9.12.24: MIT STEX Demo Day -EDEN

PARIS SMALLS: I'm in Houston, Texas for a conference called Drilling for Hydrogen. And I'll talk a little bit about why that is and what's exciting about it. Before then, I'm Paris, I'm a CEO-- actually, founder of Eden. I did my PhD in the MIT-WHOI joint program, course 12, just graduated last year and started this company, actually, while I was a PhD student.

And what we're developing is a technology to unlock subsurface resources. You have heat underground, you have natural deposits of hydrogen underground-- if you didn't actually know that-- you have minerals in the ground, you have all the gas in the ground, you have the ability to, potentially, inject CO2 underground. But all of these things require a rock fracturing technology to allow you to access the subsurface.

The traditional way of fracturing rocks is with a technology that a lot of people are familiar with called hydraulic fracturing, where you inject very high pressure water into the subsurface. This water is used to create tensile stresses in the rock, but has environmental issues from induced seismicity to contaminating your groundwater. So now residents around hydraulic fracturing operations don't have clean drinking water.

Because of this, a lot of states and a lot of countries have actually banned hydraulic fracturing. So what we're developing in our technology is a new fracture mechanism. Instead of using high pressure water, we're using electric pulses, and I've been studying this mechanism for the past four years.

You get very similar phenomena of creating fractures in the rock if you get high enough voltage into the rock. But the benefits are you can reduce or eliminate the generation of earthquakes that happen due to lubricating faults when you inject fluids. And you can mitigate the groundwater contamination issues you might have because you're not injecting water.

So the way our technology works is that we put electrodes into wellbores deep underground. We apply voltages-- very high, think hundreds of thousands to millions of volts into the rock-- until you start to generate thermal stresses in the rock and the rock begins to fail. This technology has applications across pretty much any rock in any reservoir that you would want to go to, from geothermal to geologic hydrogen, from mining and carbon storage.

You need to have fractures in the subsurface. We received multiple awards by the US Department of Energy for, essentially, all of these markets because the technology could be that powerful and unlocking these natural resources.

So where we are in our development? This isn't just a theory. We're not just drawing cartoons of electricity and hoping that we can have mechanisms happen. We've actually done it. So last year, we took the team. You can see there's two of our engineers that we worked with the oil and gas company, and we deployed our technology and we put these electrodes that we manufactured and designed ourselves deep into the well. We turned on the electricity. And then, we modulated how much energy was going into the rock.

We did this over the course of two weeks, and we saw a significant increase in production from this reservoir. So the well was initially producing 20 barrels of oil per day. We went there, we did our stimulation job, and then when we left measured production again and production increased to over 100 barrels of oil coming out per day. So the operator here, they paid for the pilot operation and they made money off of this pilot.

What was really unique about the [INAUDIBLE] the technology, was that we did this. We increased production using zero gallons of water. We did not inject a single drop of water into the subsurface while we were stimulating this reservoir. So we were very excited about the potential for the technology that's been proven in oil and gas reservoirs, and now we're looking at the technology in different geologic reservoirs.

So what we have coming up are additional projects with the-- sponsored by the DOE to do our technology for geothermal applications and granite in the US. We have customers in the Middle East and North Africa who are adopting our technology.

Our company actually signed the world's first MOU for geologic hydrogen production, and we signed this with the Omani government last year and we're looking at doing that project with them where we drill wells, we use our technology to fracture the reservoir. And then, we show the increase of hydrogen production coming out sometime later next year.

And we also have multiple contracts with mining companies who need to have their mines fractured in order for them to decrease the amount of energy required to then grind out the minerals from these rocks. And so we have a lot of really unique use cases all related to the energy transition for the technology.

And so what we're looking for are people who own wells. If you own wells or you have access to-- or networks of people within mining, geologic mining, and geothermal carbon storage or traditional oil and gas, these are all markets that our technology can play in, so thanks.

SPEAKER: Thank you, Paris. Let me start with a question here. You talked a little bit about it, but where have you seen more traction, if you could expand a little on that?

PARIS SMALLS: So the easiest thing for us to do is deploy an oil and gas well just because the market is so big. So that's the biggest market. But we actually received the most traction in the mining industry. There have been a lot of innovation and mining companies who have these groups that are actively looking to sponsor startups to help them increase their mineral yield because their ores are degrading and they have a really key role to play in [INAUDIBLE] to provide critical minerals for solar, wind, and other kind of applications. So a lot of the traction has been in mining.

SPEAKER: OK, thank you. And what is the energy requirement to create fractures in a lateral 3 kilometer?

PARIS SMALLS: That's a great question. In our pilot, we consumed less than 100 megawatts of energy. At $100 per megawatt, you're talking $10,000 worth of electricity that are consumed.

SPEAKER: OK, thank you.