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Chementator Briefs – Technology News for Nov. 2024

| By Dorothy Lozowski

Electrifying industrial heat

Calectra (Oakland, Calif.; www.calectra.com) has received $1.6 million in pre-seed funding and $400,000 in grant funding from the U.S. Government and New York State to support its work on decarbonizing industrial process heat. Heavy industrial processes, like steel, cement and glass manufacturing require high-temperature heat. Electrifying these processes to reduce carbon emissions with currently available solutions, such as using green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive. Calectra is developing a power-to-heat thermal storage technology to provide manufacturing industries with low-cost, high-temperature (up to 1600°C), emission-free process heat. The company’s thermal storage system converts electricity from the grid or on-site renewables into high-temperature heat within its patent-pending bricks. This heat is then stored in the bricks and delivered to industrial manufacturers on demand. Calectra optimizes its technology for high-temperature heat delivery at low cost and at large scale. Nate Weger, co-founder and chief technical officer CTO of Calectra, developed the technology concept while at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The company says that replacing fossil fuels in high-temperature process-heat generation could cut CO2 emissions by 1.8 gigatons per year, which represents about 5% of global CO2 emissions.

 

Cheaper cathode materials

Currently, electric vehicle (EV) batteries carrying lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) cathodes are less expensive than those with nickel cobalt manganese (NCM) cathodes, but are not able to achieve the energy density of NCM-based batteries. Now, Integrals Power (Milton Keynes, U.K.; www.integralspower.co.uk) has developed technology for LMFP cathode active material that avoids this tradeoff, allowing the lower-cost battery chemistries to achieve the performance characteristics of batteries with the more expensive NCM cathode chemistry.

Applying its propriety materials technology and patented manufacturing process, the company has overcome the drop in specific capacity that typically occurs as the percentage of manganese in the cathode is increased. The result is a cathode active material that supports higher voltages and high energy density, Integrals Power says. For EVs, the implications of this advance are that vehicle range could increase by up to 20%, or — for a given range — battery packs could be smaller and lighter.

The Integrals Power technology allows LMFP cathode materials with 80% Mn, as opposed to the 50–70% typically found in competing materials, and have higher specific capacity (150 mAh/g), while delivering a voltage of 4.1V (versus 3.45V for LFP cathodes). Third-party testing at the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) has been completed on coin cells and is now ongoing for EV-representative pouch cells.

 

CO2 to Protein

LanzaTech Global (Skokie, Ill; www.lanzatech.com) has developed a process that uses CO2 to produce LanzaTech Nutritional Protein (LNP). The company reports that it has operated a pilot plant for two years, and is now moving to the engineering design phase for a 0.5 to 1.5 tons per day facility, expected to be operational in 2026. Commercial-scale facilities are being designed for 30 metric tons per year (m.t./yr) and production is expected by 2028.

LNP is a nutrient-rich microbial protein with a complete amino-acid profile alternative to plant- and animal-based foods. Using its proprietary gas-fermentation process, with a new microbe, the company says LNP can be a cost competitive alternative to plant- and animal-based proteins.