The message from the market is crystal clear: electric vehicles need to be cheaper. Since up to 40% of an electric vehicle is the battery, and in turn 70% of the cost of the battery is in materials, it’s an imperative for the industry to develop cheaper and higher performing materials. Silicon anodes are widely considered the future – ​​they can store far more energy than graphite – but they swell 300% when loading, leading to cracking and rapid degradation. 

Aqualith has solved this problem, with a silicon alloy that only swells 10% – less than graphite swell. Aqualith already has produced dozens of full pouch cells and in six months will deliver samples exceeding 300 cycle life to EV and battery partners. They are 12-16 months from an “A cell” qualification and less than 36 months from commercial production with OEMs / Tier 1s. In addition to their anode materials, Aqualith also has solutions for electrolytes and cobalt-free cathodes. Their electrolytes are non-flammable, high performance, and can handle wide temperatures (meaning they’ll work in cold weather.)

The company is raising now for pre-seed checks.

In the $10B copper mining industry, “heap leaching” of waste rock with low concentrations of ore has become a standard practice. Heap leaching works in two ways: 1) sulfuric acid is sprayed on top to trickle through the heaps, and 2) natural microbes in the heaps also help dissolve the copper mineral into solution. It’s been widely noted that the microbes can speed up leaching by up to 2x, but nobody knows why or how this happens – or how to consistently recreate it.

Transition Biomining is building a platform to control the microbes in heaps, and deliver faster leaching every time. The economic value of improving leaching is enormous – a mere 5% boost can be worth $100 million per mine annually.

Today, one ton of conventional fertilizer covers about 20 acres. What if, from the same raw materials, we could make fertilizers that covered 20,000 acres?

Farm Minerals started with biological micronutrient minerals – Zn, Mn, Cu, Fe, and Co. Farmers don’t spend a lot on micros, perhaps only 7% of what they spend on macros, but supplementation with Farm Minerals’ blends, across a wide variety of crops and animal feeds, yielded incredible results– within just a few days and continuing until harvest. This led to their first two blended products, ElevateFeed for animals and ForGrowth, for crops.

Now Farm Minerals is formulating macronutrients by similar processes — Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium, as well as Calcium and Sulfur (to make polyhalite blends).

For N fertilizers, this is a green/decarbonized process which is an alternative to Haber-Bosch.

The key to their process is a high-surface-area carbon encapsulation that makes the biominerals dramatically more bioavailable to plant and animal biology.

California Organic makes the world’s first green ammonia that is California-certified organic. Already in market and growing rapidly, our organic ammonia is made from farm & ag wastes via a bulk fermentation bioprocess.

Until today, all organic agriculture has used nitrate fertilizers, which have several inefficiencies. Nitrates are in slurries and so can’t go into drip irrigation water systems; for this same reason, they can’t easily be increased in dosage step in step with the growth of the crop, and instead are intermittently applied to soil, which is laborious and imprecise. Most importantly, nitrates are water soluble and flush through the soil and leach out into groundwater. One-third of the nitrates are lost, and cause runoff problems downstream. Another third of the nitrates get eaten by soil microbes, as microbes eat before plants eat. Therefore much more nitrate has to be used, driving up total costs.

Ammonia products, meanwhile, are an immediately available source of nitrogen to crops, so they are preferred across conventional agriculture. They also bind to soil, so don’t flush away. In drip and trickle systems, they can feed the plant exactly when needed. By not drenching their fields, farmers avoid N2) hot moments. But until today, all ammonia products are chemically made – and forbidden in the organic sector.

California Organic invented a bioprocess to convert biowaste from farms and processors into ammonia products that are both decarbonized (green) and organic certified. After a 2-year rigorous evaluation with the CDFA, we began selling our green organic ammonia products in late 2023. Our production facility is over 1 million liters, and we are expanding it in 2024.

We can make our ammonia at up to 20% concentration in water; however, for organic applications, per agreement with the CDFA, we ship the ammonia at 6%.

Welcome to the era of “Direct Air Utilization.” You all know Direct Air Capture, and you all know Carbon Utilization. In a single step, SpiralWave radically brings down the energy and the costs of transforming the carbon in air and the hydrogen in water into hydrocarbon fuel. Unlike competing DAC and CCUS technologies and traditional reactors relying on vacuums, high temperatures, and pricey catalysts, SpiralWave scales non-thermal plasma at atmospheric pressure indefinitely.

Each SpiralWave’s reactor –  The Microbeam™  – can mine CO2 from the air each day, combining it with hydrogen from river or lake water, resulting in green methanol at cost parity with grey methanol — all at room temperature and ambient pressure. The energy demand is very low; one ton of pure methanol costs 7,000 KWh.

Our second reactor  –  The Nanobeam™  – performs Direct Flue Gas Utilization. We skip the capture, and work directly from your flue gas, whether it’s a low CO2 concentration or high, and including CO mix or not.

SpiralWave carefully fine-tunes the pulse, the frequency, and water microdroplet parameters to bias towards the formation of methanol, as opposed to other hydrocarbon byproducts. This green-methanol is a vital building block for an emerging class of green maritime fuels. To that end, a large global transport, logistics, and energy conglomerate has expressed interest in a large takeoff agreement with SpiralWave.