Advanced BioFuels USA

(Mote) How climate technology startup Mote will drive decarbonization — … Our company has developed the best solution for the billions of tons of wood waste generated in the world every year. Our proprietary non-combustion thermochemical process turns wood waste into hydrogen fuel and CO2 for permanent geologic storage.

Wood waste (or woody waste biomass) refers to certain urban, agricultural, and forestry products that include used wood pallets, urban forestry residues, nut shells, harvest waste, and forest management residues. Once screened and chipped, these products all look very similar to the bags of mulch you’d find at your local home improvement store (minus the artificial coloring of course).

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Woody biomass does two things during photosynthesis. It absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, and it uses that carbon to store sunlight as energy.

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It turns out that the most valuable technology, on every metric, is letting woody biomass heat itself up in a pressurized container until it becomes a gas. You can then react and separate that gas stream to where it’s just hydrogen fuel and CO2 for permanent geologic storage.

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All the other possible woody biomass technologies lose the stored energy and/or stored carbon. 

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The two ways of making hydrogen today are broken. Your two options are either making it from fracked methane or from highly-purified drinking water. We can’t afford more methane emissions from fracking, and it is hard to justify dedicating the amount of scarce resources (including land, electricity, and water) needed to electrify water into hydrogen. We continue to learn about the underestimation of methane emissions from fracking. And Southern California is already spending billions of dollars to reclaim drinking water from highly contaminated aquifers and the ocean. Waste biomass is much more sustainable than either of these two options.

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Mote’s technology has an ultra-negative carbon footprint because of the atmospheric carbon embodied in woody biomass that we permanently sequester. It is unsurprising that even the best case scenarios for hydrogen production from fracking or drinking water are carbon-intensive and constrained by scarce natural resources.

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First, natural solutions like replanting trees are inexpensive, but there are serious limitations to how much this process can be scaled up and ensuring the permanence of the results is a huge challenge. The second option is Direct Air Capture, which is permanent, but prohibitively expensive, and requires massive amounts of land and energy. Mote’s technology addresses the shortfalls of natural and engineered solutions with a hybrid approach that answers the question of how the world gets to 10-billion-ton scale carbon removal.

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As an example to fit today’s real world alternatives being assessed, if a renewable energy developer combined a polymer electrolyte membrane water electrolysis hydrogen production plant with a solvent Direct Air Capture plant — to produce the same amount of Mote’s hydrogen and CO2 — it would be four times more capital-intensive and nine times more land-intensive. We need an all-of-the-above approach to energy, and Mote fills a critically important gap.

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As we enter our company’s next stage, we will leverage our partnerships — with national labs, universities, and innovative companies — to advance our development of new catalysts and membranes to expand and further develop our new technology.

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We’ve signed terms with an oil major to store our CO2.

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Mote can grow to more than 1,000 utility-scale plants in the U.S. alone.  READ MORE