TechEnergy Ventures has invested in two start-ups developing technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by using the heat from industrial processes to generate electricity and replacing jet fuel with sustainable fuel. The growth potential is enormous.
The TechEnergy Ventures team and Liuminiscent founders.
Sometimes simple technologies can prove transformational. TechEnergy Ventures, the energy transition division of Tecpetrol, has found two technologies that promise to make considerable changes in electricity generation and air travel.
One of these is being developed by Israel-based Luminescent to harness the heat from industrial and distributed generation processes and the earth’s core as Geothermal 2.0 accelerates as a dispatchable renewable energy source.
The potential is vast. About seventy percent of the world’s energy is waste heat, but not much can be harnessed for electricity. Some heat engines do this but are large, expensive, and inefficient, meaning that most waste heat is lost.
Working from scratch, Luminescent created an efficient way to generate zero-emission electricity from any waste heat source. With its technology, a heat-transfer liquid flows into a nozzle, mixing with an expanding working fluid. This isothermal expansion accelerates the heat-transfer liquid to generate energy that moves a turbine in an engine shaft without energy loss.
“This is a completely disruptive approach,” said Andrea Siciliani, an investor at TechEnergy Ventures. “They have designed a fantastic nozzle, which is the core of the technology and is where two fluids meet. One turns from a liquid form to a gaseous form, exchanging energy with the other liquid. And given the expansion, once it turns to gas, it generates thrust that moves the turbine.”
Luminescent’s technology is cheaper to install and more efficient than traditional heat engines. Still, it transforms heat into electricity in smaller generators, widening the potential of this renewable energy source. A steelmaker, for example, can harvest the waste heat from its production process and convert it back to electricity.
“If you’re in an industrial plant, you can use that electricity to feed machines,” Siciliani underlined. “And since it comes from waste heat, you reduce the fossil-based electricity you usually use. You are substituting part of the electricity you use today with one that is free because you have wasted heat to recover.”
The market potential is vast. In the United States alone, the opportunity to use this technology to close the loops of distributed engines of less than 7 MW is $10 billion annually. In contrast, the chance for capturing waste heat from industrial applications is 7.6 GW in that country, equivalent to $11 billion in potential one-off business.
The technology can also convert the heat generated within the earth into electricity through smaller-scale distributed geothermal power plants. “We think this technology could unlock some geothermal potential that today is unexpressed because the heat source is too low in temperature or the overall efficiency is too low,” Siciliani said. “It could potentially unlock the geothermal revolution.”
If the geothermal sector gains 5% of the share of new capacity worldwide, this could create a $100 billion market in 2030.
The other investment is in OXCCU. The company, started by scientists at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, has developed technology to convert carbon dioxide and hydrogen into sustainable aviation fuels (SAF).
Aviation, which is responsible for nearly 3% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, “is a challenging sector to decarbonize,” stated Tomás Rauch, another investor at TechEnergy Ventures. OXCCU’s technology combines the most known two stages CO2 + H2 conversion process – the reverse water gas shift reaction and the Fischer-Tropsch process – into a one-step catalytic conversion through a proprietary iron-based catalyst. The result is a decarbonized alternative to fossil-based fuel for commercial airlines with a jet fuel range and could result in a 50% lower capital cost.
“We think that energy-dense, drop-in fuels could be the best way to decarbonize the sector,” Rauch said. “Given that the feedstock of this type of SAF is CO2 and hydrogen, this could give a second life to CO2 emissions or even have a neutral carbon footprint.”
The other potential solutions for decarbonizing aviation face different challenges: hydrogen, for example, faces cost challenges and requires new infrastructure and aircraft designs, while batteries, given their energy density and weight, have a problematic implementation, especially for long-haul travel.
OXCCU’s SAF “under certain conditions could compete with traditional fossil-based jet fuel in the future,” Rauch remarked.
SAFs are expected to become the major force in decarbonizing air travel, with the International Air Transportation Association projecting that 93% of fossil-based jet fuel will be replaced by 2050; this could create an around $400 billion market for SAF by 2050.