This catalytic reaction generates intense heat, turning some of the water into steam, which can be used for manufacturing processes or driving a turbine to generate electricity. The reaction also breaks the rest of the water into its component parts, releasing hydrogen gas, which can be burned for heat or fed into a fuel to make electricity.
What’s left behind doesn’t go to waste either. The catalyst can be reused and aluminum hydroxide smelted again into pure aluminum.
In effect, Found Energy treats aluminum as a sort of battery. Instead of using barrels of oil, you truck in refined aluminum, which is safer and easier to transport than volatile fossil fuels and doesn’t release carbon and toxic gases. Feed the aluminum into a Found Energy reactor for heat and hydrogen, then send the aluminum oxide back to the smelter for “recharging.”
“Our thesis is that aluminum is the most efficient way to move clean energy around,” said Godart, who developed the process while earning a doctorate in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s the most abundant metal on Earth. It’s double the energy density of diesel on a volume basis. It actually has an infinite shelf life, and we can already use electricity to produce it.”
Every year, Godart said, 10 million tons of aluminum go to waste worldwide, including 3 million tons in the US.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
The idea that would become Found Energy was planted in Godart’s mind nearly a decade ago. After earning a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at MIT in 2015, Godart joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, famed for building robotic spacecraft like the Voyager probe and Mars rovers.
These spacecraft need electric power, but for some missions, solar cells couldn’t provide enough juice. While designing a robot to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa, Godart realized that the answer could be a machine that cannibalized its own parts for power. And he knew aluminum contained about 9 kilowatts of potential energy per kilogram.
“I just asked the question,” he recalled. “What if we could use that as fuel?”
The idea didn’t take off, but Godart did. He left NASA after deciding he was working on the wrong problems.
“I was spending all my time thinking about other planets when we had a lot of existential problems on Earth,” he said. “I came back with this goal of using aluminum as a practical fuel on earth.”
Godart returned to MIT in 2017, where he developed the catalyst that drives the Found Energy system. The company has raised $12 million in seed funding from the state-funded Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the nonprofit Autodesk Foundation, and venture capital firms such as Munich Re Ventures, Good Growth Capital, and Kompas VC.
A prototype of the Found Energy system sits in the company’s lab, cranking out heat equal to nine kilowatts of electricity, enough to power for several US households. Godart is at work on a 50-kilowatt version and says there’s no reason it can’t be powered up to megawatt scale.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
One application for the Found Energy system could be cement manufacturing. Making cement requires temperatures of over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, mostly generated by burning fossil fuels. The world used more than 4 billion tons of cement last year, and the industry accounts for 8 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
But the Found Energy system could replace fossil fuel with aluminum-generated hydrogen, a gas that burns at up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but produces no waste carbon.
Dan Steingart, chair of the department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, said Found Energy is onto something.
“I’m a big fan of using metals to store energy, particularly something like aluminum,” Steingart said. “Metals are easy to transport and they’re easy to store.”
But Steingart warns of one major drawback. Aluminum is refined through electrolysis. But the electrodes are made of carbon and a lot of that carbon is converted to carbon dioxide gas in the process.
“Aluminum is quite carbon-intensive,” he said. “Even if you’re using hydropower or you’re using wind or solar, the process itself still produces carbon dioxide.”
Metallurgists are working on carbon-free methods of smelting aluminum, and the dream of using the metal as a carbon-neutral energy source depends on their success. But Godart said his work in space exploration has made him comfortable with daunting challenges.
“When you spend all your time thinking about how you’re going to debug something on another planet,” he said, “a lot of these problems on earth sound a little easy.”
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.