2024 MIT Sustainability Conference: Startup Exchange Lightning Talks - Emvolon

EMMANUEL KASSERIS: So, hello, everyone. My name is Emmanuel Kasseris. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Emvolon, and we are an MIT spinoff producing carbon negative fuels and chemicals today. Both myself and my co-founder are both alumni, as well as staff. We developed this technology and licensed it from MIT.

Oops. There we go. So that's the last one. There we go. So the world needs liquid green fuels to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors that cannot electrify. These are sectors like shipping and aviation, but also chemicals and fertilizer production. The problem is that no one really knows how to produce these liquid green fuels and chemicals for a reasonable cost.

We address this issue at Emvolon by also reducing methane emissions, because we essentially use wasted resources on-site that we convert to these liquid fuels that can be put in a truck and taken to market. We start with feedstock like biogas and landfill gas from agricultural or municipal waste. We also can use industrial gases. And we use our portable and modular chemical plant to convert them on-site.

This way we are addressing both a $1 trillion market that accounts for 15% on the hard-to-abate sector side, the liquid fuels and chemicals side, but also 20% of global emissions on the methane side. I guess I'll do this. It's this button, of course.

SPEAKER 1: The big one.

EMMANUEL KASSERIS: Yeah, there we go, the big one. So the issue, however, with harvesting these methane resources on-site is that conventional technology is not really designed to be cost-effective at this scale. Conventional process technology uses economies of scale. It uses one-off designs.

And therefore, when you try to do something on a landfill or a farm, a few tons per day, you result in more than 25 years of payback. By comparison, Emvolon technology can achieve a four-year payback on-site. This is without any subsidies. This is at market prices for the fuels.

This is for eight tons of product from 300,000 SCF per day of gas. We achieve this by essentially repurposing internal combustion engines as small-scale compressors and reactors. This is the technology that we developed with MIT. And this allows us to effectively build a 40-foot container chemical plant that is portable and modular and can be placed next to this low-cost feedstock without the need for infrastructure.

Methanol is an established market, $40 billion, used for several different things, such as chemicals and plastics. However, it has been growing exponentially as a potential green fuel for shipping, where more than 250 vessels have already converted to run on green methanol, but also potential feedstock for aviation. There's plenty of feedstock wasted methane emissions from just landfills and agriculture, not even including the industrial emissions in the US, to power most of the global demand for green methanol by 2030, a $70 billion market.

This is an example, a case study of how Emvolon is helping both reducing emissions and generating revenue for a customer. We just announced a partnership with Montauk Renewables on a landfill in Houston where we're taking flared landfill gas, about a million SCF per day, and converting it into more than 6 million worth of shipping fuel, methanol shipping fuel on-site, eliminating emissions both on the methane side as well as the shipping side. We're about to announce this New York-listed shipping company.

We started in 2021, proved the technology, built a beautiful 5,000 square foot facility and scaled it up. We've now just announced our pilot, and next year we're going to a first of a kind commercial unit. And we have signed agreements for more than 10 million SCF per day by 2026, as well as the offtake, which is more than 60 million in revenue.

We have lots of industrial partnerships, both on the gas supply side, working with RNZ companies, large engine companies, many shipping players, but as well as grants for many established government agencies. However, we're always looking for more partners. So if you are in the waste space, either industrial emissions, municipal, or agricultural waste emissions, if you are a user or producer or trader of green chemicals in shipping, aviation, heavy industry, please reach out to us. We have a booth. We have a beautiful facility about 30 minutes away here.

So come and talk to us. And together let's change the future of green chemical manufacturing. Thank you.

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