Pushkin.
When I'm just walking around the world day to day. They're all the obvious we need to solve this problem to deal with climate change kinds of problems that I notice that everybody notices, you know, all the cars people are driving, all the old buildings using heating oil, all
the airplanes flying overhead. But on top of those in my face, in our face things, there are other things that are less obvious but also very big and very important, like, for example, the fertilizer that's used to grow the food we eat. Turns out, the standard way to make fertilizer is to take natural gas, which is basically just carbon and hydrogen, use the hydrogen to make ammonia, which makes fertilizer, and essentially release the carbon into the atmospe sphere in the form of carbon dioxide.
A huge amount of carbon.
Dioxide goes into the atmosphere every year because of fertilizer, which means that even the most goody two shoes vegan plant based meal can contribute to climate change.
Unless you probably see where this is going, we.
Could figure out a way to make fertilizer without that very annoying part where we release tons of carbon into the air as carbon dioxide. We would never notice the difference in our daily lives, but it would be a really big deal for the world.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this.
Is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
My guest today is Rob Hanson.
He's the co founder and CEO of a company called Monolith. Rob's problem is this, how do you separate hydrogen from natural gas without emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and how do you do it at scale in a way that makes economic sense. What is the sort of basic, cheap, mass, industrial scale way to get hydrogen.
Now, you take steam and you take methane, and you heat them up together really hot, and the oxygen from the water in the steam reacts with the carbon in the methane to make CO two, liberates a bunch of energy. All the rest of the hydrogen is converted to free hydrogen, and so you get hydrogen from both water and methane. But the energy that's being put into that chemically is the carbon reacting with the oxygen form CO two.
So the basic idea here is you've got methane, you get natural gas, which is essentially hydrogen and carbon, and you want to find some way to separate the hydrogen and the carbon without sending that carbon into the atmosphere. Right, That's what you're trying to figure out. And at some point you discover the work of this French scientist named Laurent Foucherie, and he has an idea for how to do so tell me about that. How do you wind up working with him?
And so I just emailed him. I mean, I still I look at that email everyone. I just emailed him from the email address on the scientific paper and he responded, and then Pete and I flew to France and we met him, and the moment was we've done lots of this, right, We met lots of professors or researchers, and usually they'd have a paper and maybe they'd have like a poster of what they did. And Laurel started there. He described his work and then he's like, do you guys want to see the reactor?
Ah?
And we're like, what do you mean the reactor. He's like, well, I'll go show you the reactor. So we go and it's like this thing out of a science fiction movie. It's in a room, it's maybe six feet tall. It's got wires and tubes coming out of it, and we're like, whoa, this is incredible. And then he says, do draw me to turn it on, and we're like sure, and so it gives us had you know, earplugs and dark glasses, and this like flurry of French researchers kind of comes around.
So he gives you the glasses. Why when he turns it on? What happened?
So he turns on? So what drives this process? Right? Using electricity to heat methane too incredible temperatures. Well, the way you do that is with what's called a plasma torgu sounds cool. Yeah, imagine a like a combustion burner, like a flame, even a gas stove right where you're burning a combustion. It looks like that, but instead of being fire, it's a plasma generated by an electric discharge. And he has a view hole through that you can actually see it, and so it's like lightning inside of
this reactor. And it's purple because it was a nitrogen plasma, and it's loud and bright and incredible, and it's doing the thing you want to do. Yeah, it's heating you know, gas to very high temperature using one hundred percent electricity with no combustion.
And what you get out is hydrogen and carbon black. Yep, that's right, So tell me about carbon black.
All right, So it's solid carbon, but as most people know, not all solid carbon is created equal. You've got graphite, diamonds are pure carbon, very different than graphite, and then carbon black is another form of pure carbon. And when you zoom in on it with an electron microscope, it looks like a bunch of grapes. So there's these spheres of carbon that are nanometers maybe ten to fifteen nanimeters, and then they fuse together into what looks like a
bunch of grapes. And that's really important because that structure, when you mix it, and they discovered this around World War One, if you mix that carbon structure into rubber, it dramatically reinforces it. And so if you think of a pencil eraser, that's rubber without any reinforcing carbon black, and then if you think of the tread of your tire,
that's got highly reinforcing carbon black. And you couldn't really make a modern car tire out of erasers, but you absolutely can out of carbon black filled rubber.
So is Laurent part of the company.
Yeah, yeah, I talked to Laurn every week pretty much. He has for ten years, been a big part of it. We have a research partnership. Still run that pilot reactor in his lab doing kind of experimental work because it's small. Our commercial reactor in Nebraska is one hundred feet tall, okay, giant, you know, Laren's is six feet He's, you know, an equity holder in the company. Just an awesome guy. Like I said, we were right, we got super lucky and he was the real deal.
So how did you turn Lauren's idea? How did you turn this thing you saw in his lab into Monolith into this company you have now?
Yeah, So we have a saying at Monolith, which is, we don't do things because they are easy. We do things because we thought they would be easy.
Yeah.
And so his system operates at three kilograms per hour of production. And now we've spent the last eleven years going from three kilograms per hour up to fifteen hundred. We literally just hit the fifteen hundred kilograms per hour in the last couple of months, so five hundred x increase in scale and that was really hard. And then it's not just fifteen hundred, you know, for a minute or an hour, it's you have to be able to do it all the time. It's got to be commercially
viable manufacturing process. It's the classic head We known it was going to be this hard, we probably would have never started, but we did, and we've got the other side.
So I want to talk about where you are now. I want to talk about being on the other side. But before we do that, I want to go back because I've heard you talk about sort of figuring out how to found the company. Because I've heard you talk about founding the company, and in particular the frame you took in figuring out what to do, like what company to found? That frame seems really interesting and really useful. Talk about that a little bit.
We had this basically founding philosophy, and that is that what clean tech really needs to be is it needs to be both clean and economically advantaged.
Meaning cheaper or better then other products in the marketplace.
Right now, your your your value proposition minus your cost structure is better than everyone else's and you can win on both sides to be a better business.
It's a better business in some way.
Yeah, Okay, it's really easy to do something just cheaper if you have no regard for the environment. Right, we've seen that, and it usually is in the you know, most disadvantaged communities that bear the burden. And the other side's also quite easy. And you see this. The media loves these. It's a cleaner way to do something, but the second sentences, it's going to cost way more and it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work at scale.
If that's your value proposition. Now it's okay to be more expensive or have a less total value proposition early on with a pathway to becoming. And I think you know, PD solar is an example of that.
Yeah, started out more expensive and then got cheaper.
Yeah, and that's okay. Those you got to be skeptical because it's quite rare that that's actually the story. Much more typically, it starts out more expensive, it ends more expensive. Yeah, but look, that's what we were searching for.
Presumably, it's hard to find something that is both cleaner and cheaper, because if it existed, somebody'd.
Already be doing it. Right, It's like a twenty dollars bill lying on a sidewalk.
Yeah, and so The third part is the reason that it hadn't been done, Todate. That's what we were searching for, was it was cleaner, it was cheaper, and the reason it hadn't been done is that the technology had not been advanced sufficiently to make it happen.
In a minute, Rob talks about where Monolith is today. Spoiler alert, It includes the biggest plasma torch ever built in the history of the world.
Now back to the show.
So, how big is your plasma torch?
Biggest p my torch that's ever been built.
What's it look like? How big is it? How tall is it? I don't know. I don't even know a task.
It's measured in tons. It almost looks like a like a big rocket engine. You could say it's you know, thousands of parts, it's maybe twenty feet tall and use cranes to move it around.
Let's actually talk about how it works.
So you have a reactor now, right, and you said it's commercial scale, meaning you're are you selling hydrogen and carbon black.
Yeah, we're selling the carbon black to the existing market. There's a number of things in our public but one that is public was with Goodyear, right, big American iconic tire manufacturer, so we collaborate with them, and they included our carbon black in their electric drive GT tire, which is the Tesla Model three replacement tire. Okay, and that was a bit of a demo tire for them. I
think that one was ninety percent sustainable materials. So right, tire are made up of all different types of things and the big push is to get them to be one hundred percent sustainable over time. And so that was a nice step along the way. And then we're working with other tire companies as well to reduce the carbon footprint of their tires.
And what about the hydrogen.
The hydrogen which I'll get into, we're sadly not selling yet and that's because even though it's a commercial scale plant, it wasn't big enough to justify investing and converning that hydrogen into ammonia. It would have been like the world's smallest ammonia plant. So this is the first unit. And then now that we're reaching success, and this is you know, the Department of Energy stepping in for the next stage, which is to build twelve more of those identical units
at the same site. Then we'll have thirteen total. Once we have thirteen total. All the hydrogen from the thirteen will go into a normal kind of world scale ammonia plant.
So let's talk about what you still have to do and then what you still have to figure out to do the things you want to do. Right, so you have this proof of concept plant essentially that is like, you know, you're not quite to true industrial scale yet.
That's exactly nailed it. So we are full industrial scale reactor. But carbon black plants never have one reactor. They have ten or in our case, we're going to do.
The same with hydrogen.
Right, you're not making enough hydrogen to that's rery make it worth.
So in fact, while our plant is you know commercial and operating, it's the world's smallest commercial carb black plant right now, right, And so the next step is to build it out, and it's that modular buildout, and we decided to do twelve reactors next in two groups of six, and we're hoping to break ground on it next year.
It's you know, over a billion dollar project. We did get a conditional commitment from the Department of Energy to fund a billion dollars of debt into that project, and then we're going to raise equity from our existing shareholders as well as probably some new ones in the new year, and that's the next step, and that plant will then be a true world scale manufacturing facility. And we think that's you know, the next five years is what's going to take us to do that?
What are the what might go wrong?
I think probably the biggest risk is you know, it's a megaproject.
You say megaproject, I think over budget and takes forever.
Yeah, And that's the challenge, right, is how do you mitigate that risk? But that's the risk, and you nailed it. It's it's just mega projects don't have a great track record, and we're doing everything we can to mitigate it. But that's the one that keeps me awake at night is you find yourself with you know, unseasonably cold winters or unseasonably wet summers and all of a sudden, it just you've slipped on schedule.
Oh man, if the weather can screw you over, that's terrifying.
But that's big construction, right, And that's the challenge of the energy transition that few people talk about is it's always just the technology. And like, don't get me wrong, I've spent a decade in the technology realm, I understand how hard it is. But then you've actually got to build out infrastructure, and if.
We're serious, billion dollar projects that no one has ever built before anywhere ever.
Yeah, and if we're serious about tackling climate like, we have to rebuild a major portion of our infrastructure, our energy infrastructure and industrial infrastructure, materials infrastructure, And of course there's risk in that. I think what we offer, and I think this is an important model, is you need to have returns that are commensurate with that risk.
So okay, so there's the megaproject. That's kind of the medium term challenge. I mean there's also hydrogen, right, Like we've been talking about hydrogen and sort of where it is now, and hydrogen has this really essential input for ultimately fertilizer. But there's sort of a couple sides of hydrogen that we haven't talked about yet that seem like
big and interesting. Like one is where the hydrogen is coming from, or where the natural gas I should say is coming from, and then the other is other potential uses of hydrogen. Right, those both seem like big ideas that you could potentially be at the center.
Off that's right. Yeah, So you know, we intentionally because we didn't want to have that risk of chicken and egg on a new hydrogen market, we started with an existing end use that's not going away now. Going beyond that, I think there's going to be lots of growth in hydrogen. If we're a hundred million tons today, you know, I think the bulls have it at five hundred million tons by pick your date, and maybe not quite that optimistic.
But you know, do we have a couple hundred million tons of hydrogen probably?
What are the big drivers of growth for hydrogen demand for use of hydrogen in the next ten twenty years.
I think heavy transportation is interesting. So think of like big ships, maybe class eight trucks, which is like you know, long haul trucking.
Basically transportation that is so energy intensive that it will be very hard to electrify, and so then you'll want some alternative clean source of power.
Yes, if you imagine a container ship going from Long Beach to Shanghai, the whole thing would be batteries. If you wanted to do it with batteries, and so you need a liquid fuel and you can burn ammonia. But I think there'll be some applications there, and then I think there'll be other chemical applications. The big one that could be huge is steel. Right, So steel is typically reduced with carbon, the iron ore is reduced with carbon.
You make CO two lots of it. You can reduce steel with hydrogen and that way you only make water instead of CO two. You know that, that's kind of you got to be the cheapest possible hydrogen to play in that world because there's not any margin in the steel.
Steel is just a brutal commodity business, right, Yeah, that's right, Or you need some kind of subsidy, you need a policy.
Lever would be the other way to do it, right, that's right.
Yeah. So you know if a couple of parts of those two part of steel, part of heavy transportation, I mean, you'd see hydrogen demand double over today's Yeah.
Planes, I mean, I know it's kind of a dream. But like people are, you don't buy it. You're wincing at what I say.
No, I don't not buy it.
I think I think the most likely root for hydrogen getting into airplanes is through synthetically produced liquid hydrocarbons, which you can like CO two plus hydrogen, you can convert into jet fuel, and so that I believe pure hydrogen. I think for shorter haul maybe big planes, long distances, it's a hard problem. You need a lot of energy density. I mean you have when you want a lot of energy density, it's it's hard to beat, Like kerosene, just really hard to beat it.
Yeah, well, I mean it is interesting, you know, given that your input is a fossil fuel, right, like methane, like oil is under the ground and it's from whatever one hundred million years ago, like the sun grew plants and then they died and then they sat under the ground and they turned into methane.
Like.
Fossil fuels are amazing in that way, right, They're like this incredible store of energy that you can use whenever you want.
And yeah, and it's uh, I spend too much time thinking about deep time.
When you think about deep time, what do you think about.
So I'm working on this project where I'm just trying to do the geological timescale in the basement of my house. And so I've got this line that is, you know, forty five meters long, right, And if you have a line that's forty.
Five going around the sort of the whole perimeter. Yeah, Like, help me picture. This is like a finished basement. It's like a rumpus room.
That's what's going on in your basement.
Okay, right, that's right, and so right, the age of the universe is four point five billion years.
You said the universe. I think you mean Earth.
And so if you've got forty five meters, which is forty five thousand centimeters, it means that each centimeter of that line is one hundred thousand years. Each millimeter, right, a millimeter, which is like the stroke of a pen, Yeah, is ten thousand years?
Love it? All of human history basically? Yeah?
Yeah. So you can then like look at this thing and be like, all of human history is the stroke of a pen on this line that extends around the entirety of the room. But your point is exactly right.
Anything, I don't I'm not ready to leave your basement yet. What motivated you to draw this line?
I wanted to explain to my kids how how long geological time was. That's nice anyways, that was what I was trying to do, is try to explain to my kids how deep time is. But in the energy one it's right.
Wait, did it work?
Do you think your kid's got a better understanding.
Let's ask him in like five to ten years.
And so do you think about deep time in relation to your work?
Yes? I mean this is the point is you made the point of what fossil fuels are is a transfer of energy through deep time that we as a species has accessed, right, and we first access to transfer of energy through time with like fire. Right when you burn wood you get to access one hundred years of stored energy that the treated. When you burn coal you get to access hundreds of millions of years of stored energy. And that's been incredible. It's changed our society, our planet,
our way of life. And that's because transferring energy through deep time is net positive. The problem is is that when you transfer energy through deep time with combustion, you also transfer the CO two from the ancient atmosphere that was over hundreds of millions of years drawn down in a balanced way into the atmosphere now over hundreds or a couple thousand years. And that's the challenge. And so
what monolith is at its core? Right, we're still transferring the energy through deep time, but we're not transferring the CO two because the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Here.
That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. Let's close with the lightning round.
What's one thing everybody should do when they visit Lincoln, Nebraska?
Go to a Nebraska Cornhuskers football game or a Nebraska corn Huskers women's volleyball game.
I didn't see women's volleyball coming. Yeah, tell me about a Nebraska corn Huskers women's volleyball game.
So the big news this happened just a few months ago. It's one of the greatest volleyball programs in the country. But what's cool is they have a huge fan base. It's the most expensive ticket in Lincoln.
More expensive than a football game, and.
Earlier this year they decided that they were going to do a game at the football stadium and put over ninety thousand attendees, which made it the most live watched female sporting event in history. Full stop, all sports, all countries, all times.
Which element do you like better, Hydrogen or carbon?
I mean probably hydrogen because it's in our name. Often people say what's monolith named after? And Mono is one, which is kind of the point and so but with the stone, and that's to represent the solid carbon. So maybe hydrogen was first, but carbon is right behind it.
Okay, kind of like on the periodic table. As a mechanical engineer, what do you understand about the world.
I think I probably understand about the second law thermodynamics more than the average person, and that's entropy. And that's that you know, So you've got the first law, which is conservation of energy, and a lot of people can intuitively get that it's neither creater are destroyed. But entropies are more interesting one where it's what sets up time in the era of time and that there actually is no such thing as true circularity because we get older every year.
And to be clear, it's that entropy or disorder increases.
That's right, Yeah, that's right, but by law it increases, and that's actually really powerful and it comes to play in a lot of parts of real life.
Well, I feel like at some level it's what you're fighting trying to build a billion dollar, first of its kind megaproject, Like you're trying to create a tremendously large ordered system in the face of a universal law that is.
Fighting against you.
That's excellent. Anything else you want to talk about. No, this has been wonderful, very much, appreciate it. Likewise, not many people go this deep. I don't think I've ever told the story about my basement before, so you pulled that one out of me.
Rob Hanson is the co founder and CEO of Monolith. Today's show was produced by Edith Russello, edited by Karen Schakerji, and engineered by Sarah Bruger. If you like the show, please tell somebody about it, or review it on whatever podcast app you use. If you don't like the show, don't review it, but email us and tell us how we could make it better. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem