that being said these Technologies are actually making a market traction uh there's lots of companies out there deploying electric resistant boilers right now to help them decarbonize their Manu manfacturing process if instead of that you use our technology we're talking about payback periods of less than two to three years right because of how efficient our technology is I guess it kind of leads me to another question so what's sort of like the um scalability or plug-and playay uh potential for something like this yeah yeah so you know what I like to say is we're exactly like the boilers you're used to today the only thing that changes is your energy input so instead of a liquid fuel or like natural gas as an energy source that you burn we just change that for electricity and all the connections to the system are all the same so traditional boilers today they all use water as as something that they converted into steam so we would use that same exact water we call that boiler feed water and use our device to convert that boiler feed water into steam and that's the output from our system just like it is for traditional boilers and that steam just has a flange uh that connects to the rest of the system in your building so typically you might have one two Etc boilers all making steam tying it into a common steam header and from that header that steam goes into your production facility and does something useful right right we would just tie into that same exact header uh and let that steam go into the same uh end users as it is so we can tie in actually with in parallel with existing assets if you want some sort of redundancy or if you want to decarbonize X fraction of your steam or we could fully replace all of your existing boilers as it is interesting that was actually give you my next question um so okay that's great I mean it's it works just as well with an existing system as it does and stalled from scratch in the construction processed yeah you know what we're seeing is uh certainly a great application for retrofit uh what we do is really streamline that um we don't have to interfere with the building's processes or with your proprietary process or even have you adjust any of your process conditions we literally just tie it in and there's no change in your uh manufacturing operations whatsoever uh if you look at new builds we can absolutely do that too uh as a as a example case if you're a a manufacturing process that maybe doesn't have access to steady state sources of heat like a source of hot water or something like that we can use our air source component and pull heat from ambient air which is always steady uh or we could also you know liquid Source it if if you have that available ultimately the point is this if you're trying to decarbonize uh steam generating heat pumps atos zero steam generating heat pump is something that's the most cost-effective way of doing so interesting so for someone who doesn't know a huge amount amount boilers what's the sort of size range of something like this so for an industrial output is it immensely larger than something like a small factory setting or is it just multiple of the same unit that you use to achieve the same goal oh that's a fantastic question um so the whole idea is again we're we're modular right so if one of our units you know Footprints 8 foot wide 20 ft long kind of like a stipping a standard shipping container um that makes 2,000 pounds of steam per hour so one ton of steam per hour uh that's great for like small to midsize factories if you need more than 2,000 pounds of steam per hour you would just add a second one or third one in parallel these things all feed a common header uh that's exactly what you see in Industry today they have multiple boilers all making steam that just tie into a common header we have exactly the same principle that's our first product um we will be making different products in the future likely a larger system in a few years from now wow there you go yeah you and I oh sorry I was just going to say going back to what I said earlier about why we're more more coste effective but we talked about again the the efficiency of our system and why that's so much higher than conventional boilers because we're able to leverage thermodynamics to really be uh leveraging sources of heat and upgrading that heat instead of creating that heat from scratch right right the other aspect of why we're more coste effective and this kind of ties into what I just mentioned is um the integration effort we don't need to shut down facilities for an extended period of time to install our system we don't have to shut down facilities to be able to go and get hot sources of waste heat to be able to drive our system right that ends up being really these Custom Engineered solutions that end up just costing a lot of time and money to implement and worse than that is if you you know most facilities or companies have more than one facility in the world so if you're doing this intensive thing at one location and you're like okay great let me go do a second one guess what that second location is almost always different from the first one so now you got to go back and do all this custom engineering again to be able to decarbonize that location that makes it really slow and costly we solve that by just creating this modular plug play solution yeah I I've noticed quite a few companies are doing that and I think those are the ones that are going to roll out an impactful change the fastest just because it's so scalable as you mentioned earlier get those Wheels on the road yeah exactly you and I were talking about something briefly before we started recording which was um how has I guess steam Tech progressed uh over the past few decades yeah that's that's really funny um honestly since the Industrial Revolution it's it's all been the same sure got things have gotten safer right you know you have less boilers exploding knock on wood right um but uh generally it's the the the principle is the same you're converting a fossil asset from you know thermal heat into boiling water and making steam out of that and again using that steam to do something useful with it but that process it's been roughly the same for almost 200 years now there hasn't been a change in that until uh things like a steam generating heat pump come along we're changing the fundamental process of how do you make that Steam and more importantly changing the efficiency at which you do that Alum 365 lets you hold the fastest design reviews ever share your designs from anywhere and with anyone with a single click it's easy leave a comment tagging your teammate and they'll instantly receive an email with a link to the design anyone you invite can open the design using a web browser using the browser interface you're able to comment mark up cross probe inspect and more more comments are attached directly to the project making them viewable within alting designer as well as through the browser interface give it a try and get started with Alim 365 today do you think steam's going to continue to be around as long as we're around basically absolutely uh there's so many processes in the manufacturing world and even in the like the commercial the built environment world that needs Steam for heat transfer you know one of the the advantages of of steam is that it's so energy dense uh that you can use a lot smaller piping uh in your facility as opposed to converting over to like hot water you need to increase your pipe size to do that because your energy density is just lower um there's so many processes things like sterilization or things like bringing uh things up to a boil which you just need high temperature for that you can't get away from sure you'll get some competing Trends or competing Technologies out there that are converting so you University campuses from District steam you know generally University campuses have this Central Steam Plant make Steam uh put it into underground networks and go into end users like buildings around campus um that could convert to hot water uh because ultimately you just really need that for heating of ambient spaces but there's facilities in those campuses like life science buildings or Hospital buildings that will always still need Steam and so you need to be able to do that in a cost effective way and also be able to reduce a carbon signature of that steam right Ste I might be wrong with this but I'm sure you know steam can also be used as like a heating system in itself right like under running underneath buildings or like uh through buildings that's exactly right so if you've ever been in New York and you've walked through the streets you've seen the steam coming out that's exactly what that is uh that is a steam Network underground that goes into apartment buildings Office Buildings and goes through steam risers that now provides space heating uh or you know in some places it can be exchanged for hot water or even process Steam for some of the Industrials there that could use it for manufacturing or uh sterilization so could a system like that also uh take advantage of your technology absolutely anyone that needs steam we can go in there and help create that steam in a decarbonized fashion that's great that's so applicable it's so wild when you really dig into this um and you know this world has existed for many many decades but the more and more you dig into it uh and you realize how much steam actually impacts our life right these clothes right I ironed this shirt that was steam of course I'm not going to make a heat pump powered iron but um you know like textiles uh you know metals and and plastic Etc all need process heat and typically that's Steam right no it's it's one of those things it's like uh I've had guest John talking about sensor technology it's one of those things that's in your everyday life but you don't think about or appreciate it that's right and and the range of steam is also you the range of heat in the industrial sector is pretty varied we focus solely on like the 100 Celsius to 200 Celsius range these this temperature range is like very applicable to that food and beverage chemicals Pulp and Paper types of Industries uh that for roughly 50% of industrial heat need just that 100 degree range that's what lets us be able to create a standardized product because our our window is just like we're focused on this temperature range because now we can make something that can scale various different Industries and more importantly also scale you know from different continents right we're based in the US we're based in Colorado but we also have a subsidiary in the EU and the Netherlands because we see this being a global challenge right you you have manufacturing all over the world and they all need some ways of a way of cost effectively decarbonizing that manufacturing facility we're focused on that but you know getting back to the metal example A lot of these uh kind of heat needs are much much higher at temperatures we're talking about you know 1500 and and thereabouts we're not going to touch that temperature range with our heat pump when you get to that high temperature uh efficiencies will will drop off um quite a bit where it doesn't really make sense um we're focused solely on that kind of low to medium temperature repr pressure steam okay well that makes sense so I you actually just uh made me think of a question so what differences have you noticed between the US and the EU in regards to renewable energy and Technology such as this oh boy uh I wonder how much I want to step in in when I my answer here um you know the US benefits a lot from uh really low cost of energy low cost of natural gas um all throughout the us we have access to that on site um and so that keep prices pretty low when you go to other parts of the world and let's just talk about the EU because that's where we're based uh energy is different priced because they have different let's call it externalities included or call it carbon pricing right Europe has something called the ETS the emissions trading scheme uh that puts effectively a price on carbon for for industries that says um if you're going to emit over a certain amount of money you need to have you need to pay this much amount of money per ton of carbon that you Adit they also have things like the carbon border adjustment mechanism cbam for short that helps to like say okay because we're implementing the ETS manufacturers might find it more economical go you know overseas somewhere and make Steam with uh make products with with dirty um dirty energy and import that over cbam is helping to adjust for the carbon signature of the things you're importing into Europe just so that you can create more of a even and fair playing field so you know you look at other countries and their energy pricing is is very different from the US and they're actually different from other countries to other countries too and different policies that can be uh driving that that um energy pricing and it's just it's a world of opportunity everywhere yeah I can tell you New Zealand and Australia is energy processing is very different to the US I experienced that for many years it's a relief coming here yeah yeah yeah for sure so how have Global Supply chains affected your company and what you're trying to do also another great question you know one of the things and the reasons that we can get to Market so quickly is because we're leveraging a huge fraction of established uh supply chain products for our our product you know for example a heat exchanger or a valve I don't need to reinvent that right these things exist for both residential commercial industrial side of things I don't need to go in there and and just tune something just for my product that now creates a whole new part number and whole new manufacturing process right I can and I could I could maybe get some Advantage out of doing that but our whole point is speed to Market and being able to get again these these devices on the road that have good reliability that have good availability of spare parts by using standard products you know we can just go and get a replacement part fairly easy uh from our our our vendors and more importantly we can have multiple vendors multiple sources of these parts so that if say one vendor from a certain part of the world uh loses access to something we can go and buy a replacement part from someone else that way we're not subject to a lot of the supply chain constraints that could exist sure there's some other things like we're an electrified solution right getting electrical power capacity at certain locations might take a little bit more time if we have to upgrade local Transformers or switch gears right man tell you what you give me a switch gear or a transformer in less than like 12 months we're going to be best friends uh so that that's that's just going to be a challenge in general with electrification because of the demand of things like data centers or those kinds of heavy consumers interesting so kind of coming to the end of the questions I had one I wanted to make sure I asked which was do you see technology in this space changing a great deal in the coming years yeah yeah actually so this kind of goes back to what we talked about in the beginning of of the conversation I've been doing this for 20 something almost 20 years now right and I I used to work at Department of energy at rpae I got to see a lot of amazing Technologies then but really just to see uh the traction the last couple years especially with things like the IRA like all the government funding coming out in the US side has really spurred Innovation but more importantly deployment and adoption now I going back to it again like yes we absolutely need to keep doing research on new technologies moving us forward things that are applicable 10 20 30 years down the road we need to be focusing also on deploying things right now so we can have tangible results right now and and and I'm starting to see a lot of not just innovators or companies focusing on that but also like consumers customers that are buying these products actually putting money where their mouth is like you know in just the last year or two a lot of people went from talking about stuff to deploying there's a lot of new studies out there a lot of people have goals for 2030 and guess what it's almost 2025 people need to start acting to make that goal feasible that's the biggest change I've seen is people are actually starting to stick to this not just like a domestic thing it's not like a oneoff a California's off doing California things yeah it's a global thing right people are really starting to pay attention companies are have Footprints all over the world and they're all making every one of these companies all over the world follow decarbonization strategies I love that no me too um I think Europe's been kind of a Guiding Light for that for a while now um the legislation's been pretty far ahead of a lot of other regions yeah yeah I mean I I love that what I'm also seeing is sometimes it's not even legislation driven sometimes is just company like you know board of directors or seite mandated like we're going to do the right thing here uh sure needs to come down to economics as well but I've I've talked to a number of customers or sorry yeah customer that aren't being driven to do this by legislation but by their own like internal alignment no that's awesome I'd love to see that so there a cultural shift basically is what you're saying that that's a simpler way of saying it exactly um and I have to ask you before we end because I uh I meant to ask it earlier you mentioned you have your first real product rolling out last year uh next year do you want to tell us a little bit more about that and what you can say I guess in that space yeah yeah for sure um if you've been following into the news from at maero I'm happy to say that you know our first customer New Belgium Brewing is is taking our product this 2,000 pounds of steam per hour device and installing it in their Brewing facility in Fort Collins Colorado as a pilot product uh pilot project uh that's going live in March roughly 2025 we're going to be putting it in the field making steam that's going to be used in their kettles and in their processes uh just like their Steam from their current boiler ERS are and I'm happy to say that doing that they're going to be able to start making decarbonized beer uh something that I love uh not the flat kind of course like the kind that's uh low carbon signature beer uh starting in just a few months from now uh super stoked about that uh that's a public project uh there's a number of other deployments coming up after that that are all over different sectors in different continents so you know chemicals food and beverage etc etc etc that we'll be deploying with uh that you'll just have to stay tuned for more public information on no that's awesome really exciting uh so last serious question how achievable do you see our current climate goals with the rate that were starting to finally change yet boy that's a great question and I don't think I'm qualified enough to answer that um I'll just say this there's a reason I've you know I got really into commercialization you know I did the PhD mechanical engineering back in Michigan go Blue uh the thing is like that's fantastic but what really got me excited is my time at Department of energy when I was at RP where I got to look at commercialization right ultimately your technology doesn't mean anything unless you can get it into the market in some form or fashion and that's what I'm really excited about because I personally don't think we have a lot of time to to sit around and and wait I I'm much more focused on getting things out the door and making real world impact and that's why I'm grateful for partners like new Belgian Brewing because that they help us with that part prove our technology and then be able to scale that to a number of other customers I don't know what this means for overall climate change at all um that's why I think it's all of the above kind of solution going forward but I know that I can focus on getting something out the door quickly that can also be a long lasting product we're talking 20 30 40 years so we can have just you know things that can go out tomorrow but still be making impact into the far future right I think companies like yours and others like yours uh are going to be a big part of that change because I think this there's some people that are I guess idealists who who want to immediately switch to Renewables 100% which would be awesome uh but also not very achievable um and then you have others who are hanging on to the the fossil fuel side of things but there are companies like yours who say hey look obviously we need to make changes uh how can we make as much change as possible within the existing systems and I think without that it's not going to happen completely agreed case in point is this right my first view customers we're talking about industrial heat decarbonization we're talking about replacing traditional boilers right what we're actually doing the next few months sorry new first few customers is deploying our asset in parallel with their existing boilers so they get the redundancy or the drisk capability of saying okay if this heat pump you know has issues or can't Supply the steam I'm looking for my manufacturing facility doesn't go down I still have my boilers I can keep over here right but what know but the whole point is I can run that mzero system and start making decarbonized Steam and replace 50 70% of my steam load from this system get a huge amount of decarbonization while still being able to have the redundancy if I need it um to be able to to really understand this technology better but and keep my manufacturing going at the same time so it's not this like day one I'm getting rid of everything that you have know and well understand I'm saying I'm going to start deploying this in steps so I can help my customers come with me in that process Le splitting the difference if you will yeah it's uh gradually phasing it out as opposed to just in my opinion from what I've seen that works so much better because you have time to actually troubleshoot see how it plays see what changes you want to make as you follow through that process while still giving them real incedible scope on emissions reductions like real real on-site emissions reductions using our technology exactly exactly yep well uh this has been a fascinating discussion uh but for anyone who wants to follow along with the company stay up to date with all these uh projects you're working on uh what's the best place to do that you know we've got a great uh social media presence on LinkedIn um find us at AtoZ on LinkedIn come to our website sign up for a newsletter well we have a newsletter distribution that goes up roughly quarterly at this point uh with all of our latest and greatest information um from our team structure to projects to future work that's going on so or you know send me a note I'm always happy to to talk to people find us in conferences we'll always be around so um looking forward to hearing from you all yeah and ashin your uh LinkedIn and the company's socials will be dropped in the video description for the interview so any wants to reach out there are more than welcome to excellent and thank you James for all the questions and insights yeah know thank you for coming on it's being really great chatting with you and we're excited to follow along with the company's Journey thank you ahead if you will great and uh for anyone listening at home just tune in next week we'll have another guest for you [Music] [Applause]
2024-11-16 17:12
