Decarbonizing Industrial Processes with Material Science - Shreya Dave Flashcards
I’m talking with Shreya Dave, CEO of Via Separations, a company focused on reducing the energy needed to separate or isolate substances in industrial processes. Industrial separation is a critical step in manufacturing a wide array of products including pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, semiconductors, and chemicals.
I’ll ask Shreya to discuss how her company’s technologies are reducing the carbon footprint of these industrial processes, and to describe her experience co-founding this start-up company.
31/01/24
15/02/24
I am the CEO and Co-founder at Via Separations, which we founded out of our research at MIT in the Department of Material Science with my co-founder, Brent Keller, who is our CTO, and our former professor, Jeff Grossman. Via Separations is focused on decarbonizing the industrial sector by making industrial manufacturing more energy efficient and electrifying it. And we do that by replacing heat based processes like evaporators and distillation columns with membrane filtration, which is 90% lower energy, fully electrifiable, and provides operational flexibility to the customer.
So in a lay version of that, if you’re a camper or living someplace where the water is not safe to drink, the idea is instead of boiling the water, let’s use a filter to enable it to be clean enough to drink.
So you were a PhD student in material science at MIT. What do material science PhD students study?
You can be a computational material scientist and model how you think the molecules and how thermodynamics says the molecules will behave. You can be an experimental scientist and bring to life some of those things that happened in the models. You can be developing new materials, you can be putting materials together, you can be building batteries, you can be building solar cells. What I did was took a really phenomenal piece of modeling work and tried to bring it to fruition in reality in the lab, show that the material has the properties, can do the things that we predicted it could do using computational molecular dynamics.
I learned a lot about the fundamental science. And I also had the opportunity to look at the economic impact and the climate impact of the technology we were working on as part of my PhD, which is how we thought at the beginning that there wasn’t commercial applicability. We had modeled the application we envisioned, which was water filtration at the time, and when we looked at the numbers and how it’d impact the costs of water, our hypothesis that improving this material would make cheaper, better, faster access to clean water was not true.
And so in true scientist format, we had a hypothesis, we disproved it and we said thank you, we’ll move on to the next problem. And it turns out that it is true, it’s just not true in the water industry. It’s more true in the chemicals and raw materials industry that we could have a very big climate and cost impact for the manufacturers of those raw materials.
So you had a set of tests going on on a material that you thought might be useful for producing clean drinking water? Was that coming from salt water or from wastewater? No, that’s coming from salt water. So seawater desalination had been our focus. And so it turned out it wasn’t as effective in doing that as you’d hoped, and so you thought, well, where else might filtration be important? That’s exactly right.
Can you talk about where is filtration used in industry and then how does your technology do better from a climate and cost perspective than the prevailing technologies?
So I’ll actually pop one more level out and say separation. So separating different chemical compounds from one another is incredibly important. It accounts for about 15% of global energy consumption. It is about 75% of the cost of producing a raw material or a chemical. And it’s hugely energy intensive because we do it largely the same way we have since the industrial revolution.
The analogy I use here is a pot of pasta. In the existing technology, all the water is boiled off to get to pasta at the bottom of a pot instead of pouring it through a strainer in your sink, which at the industrial scale is 90% less energy, it’s fully electrifiable, and it provides operational flexibility to the customer. So filtration can displace these heat based processes, pasta strainers can displace the pasta pot in this analogy, and have a huge impact on the cost drivers on the energy consumption and on the emissions which are a little bit decoupled by using filtration instead.
So filtration is already used in the water sector. It’s been doing so about two, three decades and has been a really great use case for transformation from the pasta pot to the pasta strainer. But for chemicals and for the production of raw materials like paper, we still use the pasta pot. So what we’re doing at Via Separations is taking the pasta pots that exist in existing manufacturing sectors and augmenting them with pasta strainers to reduce the energy consumption to electrify the process and to provide the customer the ability to produce more product.
You’re talking about augmenting as opposed to substituting. So does that mean you’re doing a lot of the pre-work first and then allowing the boiling off to happen much later in the process so there’s less to boil off?
That’s exactly right. And we do that for a couple different reasons. The first is if there is a pasta pot that exists or an evaporator that exists on a manufacturing facility and it still has a useful life left in it, then we want to be able to use it, maybe extend the useful life because we’re not running it as hard, but we want to still be able to use it. And so we and our customers believe the best bang for the buck is to do that pre-work, to take, say, 50% of the pasta water out and allow the boiling to happen as well. It also, for a new technology to enter the manufacturing sector, provides some amount of redundancy. The number one and number two things that matter to our customers are safety and reliability, and redundancy enables that reliability and the existing process being there improves the safety. And so we want to be very conscious that, if that’s our customer’s number one goals, it’s also our number one goals.
And what’s the customer value? This is cheaper and/or environmentally less intensive?
So it’s three things. **It is reduction in energy or chemical or other operating costs. It’s an increase of top line. **So maybe you are running more stably and have less downtime or you are making more product because now you have this additional capacity that’s augmenting the evaporators. And then the third thing is we’re doing all of that value creation, we’re doing all of that positive ROI stuff for the customer while also reducing their carbon emissions.
And when you think about what is required in order to reduce carbon emissions at a very, very big level, the first thing you want to do is not emit the carbon that you don’t need to. The next thing you want to do is electrify the stuff that needs an energy input because electricity can be fully renewable or fully decarbonized, whereas heat is much more complicated at the moment. And then the third thing you want to do is replace with something else, whether that’s a hydrogen technology or a carbon capture or something else down the road. And we do the first two here. We increase the efficiency by 90% and we fully electrify the 10% that we don’t eliminate.
So take us through a couple of the actual use cases. So, clearly, we’re not using this to produce pasta. It sounds like a whole range of industrial processes require this type of separation that can be substituted or augmented using your technology. What’s the scope of it, and then how did you decide where to focus your efforts as a startup company?
So the blessing and the curse is that it is such a broad, huge market for us to tap into. And the curse piece of it is that it is a little bit different for each different market. So in some cases, maybe we’re fully replacing the existing pasta pot. In some cases we’re augmenting. In some cases we’re doing multiple steps together as one. In some cases we’re replacing one step and we have the opportunity to be able to plug into a huge diversity of different processes.
Like you said, they exist in chemicals, in petrochemicals refining, in semiconductors, in food and beverage, in pharmaceuticals, and in pulp and paper, which is actually where we are launching the technology.
We’re launching the technology actually as we speak. We are commissioning the first plant with a pulp and paper company in Grand Prairie, Alberta, which is north of Calgary, just for you to get your bearings.
We’re focusing on the pulp and paper industry because the industry is extremely excited about the operational flexibility and the decarbonization and the energy savings associated with this technology. They are innovative. They have been thinking about filters instead of their evaporators for two decades. They are very cognizant of how their facilities are built and operate and can understand very explicitly the benefits that this can provide. And because it’s a fairly large market for us. Globally, there’s about 1 billion gallons of this fluid that we’re processing processed every single day. And so we have the opportunity to achieve the economies of scale to be in a lot of different global markets and also use this as a launchpad into the chemicals and food and beverage sectors, which are sort of our roadmap going forward.
And is Canada, this location, simply an opportunistic play in the sense that that was the company that was interested? Or is there something about the regulatory environment that makes Canada particularly attractive given you’re based here in Boston?
it’s a little bit of both. Our first customer, and this is public, is with International Paper and they have a large fraction of the North American market, and the facility that we’re working with is an incredibly innovative and well run facility. And that’s really important to us. We’re launching a first of a kind demonstration system that we know will work, but it will take some tweaks to get there and it will take some patience and understanding of what’s going on on both sides of the fence in order to really make this work extremely reliably, and we’ve found that in the human beings, in the culture of the parent company, and in the economic opportunity for this particular facility.
A very small piece of that is regulatory environment because there is a tax on carbon in most of the provinces in Canada, and that is projected to increase. So there is a slight incentive for Canadian companies to move more quickly, as compared to American companies. But I’ll be totally frank and say that our pipeline is probably 50/50 US and Canada at this moment. So we’re not only focusing on Canada, we don’t need that regulatory environment for it to be a cost driver for the customer to adopt, and it does not need to be a carbon initiative for it to be valuable to the customer.
So how are you going to market with these? I’m trying to understand the growth potential. So if this is offering them a solution that is cheaper than their prevailing technology, even without a carbon tax, is I think what you’re saying, and it has the benefit of carbon reduction, which is helpful for a lot of companies who have made net-zero pledges and other science-based target initiative reductions. So this sounds like quite a huge opportunity. Am I hearing that right?
So how are you going to market? Are you developing the technology with a technology partner and then co-installing it and maintaining it, or are you licensing your technology? How are you actually getting it into these plants?
That’s a great question. So for these early projects, at a minimum, we are installing the technology at the customer site and in collaboration, of course, with that customer. But the opportunity here is for us who knows the technology the very best to be able to operate it as optimized as possible instead of having to rely on a third party or a customer to operate it at its peak performance. And so we believe that we can provide the best performance by operating it ourselves in the near term.
We also think a lot about what’s best for our customer. We’re trying to make their operations more efficient and economic and retain the jobs in their region and to provide good paying jobs to the economy as well.
So when we’re working with the customer, we have learned that the customer is most excited about a sort of annual service fee as opposed to a capital sale. And that’s not every single customer. Some folks in our pipeline are saying, no, I actually think I’m interested in a capital sale. But for the folks who say, “Hey, this decision would be easier, we can make this decision more quickly, this would be great to be put on our operating budget instead of our capital budget,” we’re happy to work with them and secure the financing of the project on our end. We, obviously, have to pay that capital back and that feeds into the pricing on both sides, but it gives us the opportunity to move more quickly. It gives us the opportunity for the customer to make those decisions under just a slightly different set of constraints.
And so is this primarily, are you thinking about this as a retrofit technology?
Absolutely. Absolutely. We very firmly believe that all the industrial manufacturing domestically and globally is doing a very good job of it. And we don’t need to tear it down and start from scratch, that we can make the facilities more cost and energy efficient together by adding some equipment, some infrastructure to the existing facility. So this is always done within the boundary walls of the existing plant in different formats or footprints depending on what space is available. And it’s always done kind of within the scope of what the customer is comfortable for us to do onsite.
And so you had mentioned some pretty large statistics about separation being a real driver of energy use and carbon footprint in the industrial sector. So in your early deployments, when you’re installing this equipment at pulp and paper operations, for example, by how much does it reduce the entire plant’s carbon footprint?
I can say that we are able to offset about 50% of the energy required for the black liquor concentration process, which is about a third to 40% of the energy on the entire facility. So we’re talking 10 to 15 to 20% depending on exactly the use case for the customer of the overall mill. Not every project is going to hit that number because we are also making economic decisions. So it’s not just what we can do or what we should do, but also what makes sense in the current demand environment, what makes sense in the current regulatory environment, what makes sense on the timeline and schedule and risk that the customer is willing to take. But that is the opportunity for the pulp and paper facilities.
It’s a really great opportunity because it is so diverse, it is challenging and it is not straightforward and there is no one size fits all. But to us that’s a market inefficiency and we can fill that gap.
It’s interesting that you’re planning to pursue this half in the US given we don’t have the carbon tax that, for example, Europe faces in terms of their emissions trading system, which would only improve the ROI from the customer’s perspective. Can you talk a little bit about that?
This has been very important to us from the get go since we started the company. Bill Gates has released his book with the phrase green premium, you pay more for the lower impact product, whatever that may be. And I think that’s absolutely important for many technologies in many areas. You can imagine concrete, for example, may or may not have a green premium, but if it does, it’s a very small fraction of the overall cost of a project.
However, when we are talking to our industrial sector customers, their ROI on their investment is they’re still the number one thing. And yes, they have goals and pledges, but the best case scenario is that we can do both of those. And so we want to be really aligned. We don’t want to have to rely on any regulation, any tax credits, any incentives to be economic to the customer.
And that was very much by design of the company, of the project, of the technology, of the customer relationships that we have. So whereas you may see carbon capture costs hundreds of dollars per ton of CO2, we are creating a hundred dollars or more of value for the customer per ton of CO2. And that gets me really excited, that gets a lot of our team up out of bed when times are hard and we’re figuring things out, and I think it is why this business will scale rapidly.
That’s interesting. It seems to me, once you do get around to expanding to markets with carbon taxes of effectively a hundred dollars essentially, then you’re doubling the returns to clients, which then, presumably, you’ll take a bigger share of that because you can price it more, which is more value for you as well.
That’s exactly, exactly the goal. We’ve opted to start here in North America because we’re already doing a lot of new things and adding another variable of complexity was not something that we were willing to sign up for. But a lot of companies have facilities north and south of the border, and so even though, for example, voltage standards are slightly different in Canada, those are relatively trivial things to worry about as it relates to the global operations of a company. And we’ve found plenty of business in North America, so we haven’t had to look past, at least for the near term.
So let’s talk a little bit about funding. So I know that as a startup you initially had some funding from the US Department of Energy. Subsequently, you’ve been raising money from venture capitalists. So can you talk about what your theory of funding has been and why this hybrid approach of public and private money?
I think that the opportunity to make every dollar go further is my fiduciary responsibility. So maybe that’s by stretching a dollar and being cost conscious on a project, but also that’s by leveraging DOE dollars or the National Science Foundation for things that they’re really good at, which is technology development, technology validation, meeting cost targets, and venture capital dollars for the things that they’re really good at, which is sales and marketing, which is protecting the intellectual property. It’s the building the business, it’s the G&A components. And so we have a pretty clean split between what is allowed to be allocated. Of course, we do. That’s the law. But we also internally feel very strongly about what can and cannot be allocated to each pool of capital because what we’re doing is filling the funding gaps in each.
So in the venture capital world, it is very expensive for us to do development on the venture capital dollar because we’re selling parts of the company. But the reality is that something coming out of a university research lab is not ready for commercialization yet. And so there’s a gap there. And venture capitalists, I don’t think they would even suggest that they want to be the technologists, the deep experts in what’s going to work, what’s going to scale up, how is that going to happen. Whereas the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy bring in reviewers who have experience in that area. And so when you submit an application and the reviewers see it, they’re asking those sorts of questions.
And so every time, even when we don’t win it, and we don’t win many of them, we submit a grant application, we learn something from it, we get great feedback. Or we’ve had to run to ground a question that we hadn’t internally, and the process of just writing the application has made us learn something or set some strategic vision. The value is for both sides far, far, far beyond the dollar, but dollars are a means to an end and we do need to be able to pay our people and to rent our space and to build our projects and the right type of capital going to each of those things is important to our strategy.
So the DOE or NSF grants, they do call for proposals and they say, here’s what we’re looking for, so I can understand how you might select which to apply to those that match reasonably closely to what your needs are as well. How does that work in the venture space? There’s like a million venture capitalists out there. How do you figure out who to approach and if you have more offers than you need, who to select as a partner?
I’ll start by saying is when we first started raising money in 2017, there weren’t a million options out there. We were in this pretty unfriendly space of material science, climate tech, and hardware at a time when climate tech 1.0 was still fresh in everybody’s memory and software was scaling. And it was very easy for me to tell who to talk to because I would just look at their existing portfolio, see only software companies and say, this doesn’t make sense for us. And not to say I didn’t have some conversations. I learn a ton every time I’m fundraising, every time I have a fundraising conversation. I did speak to some folks and we’re talking just different numbers. Let us know when you have a hundred users. Well, if we have a hundred users, we’re making well over a hundred million dollars a year. And so in 2, 3, 4, 500 million a year. And so we’re not the right fit for that investor. And so I learned that pretty quickly.
The good news is that landscape has changed dramatically over the last seven years, that there are a number of people who are excited about hardware, hard tech. Again, I think tough tech is a great phrase. There are a lot of people and tons and tons of smart people investing in climate at every stage of the growth trajectory for a company. And when we’re talking to folks now we’re looking at, okay, is this the right amount of technology and market risk that you’re willing to take? So some farms want to come in really early, right, make lots of bets and know that a lot won’t turn out, but also know there’ll be some really big winners. And some folks want to come in later when the technology has been completely proven and there’s no questions about it working. And then there’s everybody in between.
Right fit really matters because you’re working with these people, you’re working with your board, you’re working with your investors to build the larger story. And if you’re misaligned, then you are spending your time trying to fit a round peg in a square hole because it’s not a we’re building this together, it’s we’re trying to prove to each other that we have something here, and that’s just not company growth.
So I think a lot of folks who aren’t familiar with the startup process and with venture capitalists, imagine that VC investors are there primarily to provide money and then check up periodically to see whether you’re meeting the benchmarks you had claimed you’d meet when you made the initial proposal. But in reality, lots of them actually provide a variety of technical support and expertise. So can you tell a little bit about how have they helped you beyond the funding?
I have so many examples. I have so many very tactical examples. Helping us develop our corporate financial model or helping us negotiate a equipment loan deal. These are things that just happened in the last three months for me that I’ve worked with my board and my investors on.
I’ll say more broadly is that venture capitalists, growth equity investors, whomever you’re working with, have the benefit and the exposure to hundreds of companies. Some they’ll invest in, some they won’t, some they’ve already invested in and exited, some have invested and not succeeded, but they’ve got this incredible data set of what works and what doesn’t work. And that pattern recognition is probably why they invested in us. And that pattern recognition is this wealth of knowledge that we should be tapping as far as what’s working and what’s not working and where have you seen companies falter and what are we expecting around the corner?
So as CEO, it is my job to set the strategy and set the vision, and also raise capital and build a business and all those sorts of things, but setting that strategy and vision is not done in a vacuum. It’s done with a lot of input. And that is incredibly valuable because we aren’t on an island nor should we want to be.
You’d mentioned earlier about some of your clients don’t want to purchase the capital, but rather want to pay you an operating fee, which requires therefore you to go and get that financing. Where are you getting that financing from?
For the current project, the majority of that is equity capital, with a little bit of creative financing thrown in there. But down the road, as we come down the technology risk curve in that we are proving that we can do what we say we can do at the commercial scale, we are operating for 3, 6, 9, 12 months reliably, then we will open up different pools of capital. And this is not my area of expertise, it’s something I’ve learned a lot about. But with the contracts that we are working on with our customers, the goal is to unlock project finance capital and have project companies that own each project and allow project investors into the capital stack.
And so that’s really important to us. It’s really important to us and our customers that we have repeatable agreements so that if we build one project with one facility, we don’t need to start over for the next project or the next project, that we have sort of a master services agreement. And that’s one of the kind of corporate level strategies that we’re working on with a couple of our customers.
Let’s look a little bit toward the future. You’d mentioned earlier that you’re expecting the next set of projects to be split across Canada and the US, and to go above and beyond the pulp and paper sector. So can you talk a little bit about how you decided which sectors to go into and how different or similar they will be to the pulp and paper experience you’re acquiring right now?
We have a couple key criteria when we’re thinking about where do we go next. The first is thinking about our fiduciary responsibility. Where are we able to scale and grow the business? The second is where are we going to have a carbon impact? And those, because of our business model, because of the value we generate per ton of carbon, are very well aligned. And so that actually does not end up being attention as you might otherwise expect. And then we also are looking at customers that are willing to adopt quickly. And that’s important because we could solve, for example, crude oil distillation and we could be working on that and we could solve that from a technical perspective. But is a petrochemical refinery going to replace or offset or augment the first step in their process tomorrow? Probably not.
And so we have to also think about how much data is required for the customer to adopt this technology? What is the scale and scope of that? Does this need to be operating commercially for how long? And what are those metrics because those metrics exist for a reason?
And so we’ve got to be able to match, we’ve got to be able to deliver that burden of proof that we can do what we’re we can do. And so we want to start with some of those same customers, but some of the systems that maybe are smaller or are less reliable than their core processes, and then ultimately build that capability in the company and scale to those larger ones. So we think about not only the market and climate impact, but also how do we go to market? How do we drive value to our investors on what timescale? Because we can’t sit around, nobody can. No large or a small company cannot not see revenue for a very long time.
And so how does those calculations lead you to particular industrial applications beyond pulp and paper?
There’s a few I’m pretty excited about right now. Acid processing is one of them. So whereas the pulp and paper market is a very caustic, so think bleach is a caustic material, as if we’re working with concentrated bleach, very caustic, but acidic is the other end of the pH spectrum. And so there are some symmetry in how the chemistry works there. So we’re really excited about some acid processing applications.
We are really excited about a couple of food-based applications. Sugar concentration is done entirely with evaporators today and could be a really great place for very few tweaks of technology, just kind of a copy and paste. But then there are other sectors, for example, separating different organics from each other, that would require more fundamental tweaks of technology, but still leverage the same platform.
And we also need to be super focused. We’re launching our first project, we’ve got to deliver, we’ve got to stay focused on the customers we have today and the customers that we’re going to have tomorrow. And we’re a small team, and so we can only do so much. And the cardinal rule of startups is to not try to do everything and to focus really carefully on your first beachhead market. And for us, our beachhead is a really, really big market. And so we’re excited to tackle that simultaneously.
I want to take us in a different direction. One of the last questions I tend to ask folks is for advice for others thinking about getting into the business and climate space. So what advice do you have for folks when they ask you, where are the opportunities? How can I find out about working in the climate space?
My number one piece of advice is to work with people you’re excited about working with. Everything in this sector is hard. Everything in this sector is new. Everything in this sector is exciting, at least in my opinion. But if you’re working with people that you’re learning with, you’re working with people who excite you and you believe in, then all of the noise will ultimately work out. At least in my opinion. So I think that a lot of folks ask me, do I need to be a technical person? Do I need to be a business person? I think the answer is you can be everything and work in the climate sector. We need really smart people who are really motivated in all parts of the ecosystem. And I believe it’s a very, very exciting place to be in early stage startups.
