5.4.22-Startup-Ecosystem-Amogy

ABIGAIL JABLANSKY: I'm Abigail Jablansky, business development lead at Amogy, an ammonia energy company, hence the name. And today I'll be talking about a big solution for a big challenge.

We were founded about a year and a half ago by four MIT alumni. We're based in Brooklyn in the Navy Yard, which has been revitalized as a center of manufacturing and innovation. We're actually outgrowing our space as we scale up our technology, which I'll talk about.

We are at current 40 employees and hiring. So if this is interesting to you or somebody in your network, come see me after. And we've raised about $75 million in funding to date. In addition to our expansion in the New York area, we're also opening an office in Norway later this year to really be at the center of sustainable innovation and maritime technology.

So the big challenge for us is that greenhouse gas emissions are growing rapidly year on year. And of that, transportation comprises an increasing percentage. While much progress has been made in the personal vehicle space, with technologies like batteries and hydrogen fuel cells, there's really no sustainable solution for these industrial transportation sectors. And with our technology, we believe we can reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by about 10%, by providing emissions-free technology for those sectors.

For us, that big challenge is the big opportunity. And when we talk about alternative energies for transportation, hydrogen and batteries typically come to mind. Both of these are zero emissions, although they have very low energy density, in particular hydrogen, because of the amount of energy it takes to compress, store, and transport that hydrogen. And neither has a very sustainable infrastructure or ease of transportation. Ammonia checks all three boxes, zero carbon, high energy density, and an existing infrastructure that makes it readily available for industrial deployment.

Ammonia has been produced for about 100 years, primarily as a fertilizer and secondarily as an industrial refrigerant. So there's a lot of industrial knowledge around how to handle and store this product. And we want to build off of that. So our technology is a miniaturized ammonia cracking power system, for efficient generation of electricity on board a vehicle.

Here's our big solution in action. There's a drone, a 5 kilowatt drone, that we built last summer, less than a year ago. You can see here our fuel tank goes into the reactor, which is really our core technology. And then the reactor products go into the fuel cells for electricity generation on board, no intermediate hydrogen storage.

And we saw about 38% efficiency with this, including a 50% efficiency drop-in from the fuel cell alone. So since then, we've taken our power pack, we made it bigger, bought a tractor, put the power pack in the tractor, and we are about a week away-- knock on wood-- for anybody watching this from Amogy, knock on wood. We are about a week away from demonstrating this tractor on a farm that already gets ammonia delivery for fertilizer. So we are demonstrating a tenfold increase in the power scale from 5 to 50 kilowatts, an increase in the efficiency to 42%, competitive if not better than diesel engines of today, and in an environment where the infrastructure already exists.

We're looking at shipping to be our true first market, though, because the International Maritime Organization has already come out with pretty stringent emissions reduction targets for 2030 and 2050. And action is needed now to meet that. And in fact, the ammonia producers are already gearing up for the increased production, fueled by-- pun intended-- the adoption of ammonia as a marine fuel.

And we know that it takes many different partners to build a ship, and that's really what we're looking for. We're looking for partnerships across all of these, from naval architects to government support, to bunkering or refueling support, port infrastructure to make this possible. And we are already designing a 500 kilowatt work boat to set sail in the first half of next year with one of our investors, Amazon, although we're looking for partners across the industry to make that vessel a reality.

We are a bigger solution than just shipping. This technology can be equally applied to ground vehicles and trucking for longer ranges, as well as stationary power generation, things like port infrastructure, server farms, things that really require that multi-megawatt scale. And with our technology, we can provide five times the range or duration that a battery can provide and we can do it continuously.

And so here's a summary of our milestones to get up to that scaling of multi-megawatt level where we are today. You can see the tractor demonstration. So please look out for that exciting announcement in the near future.

And the ask is really for partnerships across all of these industries, marine, on road, and stationary power from asset owners, industry-specific application experts, and ultimately any end user that is interested in zero emissions shipping. Thank you.

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