CDR Innovator Interview - Mormair

'Unbound Showcase' is a globe-spanning series of interviews with pioneers of carbon dioxide removal (CDR). We’re questioning innovators, business leaders, policymakers, academics, buyers and investors taking on the challenge of our lifetime - gigaton-scale carbon removal from the earth's atmosphere.

Today’s interview is with the founder of CDR innovator Mormair, Valerie Findlay.

"What is Mormair?"

Valerie Findlay - We capture carbon while generating energy. We've replaced the internal combustion engine with an engine that runs on a chemical process called chemical looping combustion. We generate energy with no emissions, and this chemical process inherently captures carbon from the fuel and separates it so we can use any fossil fuels without emissions. We can also use biofuels, anything, seaweed, biochar, algae, and I think we talked about chicken shit at one point. We can use anything with hydrogen and carbon, and it separates the carbon.?

So, if we're using a biofuel, we capture atmospheric carbon. Our ideal fuel source is seaweed because we prefer to use something other than having to use land to grow fuel. We'd rather take it out of the oceans and reduce their acidification. But while that industry is emerging, we can use rape seed oil, fallen trees even fossil fuels. So, we're viewed as a fundamental transition technology for the energy transition with the benefit of capturing carbon. Our process captures a lot of carbon, so for a Megawatt of generating capacity every year, our Goldberg Generator captures 7,500 tons of carbon. Our first three-megawatt installation will come online in June 2024 at Glass Futures, which has a new centre for excellence in Saint Helens near Liverpool. And so every year, that will capture 22,500 tons of carbon and offset another 45,000.

"What was the inspiration that led to your carbon removal startup?"

Valerie Findlay -? The original idea from our co-founder Allan Goldberg was not to remove carbon; he aimed to improve the energy supply in South Africa, which has a notoriously unreliable grid. They always have blackouts, which hinder quality of life and productivity. South Africa is currently a predominantly coal-based economy, and Alan was trying to find a way to make a more reliable energy source and not make the climate problems worse. Alan had read about chemical looping combustion. It’s an idea that's been in development for decades, but no one's quite cracked what needs to be solved to make an economically viable solution. He worked with a team of contract engineers in South Africa. They have a lot of different types of engineering experience, and they solved the two things that needed to be solved to make a viable technology.

We have a new type of generator (we’ve dubbed the Goldberg Generator,) a micro-CHP that can run on coal with no emissions. Through further internal discussion, we realised if this can run on any hydrocarbon, it can run on biofuels, and if you're using biofuels, you're capturing atmospheric carbon.?

We thought, why not bring this out in the UK and Europe, build it up, and then deploy it at an affordable price in South Africa rather than try to charge people in the Global South to develop and scale the technology? In the UK, there are carbon markets and carbon offsetting. There's a lot of funding going into decarbonising. That's the big business right now. So we knew that with this generator that could capture carbon while producing energy, we would have a hit on our hands.?

We've received tremendous support from Innovate UK. They've set us up with our first couple of projects. So Glass Futures is a research and technology organisation (RTO) and the innovation arm of the global glass manufacturing sector - they're tasked with helping the glass manufacturing sector decarbonise, which is very difficult, like most manufacturing in the foundation industries. Innovate UK is their backer. Innovate UK arranged for us to be part of this project because they're coming up with this new centre for excellence. They need an energy supplier. They've said, look, get Mormair, meet Glass Futures, Glass Futures, meet Mormair. They've done that with a couple of other RTOs as well.

Last week, we were in scenic Middlesbrough to view the Materials Process Institute. They are a spin-out from Tata Steel. They were Tata Steel's innovation arm and are now their own research and technology organisation, also backed by Innovate UK. They're trying to decarbonise the steel manufacturing sector, which is also notoriously tricky. So, we're getting a lot of traction with this niche beachhead of notoriously difficult-to-decarbonise industries. We are also talking with an aluminium recycling project looking for a site in the UK. They want to use renewable energy, but what should they do if the wind isn't blowing and the sun's not shining? We've said we can cover that for you, and you can put it anywhere. You don't need to be limited to where there's a solar farm nearby or a wind farm nearby. We can get you that energy and do it cheaply because the cost of producing energy is relatively cheap. It's a no-brainer because it's affordable energy. It's environmentally friendly.

The technology has been developing for nearly a decade, but we only launched the company a year ago. And we're now getting connected with many good names.

"Can you share that 'aha' breakthrough in your startup's journey that left you especially excited about its potential?"

Valerie Findlay - Deep tech startups are very different from regular startups. We must challenge every element of our business model through customer discovery conversations. So, one of our big ‘aha’ moments was related to carbon management. Carbon management is crucial because we capture all this carbon and don't want to truck it around. How are we going to move it from place to place responsibly? So the big aha moment had to do with, well, what if we used existing infrastructure to move it around? Pipes are naturally bidirectional. Why don't we look into using any current gas infrastructure to deliver fuel and then remove the carbon?? Pretty much all we need is relay and storage facilities set strategically along the existing network. You can utilise existing gas network infrastructure and set up relay stations and storage facilities strategically. Then, you shunt it and clear it out with an inert gas.

We have a member of our team who is a civil engineer currently doing his dissertation on carbon management by utilising the current gas infrastructure at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. He's getting a lot of great support because carbon management is an emerging Hot Topic. We're one of the first companies to encounter the problem of what to do with all the carbon. We have too much carbon. We don't want to open and release the valves; how do we responsibly move it? This keeps us awake at night. If we were to decarbonise the planet entirely without having the management to sort it out, it would require about 600 million truck tankers to move the carbon yearly. Six hundred million tankers would circumnavigate the globe about 12 times.

That's why it's important to us to have this figured out so that when we capture millions of tons a year, this management system will move smoothly. We don’t need to dig up England and put in new infrastructure; we can use things that already exist.

"What have you found the best way of garnering investor or buyer attention?"

Valerie Findlay - Two things have helped secure investment interest - showing how our hardware measures up to established competition and support from industry thought leaders.?

We started showing people our competition, which helped us overcome investors’ reservations; “We don't know you from Adam,” “This sounds too good to be true,” “This sounds like a perpetual motion machine.” We showed them Babcock and Wilcox, a significant energy OEM in the US; they create boilers and generators (listed on the New York Stock Exchange). So, whatever the claims they make, they need to be able to back up. Once we started showing people their tech solution and the fact they've almost matched TRL to us but solved those two significant challenges, I told you about completely different ways from us. We think ours is better. Their 25-megawatt installation is 17 stories high and immovable. Our technology is modular and scalable and comes in shipping containers. So you take a hundred shipping containers and think of that footprint (when stacked) versus their 17-storey Goliath, but it shows people this is a functional technology.?

We have a champion at Innovate UK, called Bruce Adderley, who used to work on chemical looping combustion for Tata Steel. They were trying to solve it, but they never did. We met him at the UK Metals Expo in September, and when he heard that we had solved chemical looping combustion, we told him how we did it. He's just been amazed, and he's been making introductions and pulling strings and championing us. For example, he spoke to the Department for Business and Trade and stated: “This is the technology we need to push forward in the UK.”?

"How are you approaching scalability, and what tools or strategies have proven most effective in levelling up your solution?"

Valerie Findlay - We're going to be scaling outward rather than upward. So, we plan to have a franchise model instead of trying to scale this all ourselves. We want this technology to get out there as widely as possible, as fast as possible, because of the positive impact - that would be untenable for us to do in a traditional growth format. Instead, we plan to enter joint ventures. One of the main benefits of these RTOS is that they have memberships, so Glass Futures, for example, after seeing this at their site, represents about 70% of the global glass manufacturing sector. They want to enter into a special-purpose joint venture vehicle, one of our franchises, and sell this to their members. So they'll be responsible for all the business side of things, and we’ll provide the technology.?

We're going to do the same thing with the Materials Processing Institute. They can go to the global steel, cement, and materials manufacturing sectors and sell this to them. We're also talking to a few different people about regional-based franchises. So we're talking to a company in the Gulf region based in UAE, and they'd be pleased to do this in the Gulf. That's not a place we ever planned to do business ourselves, happy for someone else to take it.??

And we also are close to a power purchase agreement. We have a customer in the US. So this is going to be a successful way to do it. It's about developing those partnerships and finding the right people and organisations to take this out. The members of the RTOs trust them, and if they've said, “We've done this on our site; it'll help you decarbonise.” We know that that's an easy sell.?

That's our plan; we say we're scaling out rather than up.

“What's the biggest challenge your business is facing, and what do you think is required to solve it?”

Valerie Findlay -? Two things, the first being that there's a shortage of a critical raw material we rely on - it is a single piece of pipework that's 22m long, and only two steel mills worldwide produce it. One is Dalmini in Italy and Shanghai Metals in China. We want to partner specifically with a British Steel company - so that we can have it done right here in Britain and not have to transport it. And we'd like to enter into a partnership where we say we can give steel manufacturers green energy, and you can make this steel component for us. So we’re still trying to get those conversations in play.?

The second thing is that there are a lot of issues surrounding the voluntary carbon credit market and how that operates. There are a lot of people who talk about additionality and the permanence of storage. They will destroy any industry's ability to make an economic case to remove carbon. So, they argue that you should not get carbon credits if you make money in removing carbon. However, we capture carbon, whether we want to or not, and how we store it will be driven by the market. If Coca-Cola is going to pay us $200 a time for our food-grade carbon and it costs us $100 a ton to store it, we're going to sell it to Coca-Cola. We don't want to, but it makes you think about the wider market for any company that captures carbon. There need to be market incentives for them to store it responsibly rather than to re-emit it because if you're capturing it at high purity,? then that carbon has a lot of intrinsic value. It has value to hospitals. It has value in food and beverage. So we're having discussions, some might say arguments, with the carbon capture market about where that additionality lies. Does it have to do with the capture or the storage? Because we say, look, you need to make it economically viable to store it responsibly or people won’t store it responsibly when they capture it.

You cannot punish processes that in themselves are profitable if they are not as profitable as just selling the gas. We might make roughly $80 per ton when it comes to making high-grade plastics. So every other carbon storage method with permanence requires money to be able to store, so the cheapest I've seen is $50 a ton. We make $80 a ton. So they're looking at us going, “You don’t need carbon credits.” We might respond, “We could sell it to Coca-Cola for $120 more.” So there's a net sum difference between the actual value of the carbon gas and, specifically, the amount we get when storing it responsibly. Until we get to scale and we can bring the cost of manufacturing down to a point where the actual storage competes with the gas price itself, there needs to be a mechanism that allows for it to be subsidised by that process.

Unbound Summits’ mission focuses on unrivalled connections, new insights and unbound CDR opportunities. You can find out more about Mormair’s incredible tech here.