163 - High Heat, Low Carbon - The Future of Industrial Heating with Addison Stark

In this episode of the Insiders Guide to Energy Podcast, we dive deep with Addison Stark, CEO and Cofounder of AtmosZero, into the transformative technologies revolutionizing industrial heat and steam production. Stark, leading the charge at AtmosZero, is pioneering a new age of decarbonization with innovative, electrified solutions for industrial processes, challenging the traditional reliance on fossil fuels. 

AtmosZero stands at the forefront of energy innovation, focusing on scalable, efficient, and sustainable heat pump technologies. Stark discusses the significant impact of decarbonizing industrial heat, which constitutes a substantial portion of global emissions, and how AtmosZero's approach to electrification can lead to a more sustainable and efficient industrial sector. 

Throughout the conversation, Stark sheds light on the complexities of integrating new technologies into existing infrastructures, the economics of transitioning to greener solutions, and the broader implications for global energy policies. the conversation also delves into the intricacies of AtmosZero's cutting-edge heat pump technology. Stark elucidates the engineering behind their high-temperature heat pumps, capable of reaching temperatures over 200°C, which marks a significant advancement in the field. This technology is not only pivotal for enabling a wide range of industrial processes to transition away from fossil fuels but also enhances energy efficiency and reduces operational costs. 

The discussion extends further around the integration of AtmosZero's solutions with renewable energy sources. Stark explains the dual benefit of coupling their technology with solar and wind power: reducing the carbon footprint of industrial heat production while also addressing the intermittency challenges of renewable energy. By leveraging thermal energy storage systems, AtmosZero's approach ensures a steady and reliable supply of high-temperature heat, even when renewable energy generation is low. This synergy between advanced heat pump technology and renewable energy sources exemplifies a holistic approach to industrial decarbonization, aligning with global sustainability goals. 

Also discussed, is the importance of smart grid compatibility and the potential for AtmosZero's systems to participate in demand response programs. This capability not only enhances the resilience and flexibility of the energy grid but also provides economic incentives for industries to adopt cleaner technologies. 

In conclusion, listeners will be treated to an insightful discussion on the challenges and opportunities of electrifying industrial heat, the significance of product-driven solutions over project-based approaches, and the potential for scalable, efficient electrification technologies to transform the energy landscape. 

Transcript

12:35.44 

Addison Stark 

Waste heat is a waste of time for the past thirty years industrial heat pump manufacturers in Europe have been chasing after COP higher efficiency fully integrated projects. But the challenge with that. It's a fully integrated project involves long shutdown time lost revenue hidden costs and it's made it so industrial heat pumps have never taken off as a product class unlike heat pumps for building heating at AtmosZero we're focused on decarbonizing by introducing a drop-in product. Boiler 2.0 something that focused on not requiring waste heat but can be scalable like electric vehicles like solar modules like heat pumps for buildings. You know, let's focus on products not projects. 

13:25.56 

Jeff McAulay 

Addison it's great to have you on the show. What a wonderful provocative framing upfront I'm really excited to get into the technology the details but at the top here help us understand why are we focused on electrifying and decarbonizing heat. And why is that so hard in an industrial setting. 

13:45.26 

Addison Stark 

You know Jeff the question you just asked me was something that really I spent a lot of my time in 2020 dealing with everyone had their covid hobby mine. Ah sure I did some sourdough baking but I also started to dig into this question of why were people saying. Industry is hard to decarbonize and wouldn't happen till the 2040 s so we should focus on the grid first then do transportation and then we'll be able to innovate our way out the challenge with that as we all know is it takes a long time to scale technology. We've been around clean tech one point zero. We've seen it now coming back here. We need things that can be productized to be able to scale so we can start to hit our interim goals on the path to net zero by mid-century industry is a third of emissions in the us roughly equivalent around the world and process heat itself is three quarters of that in digging into this during the pandemic I really recognized if we want to decarbonize industry sure we got to get steel. We got to get cement. These things are big and important materials. But the reality of everything else. It starts to become highly heterogeneous. Ah you have um you know, different. Technologies different manufacturing processes that maybe we can't directly decarbonize but a common thing across most manufacturing is process heat. So I did a deep dive into that and as I really started to identify the opportunities there. You know you recognize there are some great efforts. 

15:14.12 

Addison Stark 

Towards that front already you look at resistive with Storage. You look at these other approaches that we can talk about later is we recognize that there's different temperatures of heat that need to be dealt with and also different Scales. We decided to take a little bit of a different path at atmos zero What I recognized is the centrality that. Steam has played in industry since the beginning of the ah industrial revolution and what it continues to play steam is half of all industrial heat steam is Water. We're comfortable with designing systems around that and it actually offers the manufacturing facility. It's a lot of tight control around temperatures. Of the processes. They run. So if we're going to decarbonize industry to hit Net Zero. We got a focus where the bulk of the emissions are and that's in Heat. So That's why it's so important and why you see such an uptick in interest in this space recently. 

16:09.78 

Jeff McAulay 

That's a great summary. So a huge chunk of global emissions is an industry and a huge chunk of that is in process heat which is primarily driven by steam and so that's why you're targeting it. You mentioned industrial steel and cement as being separate just give us a picture of. Who those customers might look like that are manufacturing that are using steam in that process just a few. Ah maybe not customers but targets ah who are who are those examples. 

16:35.46 

Addison Stark 

Yeah, so this is a good place to take 1 step back and look at what does different kinds of industries use heat for and so we do often hear about oh cement has some heat requirements steel has some heat requirement but those are very specific kinds of manufacturing processes where. The emissions comes from the utilization of fossil fuels to provide both heat. But also the the chemical reactant to actually do the chemistry to convert iron oxide to iron and generally these things are done in very large massively large integrated facilities. Think like you know, similar to large scale like refineries and other kinds of chemical processes commodity chemicals and commodity materials are very large integrated places where you know they've been driven by economies of large plant scale from traditional chemical engineering approaches. The reality is though. When you look across manufacturing broadly 65% of facilities are much smaller total thermal loads below ten Megawatts so we're talking about things that are small enough that the returns by doing a complex integration project or kind of redoing the entire manufacturing process. Can be much too expensive and never pencil out on a capital return basis. So the reality is light and medium duty manufacturing is distributed and steam is very common in that smaller manufacturing looks like food and beverage. It looks like breweries distilleries looks like cosmetics manufacturers it looks like laundries. 

18:09.70 

Addison Stark 

And it looks like all of the smaller and lower temperature processes below two hundred and Twenty Five Celsius um is really where steam is a very common carrier and is driven already by a modular product a combustion boiler. So. 1 of the things that really drew me to this problem is the fact that we have used 1 product type the packaged combustion boiler that was first introduced by Babcock and Wilcox in eighteen sixty seven a little Rhode Island company that has still the most important supplier of steam equipment. But the reality is that productization at that time enabled the scale out of the industrial revolution and the distribution of manufacturing generally before that um boilers were built brick by brick think like an old brick. Pizza oven for example, but you would have a little bit of a boiler inside of it. They focused on doing cast iron fully wrought products that were built in a factory and shipped out rather than being built on site. We see the opportunity to move to electrification based on a. Electrified product that is equally scalable and just as drop in integratable. So there's a lot of nuance into how we think about decarbonizing heat. Um, and a lot of it comes from how can you not have to reinvent the entire supply chain or focus on. 

19:37.33 

Addison Stark 

1 ne-off highly engineered integration projects that have a lot of cost overrun. 

19:40.72 

chrissass 

For those of us that may not be as into this. Let me just make sure I understand what you're saying So you're basically implying that in certain industries. The boiler technology is where you can drop in. And replace and use electrification to create steam as opposed to a more traditional Combustion Technique is that what you're saying. 

20:02.93 

Addison Stark 

That's correct and actually there exist products on the market today that are resistive boilers. So there are an electrified solution think of it like ah your tea kettle like an electric tea kettle where you heat the water there's and a resistive element in there. What's happening there. However is this is limited in scaling because it's very expensive to run. You're paying electricity prices to boil water in a 1 to 1 convert one Kilowatt hour of electricity into one Kilowatt hour worth of steam. You're paying electricity prices for process heat. That's generally 2 to 3 times more expensive is burning natural gas on site and converting that directly to heat so bridging that gap has been a challenge but electrification has also offered other benefits to customers that have chose to adopt that technology already which is eliminating. Ah, emissions of particulates or knocks or socks. Ah, it helps with ah alleviating getting natural gas out of their facility um certain customers really find that there's a lot of value to their customers to have a decarbonized product particularly if you think about customer facing things like food and beverage. We have focused on the reality that that has not scaled but people are buying it anyway, we as a company are focused on well, how do we take advantage of what industrial heat pump manufacturers have tried to do before which is take a heat pump technology which raises the temperature up. 

21:28.14 

Addison Stark 

Of a source of heat. It moves heat. It's much more efficient and you can actually decrease the electricity required to a fraction of the heat that is delivered but doing it in a productized form instead of having to capture high temperature waste heat and upgrade it to steam temperatures we focus on going from ambient air. Just like what's done today to deliver heat pumps for heating a building and ah keeping your building. It. You know fifty. So I guess more like c maybe c but going all the way up to one hundred and fifty Celsius boiling water delivering process heat. So it's something that doesn't exist on the market. 

22:05.48 

Jeff McAulay 

Yeah. 

22:07.29 

Addison Stark 

We saw this as a productized opportunity that can scale but enable a high enough efficient ah high enough efficiency in the product that can be directly competitive and bridge that opex gap. 

22:22.44 

Jeff McAulay 

Addison where is that decarbonization most important is that us is it europe and there are there other drivers cost savings security of supply that you're seeing really increase the demand at this time. 

22:37.45 

Addison Stark 

Yeah Jeff um, you hit 1 nail on the head that we've seen as ah as a company is um, we so first off manufacturing that uses steam is global. You know the the unit operation. To boil water or to boil wart to make beer is the same in fort collins Colorado as it is in Delhi India um, and so there's you know unit operations and chemical process design is global so steam is also ubiquitous. Globally now that pretty much points us to. Steam is used where the manufacturing is and steam is used where people are and so we see a global need for this technology deployment. Um and one of the near term markets where it's beyond just decarbonization potential and customer demand is also dealing with um. Supply critical supply chains energy supply chains where natural gas is much more of ah geopolitically manipulated Europe has a huge demand for electrification to move away from pipeline gas which is no longer available from Russia. Um, now they're completely um, dependent on global l and g import. Which of course has a lot of political implications that we've heard recently in the us where we're looking at slowing down our exports. Ah, but also that means that europe is tied to a more expensive gas than we are here in the us um, but also the reality it's not just gas being used to generate steam. 

24:07.60 

Addison Stark 

In Southeast Asia where you don't have natural gas infrastructure you're using, um, imported lngg or you're using oil. Um inland china and India you still use a lot of coal stoker boilers. So there's a lot of opportunity for air improvement in Gen um is um is. Um, overall air quality improvement in general as well is another consideration for electrification. 

24:35.14 

Jeff McAulay 

Well I'm really excited to get into the technology side and in some ways this is the age-old question. We're just finding different ways of boiling water. This is one of the first things right? after ah humans discovered fire. We discovered boiling water and here we are. Ah, you know tens of thousands of years later still trying to figure it out so walk us through some of the other options you've mentioned around the world. It's still fossil. But we've heard of ah you mentioned electric heating. Um, why aren't we talking more about solar thermal or are there biomass. Options that make sense and as you go through these help us understand what are the metrics that matter you did mention obviously carbon intensity. There's cost. You also hinted at cop would love to hear your your thoughts on that as well. 

25:23.65 

Addison Stark 

Well Jeff you're right? There's nothing new under the sun. Um and boiling water still drives everything we do. It's not just manufacturing but also steam is still central to steam systems for campus heating for city city district heating steam has. Been used and why it's continued to be used is we're using water which is a safe substance but also really, what's important about steam as a heat carrier is that it um has a very high heat of vaporization and condensation. Essentially the power um of the heat power. You can pack with this. Very high power density which is super important. It's very different than just using hot water which is latent heating and it doesn't carry as much you have to flow a lot more hot water than steam to be able to deliver so. Nothing's new under the sun and I've never been drawn to sexy problems I've been drawn to impactful problems and boilers are that. Um, so you're right there there are different ways to boil water. All we're talking about is giving enough heat above c to start that process at ambient pressure higher pressures its higher temperature and that's the higher you go but is important. Um, we have used combustion for one hundred and eighty years and thousands of years before that to do cooking and that is essentially driving ah boiling and we can do that with fossil fuels or we can look at fuel switching like you're and mentioning Jeff you can look at biomass you can look at other green fuels think hydrogen or ammonia or synthetic natural gas. 

26:59.63 

Addison Stark 

R and g renewable natural gas. There's a lot of different ways you could look at that probably the most viable 1 right now is renewable natural gas think true drop inrability with natural gas. It's a fungible swap the reality with that is r and g costs anywhere from 10 to 100 x natural gas but people are buying it because it's a drop in integration that allows them to eliminate scope ones on day one so that is ah that has been a powerful powerful driver for that other things synthetic hydrocarbons or biomass still require more technology adoption. Ah, you would need to adapt your system to be able to integrate hydrogen. You know there's a lot of challenges there that it means a much more expensive integration. It's not truly a drop in swap biomass boilers have existed but it requires a lot more biomass. Than coal to be able to deliver as a solid fuel so that's a challenge now when it comes to paths to truly decarbonize direct electrification is probably going to be the lowest cost from most analyses that you'll see out there on a. What we like to use levelized cost of heat l co h or levelized cost e steam l c o s basis. Um, and that's just the reality of how cheap renewable electricity is becoming but also how stable and predictable grid electricity can be for heat pump solutions now. 

28:21.92 

Addison Stark 

There's 2 main electrification approaches for heat decarbonization that I see being important number one is heat pumps like we're doing low temperature heat where the lift from the temperature you're taking your heat to what you're delivering at if it's low enough. You can get enough so efficiency. Coefficient performance cop to be able to bridge that electrification cost gap compared to fossil fuels the other approach that um electrification is occurring is through what we call resistive with storage. So think of companies that you may have heard of like antora or rondo. Are probably the 2 leading candidates that are doing thermal storage thermal batteries where they charge them using resistive heating so again like we were talking before one unit of electricity becomes one unit of heat. But they're charging it when electricity is cheap if you have direct connection to wind. Our direct connection to solar and you're charging and when that's available and cheap that is a great way to store that and dispatch that constantly those kinds of approaches work really well for very high temperatures think about above c all the way up to flame temperatures c where you're able to drop in integrate and replace and deploy essentially a technology that can give you high temperature heat now for lower temperatures. Steam is generally not delivered above two hundred and twenty Five Celsius there is a little bit used in the chemicals industry refining. But. 

29:57.90 

Addison Stark 

It is not something that um is as as um, ah I'm going to pause. It's used for very high temperature I'm not used for very high temperatures below 27 this is where heat pumps really allow you to use grid electricity. So one of the important things we do as a company is assume you're not getting ten cent a kilowatt hour electricity in your manufacturing facility. You're getting seventy cent ah Kilowatt hour or a hundred or one dollars a kilowatt hour we focus on if you just plug this thing this high efficiency heat pump into the grid and just. Ah, ah, take pay electricity prices as you get them today because of the efficiency of um of a heat pump. You're able to bridge that gap and deliver at the same cost of the fossil fuels. Ultimately what I see is 2 approaches for electrification, low temperature with heat pumps. High temperatures where it's resistive with storage and I always remember there's no silver bullet. 

30:59.21 

chrissass 

You gave a fairly complex description of of the different types of electricity you you implied that your solution is for grid power that it's not necessarily the least Expensive. So if I don't want to get into all. Understanding all the bits I have a plant to run I have a brewery to Run. Let's go over the economics. Let's let's simplify the Economics. What does it really Cost. You've got to put in a new piece of Equipment. You got to change out some sort of a boiler I assume and put something else in how do these economics work. 

31:30.30 

Addison Stark 

Absolutely right? So the first thing that anyone needs to know about the economics of process heat decarbonization is. It's an energy conversion that is dominated in the long haul by the fuel price of what you're using and the efficiency you convert that fuel. Over to process heat. So capital itself is relatively constrained in the levelized cost to heat usually less than 20% and it's really about that other 80% that is the ongoing fuel cost opex. That's why using a heat pump is so important by using a heat pump. You're able to. Essentially decrease. Um the total amount of fuel you need because of the high efficiency and drive that economic ah benefit. Um, so what really entails the capital cost. However, you know earlier as we were talking I was talking about the importance of limiting capital. The reality is if you're running a manufacturing facility. You're a brewer. You're a brewer. You are not a boiler room operator. You know you don't care about the boilers. You just want the steam to deliver to drive your manufacturing process. So for you, you're really focused on having an easy to drop in and run system. Not having something that requires you to shut down for many days to capture the waste heat off of your of off of your boil. Kettle's um things that can mean lost revenue. For example, the way we look at these things is if you are integrating into a facility that requires shutdown. 

33:02.36 

Addison Stark 

If you're going into $100000000 a year manufacturing facility those you know five days to install that thing is a huge amount of lost revenue you're talking about 2 to $3000000 in lost revenue if you shut down for that many days that is where you actually start to have huge capex implications. What we call the hidden cost of waste heat where the idea is yeah, you can look at the nameplate cost of getting that heat pump. But once you actually look at the total um engineering integration costs um is a big deal of suddenly is going to cost too much and actually little overwhelm. So. For us. We see the most important things is high efficiency that that minimizes your fuel cost and things that are repeatable and easy to integrate and therefore the capital itself is less important. Um, it's the integration project that can overwhelm. 

33:55.37 

chrissass 

Now I get the integration project and the the challenges there. What's taken till today to make this become a reality I mean you said 18 hundreds when steam was initially the boiler architecture that many pope people still use today came into effect. Why is it hard. Why is it just taking place today this this transition. 

34:14.60 

Addison Stark 

Well exactly right? So fossil fuels have been and continue to be very cheap in North America natural gas is really the marginal price center for everything because of shale gas. There's a lot of reasons why the us is particularly. Blessed and an anomaly on the global market because of shale gas. Um, so there's been very little incentive to move away from the status quo I mean there's a lot of capital replacement. You'd have to do why. Kill a good thing I think the reality is is manufacturers are getting pressure from customers to decarbonize. You know when you think of you know I mentioned a couple of industries that are heavily reliant on steam that are super so interested in this food and beverage craft brewing cosmetics customer-facing products where. There is real marketing value to having a decarbonized product so eliminating the scope one of manufacturing is dealing with your steam boilers. That's an important piece of that. So partially it's just been. There is demand now for a decarbonized boiler that there hasn't been previously now. Why. Um, have things not scaled for electrification. It's kind of what I what I really think about um with heat pumps is everything is focused on a holistic integration project for plant-wide energy efficiency optimization rather than a drop in boiler that is just. 

35:44.84 

Addison Stark 

Design just to deliver steam and being willing to give a small percentage on operating efficiency but instead to receive a easy to integrate product. 

35:59.13 

chrissass 

All right, assuming it's easy cost comes down. We're talking renewal in the age of renewable energy are your customers at the point where they are putting heat batteries in or was that just an example of how you cost average down that you gave in your earlier explanation. 

36:12.90 

Addison Stark 

Yeah, so heat batteries are still a nascent technology that are starting to be deployed as well. We're very excited about what we see at companies like Rondo and antora they're starting to scale out what we see as a highly complementary. Ah, technology for this space as as I really think there's no silver bullet and these things are going to be deployed the economics of heat batteries really depend on if you have access to time of day pricing that goes really low. You need to have very cheap electricity to enable yourself to deliver yourself steep cheap heat. Because you are heating resistively rather than with a heat pump. So this is important for higher temperatures where a heat pump can't go. It is going to be the best option. It's hard for smaller facilities. Um, that we're focused on to smaller facilities might not be time a day price. Um Acceptors. You don't have often as sophisticated of utility engineers operating and optimizing their electricity pricing or they just won't don't want to deal with that. So boilers also have an important role to play for distributed systems and smaller manufacturing that those kinds of approaches which require a little more. Sophistication on behalf of the operator could be a challenge or not as drop in integratable. However, for larger manufacturing facilities. They could be really the right answer particularly higher temperature. We see them as being highly complementary dealing with. 

37:40.74 

Addison Stark 

Fluctuations and prices That's something that that technology really has a strength for. 

37:46.26 

Jeff McAulay 

Addison looking ahead. It seems like this is ah a moment in time where you're seeing industrial energy users making a bet and because this is long-lived infrastructure. There's ah, a capital investment. That bet is essentially that the spark spread the difference between the cost of electricity and the cost of gas maybe goes negative where essentially when you look at cost of electricity versus cost of gas ah and including the cost of carbon that your long-term bet. Is that it's cheaper to get low carbon energy from electricity is that is that the case when you look out over the next decade and what other major trends. Do you see for industrial heat on the horizon. 

38:33.35 

Addison Stark 

Absolutely right? So you know I think when you just add a little nuance to your thinking on the spark spread is yeah as you frame it. It's really more about the green electricity to um, ah gas. Spark spread or what you know what is the overall carbon benefit there. But also it's how wide can we really expect it to ever be or how narrow can we ever expect it. I'm a little more conservative in the view that. End of the end of the wire manufacturing facilities are going to be able to capture a lot of arbitrage on time of day pricing as you see there's more and more announcements where when people install a solar facility. They're putting batteries on site. Ah the grid operators are probably going to be putting large batteries across different nodes where. Where is that arbitrage going to be captured I think it's be hard as an end user I think we're going to still see that you know as an endusing manufacturer you're paying your t and d prices. You're paying your generator prices and you're not seeing huge fluctuations that you can take advantage of so you need high efficiency solution that bridges that spark spread and we see heat pumps being able to. Do that? Um, the other thing that is really important to the customer right now as you're making a bet for the next thirty years is you walk into a boiler room Today. You'll find boilers that are 4050 years old they live longer long time and the real question is you're. 

39:59.11 

Addison Stark 

Depreciating those assets taking them about replacing them putting in new boilers. Big manufacturers are starting. They ask the question. Do I want to install another thirty forty year old a 40 year life so um lifecycle fossil asset am I going to be caught with essentially too much. Um. Essentially too long am I going to lose that capital investment because it gets regulated out in 2035? Um, you know so these are considerations being made now by manufacturers that are planning for their next retrofits. 

40:34.28 

Addison Stark 

Think there's a lot that goes into this bet that you're talking about I think it all boils down to resiliency and capital efficiency for the long haul. But Also what's going to serve me as long as my combustion boilers have previously and I think people are recognizing electrification helps to minimize. The risk in the future. 

41:00.28 

Jeff McAulay 

Addison you've got a tremendous depth of knowledge here on the technical side on the geopolitical on the customer side. You've got to tell us a little bit about your personal journey of how you came to the founding and the elements of your your background that you're bringing to bear. 

41:01.62 

chrissass 

It was. 

41:16.86 

Jeff McAulay 

In your entrepreneurial venture. 

41:19.11 

Addison Stark 

Well yeah, um I was born in Eastern Iowa on a farm and the first thing I drove was a tractor when I was like eight years old you know I learned how to weld at that time and I really learned handed on solutions. 

41:27.70 

Jeff McAulay 

And. 

41:35.45 

Addison Stark 

Are the way to actually solve problems. Um, from there I went to the University Of Iowa and got involved with ah climate and climate solutions and policy to be able to make that happen which actually brought me to mit where I met Jeff Jeff and I have actually known each other now for almost twenty years and we went to mit at a time when energy the energy club energy innovation and solving climate was really the the calling of a lot of people that we have known professionally now for a long time who have dedicated themselves to this what? I. What I'm doing now is I recently moved from the East Coast where I was working in um in dc on energy innovation policy on creating the institutions necessary to scale climate technology to Fort Collins Colorado where I could actually find a place to build a company like this you know as I jokingly said in Cambridge in October at the mit tough tech summit I said you can't build this company in Cambridge you got to go find a land-grant town and you got to go find people who learn to weld when they're 10 who used to be diesel mechanics become mechanical engineers and actually people that live and breathe pressure vessel codes and that's what we're doing at atmos 0 right now in Northern Colorado is we're working with real engineers who build real things and we're building boilers we're having a great time. 

43:02.31 

Addison Stark 

I'm loving being able to connect back to hardware again but also really focus on something that matters. 

43:11.74 

Jeff McAulay 

Addison I love this image of 8 year old Addison driving a track I think I need to see that that picture at some point. Um, but but also you're um, you're a math major. You got a ph d in combustion mechanics. So. It's it's tremendous that you know how to turn a wrench but also want to um, emphasize the the credentials there as well truly truly mind in hand if I could say that um, but also ah talk a little bit more about rpe because rpe where you were for many years is also the front lines of commercializing. 

43:38.92 

Addison Stark 

Oh. 

43:45.86 

Jeff McAulay 

Hard tech and how you brought that experience into ah atmos zero and. 

43:51.39 

Addison Stark 

Yes, um, actually you're right I didn't add enough detail. It was a 1945 Ford front loader tractor was my first vehicle. Um, and also yeah, my ph d is in combustion and my. Um, advisor my ph d advisor from mit ah go name jokes that I'm working to put him out of business for once and for all, um, it's it's it's the reality of combustion is still a super central technology I still think it's super important. It's. 

44:20.90 

Addison Stark 

Something we need to focus on for a long time but electrification is going to replace it for steam generation and yeah, so my founding team at atmos zero. We met through rpe my my cto and co-founder Todd Bandauer who's a professor at colorado state university um I funded him. In a arpa e project focused on decreasing water consumption in power generation thermal engineer out of georgia tech who um, actually in a previous life before that he was the starting quarterback at Iowa State when I was in middle school I used to boo him because I grew up in Eastern Iowa and then our other co-founder Ashwin. 

45:00.25 

Addison Stark 

Um, actually hired me at Rpe and then after Rbe he was working at a Katie's power the thing we all had in common and what we were excited about doing here beyond being mechanical engineers with a focus on thermal systems is the reality that we've all spent 15 years working on commercializing. Early stage re high risk high reward technology. But what you all know and what we all know about spinning technology out of the lab is that's still a long way from product. We saw this as a product driven opportunity to be able to scale new technology. Rather than a new technology looking for a product market fit. We had product market fit from day one and we were all excited about the ability to go out and scale something into the giga tons of impact going into the 2030 s. 

45:50.80 

chrissass 

All right giga tons of impact that leads me to the last question I have for you on this interview. We always like to end with a crystal ball. What is the 1 thing that your company will impact over the next twelve months what's your bold statement for twelve months from now where will we be different with your technology? 

46:07.90 

Addison Stark 

You know twelve months from now if all goes according to plan of what we're trying to do. We're going to be installed at New Belgium at their flagship brewery helping them to produce the first fully decarbonized beer. Just in time for the super bowl in 2025 it's not a Sam Adams for Jeff sitting in Boston but out in Colorado having a good decarbonized fat tires the way to go on. 

46:35.70 

chrissass 

Awesome! Thank you so much for being a guest on our podcast today. This has been informative and fun. Thank you. 

46:42.11 

Addison Stark 

Absolutely. I Loved this.