The Global Pledge to Triple Nuclear Capacity, Infinium lands historic offtake with American Airlines and The 'Permian Basin' of Lithium Mining

Fellow agents of change,

Good to be back after thanksgiving and my what a whirlwind of a week it’s been. At 8090 Industries, portfolio companies had some historic milestones and much in the works. With that said, excited to share the following, and before we go all in, thought we’d share a little holiday cheer from my family to yours as we now enter into December.

8090 Industries portfolio on the move:

?? Breaking: Infinium unveils Project RoadRunner in West Texas, the largest power to liquids efuels plant in North America, landing $75M from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Catalyst Fund and secures a 10-year offtake for its eSAF with American Airlines .

Infinium upcycles millions of tons of CO2 that otherwise would be emitted to the air along with renewable power to produce enormous amounts of ultra low-carbon fuels for heavy transportation fleets without changing existing infrastructure.

Learn more in this video below:

?? Forbes: Incredible breakdown on the technology behind REGENT ’s all-electric seagliders

Incredibly proud of and inspired by 8090 Industries portfolio company REGENT bringing air ground effect to the masses. Since World War II, military pilots knew that flying low was a good way to conserve fuel. When you fly very near boundaries, it can be ground or water, you create an air cushion. That air cushion basically allows you to have artificial lift. Alan Ohnsman of Forbes has the story: Billy Thalheimer, who worked on eVTOLs for Boeing’s Aurora Flight Sciences and spacecraft at Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, thinks a different type of battery-powered aircraft can get to market faster and be more affordable for passengers: seagliders. Resembling futuristic business jets, they’ll take off from ordinary waterfront docks, first operating like boats on hydrofoil stilts over the water at 40 mph or 50 mph. Once they reach open areas they lift off and fly about five to 10 meters above the water. REGENT will have commercial units ferrying passengers between Hawaii’s islands or around the Florida coast for an estimated $40 a ride.

With that said, let’s get to it.

WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:

- The US and 21 Countries Pledge to Triple Nuclear Capacity by 2050

- If This Technology Breaks Through, Solar Energy Will Skyrocket

- New Report: The US Salton Sea is the Permian Basin for Lithium ??

- The Geothermal Plant in Nevada Desert Powering Google Data Centers ??

- Behind the Scenes at a U.S. Factory Building New Nuclear Bombs ??

- How the U.S. Market Went Sideways for a Wind-Power Giant

- Inside India’s Gargantuan Mission to Clean the Ganges River

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WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:

The US and 21 Countries Pledge to Triple Nuclear Capacity by 2050 Yes, this just happened. The United States and 21 other countries including Ghana, France, UK,, Mongolia, Canada, UAE, South Korea, Japan, Belgium, Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechia, Finland, Czech Republic, Moldova, Mongolia, Netherlands and Morocco pledged on Saturday at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai to TRIPLE nuclear energy capacity by 2050, saying the revival of nuclear power was critical for cutting carbon emissions to near zero in the coming decades. Proponents of nuclear energy, which supplies 18 percent of electricity in the United States, say it is a clean, safe and reliable complement to wind and solar energy. Important noting that even countries with recent nuclear phaseout policies are part of this historic accord while China, India, and Russia are independently advancing their own nuclear expansion efforts. Proponents of nuclear energy, which supplies 18 percent of electricity in the United States, say it is a clean, safe and reliable complement to wind and solar energy. But a significant hurdle is funding.

“The demand for clean energy is almost unprecedented,” said Maria Korsnick, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. “There’s no real solution that does not involve nuclear.”

If This Technology Breaks Through, Solar Energy Will Skyrocket: Penned by friend Ken Silverstein of Forbes, this is a fascinating deeper look into the technology promise of perovskites and their massive boom they could drive in the solar industry. One company specifically is one to watch, incubated by the legendary Texas Hunt Oil Family, called CubicPV.

“Take a square meter at noon: The sun creates 1,000 watts of energy. Waiting one-hour results in 1,000 watt-hours of power. If the efficiency rate is 25%, we get 250 watts from one square meter. However, using perovskite, we can get as much as 40% or 350 watts.”

New Report: The US Salton Sea is the Permian Basin for Lithium Want to produce a huge amount of lithium for electric vehicle batteries — and also batteries that keep our homes powered after sundown — without causing the environmental destruction that lithium extraction often entails?Then the American Salton Sea may just be your jam. Companies big and small have been swarming California’s largest lake for years. This even includes our friend and 8090 Industries Operating Partner, who helps lead Energy Source Minerals, one of America’s leading lithium mining project developers. The lithium gold rush is trying to find a cost-effective way to pull out the lithium dissolved in scorching hot fluid deep beneath the lake’s southern end. Now a new federal analysis suggests there’s wildly more deposits of the valuable metal buried there than anyone previously understood. Sammy Roth of the LA Times has the story.

“We may be able to extract 18 million metric tons of “white gold” from the heated underground pool, which is not connected to the surface lake. That’s the first thoroughly documented public estimate of how much lithium is available at the Salton Sea, said Alex Prisjatschew, an engineer with the U.S. Department of Energy, which funded the analysis — and it’s higher than past guesses. That’s roughly the equivalent of 382 million electric vehicle batteries. There are fewer than 300 million cars and trucks registered in the United States today. So yes, it’s a big deal.”

The Geothermal Plant in Nevada Desert Powering Google Data Centers: One of my favorite stories of the week, and particularly special when it covers a friend Tim Latimer and his incredible entreprenuerial journey. Penned by the always amazing Adele Peters of Fast Company, this is a MUST read. In 2020, Google set a goal to get to 24/7 carbon-free energy by the end of the decade, meaning that all of its data centers and offices will run on clean electricity every hour of every day, all year long. The company didn’t know exactly how that would happen. Solar and wind power aren’t available all the time, and storing renewable energy with batteries is still relatively expensive. Some studies suggest that for the whole grid to get to 100% clean power, between 10% and 20% will have to come from other sources that are always available. Google started exploring new technology, including green hydrogen and advanced nuclear. And in 2021, it partnered with a small startup called Fervo Energy to test Fervo’s next-generation geothermal energy—something that was unproven at the time. Today that technology is up and running in the Nevada desert. Fervo’s new geothermal plant sends power to a nearby power plant, which sends it to the grid that powers Google’s data centers in the area.

“We realized pretty quickly that it was going to take more than wind and solar and lithium-ion storage to get us to 24/7 carbon-free energy.,” says Michael Terrell, senior director for energy and climate at Google.

Behind the Scenes at a U.S. Factory Building New Nuclear Bombs: Within every American nuclear weapon sits a bowling-ball-size sphere of the strangest element on the planet. This sphere, called a plutonium pit, is the bomb's central core. It's surrounded by conventional explosives. When those explosives blow, the plutonium is compressed, and its atoms begin to split, releasing radiation and heating the material around it. The reaction ignites the sequence of events that makes nuclear weapons nuclear. In early nuclear bombs, like the ones the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II, the fission of plutonium or uranium and the fatal energy released were the end of the story. In modern weapons, plutonium fission ignites a second, more powerful stage in which hydrogen atoms undergo nuclear fusion, releasing even more energy. The U.S. hasn't made these pits in a significant way since the late 1980s. But that is changing. The country is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, making upgrades to old weapons and building new ones. The effort includes updated missiles, a new weapon design, alterations to existing designs and new pits. To accomplish the last item, the National Nuclear Security Administration has enacted a controversial plan to produce 50 new pits a year at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and 30 pits a year at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. The first pits will be designed for a weapon called W87-1, which will tip the new intercontinental ballistic missile, called Sentinel. After that the complex will produce pits for other bomb designs.

“The U.S., like all nuclear nations, stockpiles weapons in a delicate game of deterrence, the idea being that the existence of our equally or more capable weapons will stop others from using theirs. In this strategy, the pits' true purpose is to sit idly as a threat. But for the strategy to work, the country must be willing to follow through on that threat. The atomic age is renewing, and we will all have to grapple afresh with the coiled terror of these powerful weapons.”

How the U.S. Market Went Sideways for a Wind-Power Giant, Orsted: The poster child for the wind-power revolution was supposed to help build America’s clean-energy future. Its messy pullback from the Northeast is threatening those aspirations. Denmark’s national oil-and-gas company, now known as ?rsted, bet big on renewables a decade ago. It renounced fossil fuels, renamed itself after a 19th-century physicist and embarked on a debt-fueled expansion, becoming the biggest offshore-wind developer outside China. Surfing investor enthusiasm for all things green, ?rsted surpassed BP in market value early in the pandemic. A hotbed of activity was the U.S., where ?rsted made a play at dominating the nascent wind market. The company lined up high-profile projects off the East Coast championed by Democratic-led states with ambitious climate targets. Much of that work is now at risk of running aground and this story, written by David Uberti is how it got there.

“The biggest mistake, in hindsight, was that they went all out in the U.S. It was not a market they knew, and they overcommitted.”

Inside India’s Gargantuan Mission to Clean the Ganges River: The Ganges is one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, providing water for an estimated 600 million people. Water from the Ganges is widely used in Hindu prayer and ceremony; you can buy plastic bottles of it from stalls all over the subcontinent—or order one on Amazon in the UK for as little as ￡3. And yet despite its sacred status, the Ganges is one of the most contaminated major rivers on earth. The UN has called it “woefully polluted.” As India’s population has exploded—in April 2023, it overtook China to become the world’s most populous country—hundreds of millions of people have settled along the Ganges’ floodplain. India’s sanitation system has struggled to keep up. The Ganges itself has become a dumping ground for countless pollutants: toxic pesticides, industrial waste, plastic, and, more than anything, billions upon billions of liters of human effluent. Beautifully written by Oliver Franklin-Wallis of Wired Magazine and Author of the grodnbreaking book Wasteland, this is a frontline look into one of the world’s most polluted sites and how India is undertaking one of the biggest engineering programs in the history of sanitation.

“Sewers were flowing everywhere. It flowed into the streets. It is a fascinating test case in the global effort to clean up our rivers and seas. After all, if you can’t clean a river sacred to hundreds of millions of people, what hope do the rest of us have?”

About Rayyan Islam

Rayyan Islam is the co-founder and General Partner of 8090 Industries, the leading partner and investor for industrial breakthrough technologies focused on decarbonization and national security. The companies Rayyan’s invested in, sourced and advised have grown to over $8B in private market value. Rayyan has led investments in groundbreaking companies like EquipmentShare, Astranis, Infinium, Quaise, Regent, Living Carbon and Liberation Labs, and serves on the Boards of Oklo, Cemvita, Circ, Maple Materials and is a co-founder of Gold Hydrogen, a producer of abundant clean hydrogen from microbes and old oil wells for less than $1/kg. Rayyan was recognized by Business Insider as one of the top 100 early-stage investors of 2023, alongside Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla and?amongst the most powerful seed stage climate tech VCs by Fortune Magazine. As a frequent speaker on venture capital and climate technologies, Rayyan has spoken at NYU, Stanford, UT Austin and the United Nations and his work has been featured on CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired, Yahoo Finance and more.

Influenced by his family upbringing in Bangladesh, he personally witnessed the ramifications of energy insecurity and climate change at a young age and its impact on communities around the world. Determined to make a serious dent on the issue, Rayyan has supported a cadre of climate technology solutions, drafted policy recommendations to President Joe Biden’s climate transition team and founded the decarbonization focused newsletter Decarbon Weekly, which counts C-suite executives, leading climate scientists, members of state and local governments, founders, investors and foundations amongst its thousands of subscribers.

Rayyan lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife, son and daughter.