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Leah Ellis and Yeti Ming Chiang
Image provided by The Engine
while Leah Ellis She was earning her PhD from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, and was part of a The team that researched the battery for Tesla. After her graduation, her budding career took an unusual turn.
“I could have had an easier job with my background in battery materials – a lot of my colleagues work for it Tesla or apple. I could have done that, … and I would have made more money in the beginning,” Ellis, 33, told CNBC by phone Wednesday.
Instead, Ellis applied for, and won, a prestigious award Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Who gave her two years’ salary to work with whoever she wanted.
Ellis holds a Ph.D. in electrochemistry and went to work With that said – Ming Chiang, renowned professor of materials science at MIT He is also a serial clean tech entrepreneur. Chiang co-founded companies such as American Superconductor CorporationAnd A123 systemsAnd metal desktopAnd energy form And 24 M Technologies.
Ellis is now scaling up a new, climate-conscious process for making cement, one that works with electrochemistry rather than fossil fuel-powered heat.
Making cement using electrochemistry was Chiang’s idea, Ellis told CNBC in Boston at the end of May. Ellis said she worked with Chiang in 2018, right after he started energy forma long-term battery company, and he was thinking of the abundant intermittent power being generated from renewable energy sources such as wind.
“Sometimes people pay you to take power off their hands,” Ellis told CNBC. “Instead of putting that energy into a battery, what if we could use that extra, low-cost renewable energy to make something that would be massively carbon-intensive? And then the first on the list of carbon-intensive things—it’s building.”
Cement is a necessary component of concrete, a cornerstone of global construction and infrastructure, because it is cheap, strong and durable. Four billion metric tons, the equivalent of 50,000 fully loaded planes, of cement are produced each year, according to The 2023 report from management consulting firm McKinsey. was the market value $323 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $459 billion by 2028According to SkyQuest Technology Consulting.
cement powder Traditionally by crushing raw materials, including limestone and clay, mixing with ingredients such as iron and fly ash, and placing it all in a furnace that heated the ingredients to about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. This cement making process generates approx 8% of global carbon dioxide emissionswhich is a major cause of global warming.
When Chiang had the idea of electrifying the cement industry, he turned to Ellis. “He’s very busy, so he was like, ‘Go ahead and figure it out,'” Ellis told CNBC.
So I did.
In 2020, Ellis and Chiang co-founded sublime systems to refine and scale the electrochemical process they created to make cement.
Sublime has raised $50 million from some of the top clean tech investors, including Chris Sacca Low carbon capital and the separate Boston-based MIT Corporation the engine; from Siam Cement Group, a leading cement and building materials company in Asia. And through a A couple of grants from the A program of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E.
Leah Ellis, CEO, Sublime Systems
Image courtesy Summer Camerlo, Sublime Systems
Ellis likes to describe what they’re doing as developing an “electric vehicle for the cement industry.” An electric vehicle replaces the combustion engine with an electric motor, and that’s what Sublime Systems does in its cement process.
“I think it’s easier for lay people to understand how we take this high-temperature process that’s driven by fossils and replace it with something that’s powered by electrons. And we’re using electrons to drive these chemical reactions,” Ellis told CNBC by phone Wednesday. “This occurs at an ambient temperature lower than the boiling point of water,” she said, and that is a critical differentiator.
Ellis said she didn’t know much about cement when Chiang asked her to figure out how to make low-carbon cement. I started reading Wikipedia, then textbooks. Then I worked with another Ph.D. A student conducting research that has subsequently been published in scholarly journal articles on the topic. This led to the concept of what Sublime does now, and it has continued to improve on that concept ever since.
“Basically, it didn’t stop,” Ellis told CNBC. “It’s been five years.”
Bringing the “magic” of chemistry to cement
Ellis has always been curious. “I grew up pretty geeky, I guess, reading a lot of books,” she said. “I have always had a thirst for knowledge and a sense of adventure.”
I also grew up in a religious home. Her father is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi from Texas, her mother grew up on a sheep farm in South Africa, and the two met when they were in Israel. “There are enough rabbis in Jerusalem. So he moved to eastern Canada, where they don’t have a lot of rabbis,” Ellis told CNBC about her father’s move. Her family celebrated and encouraged a strong intellectual life.
Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime Systems, works at the cement plant.
Image courtesy Leah Ellis
Ellis and one of her younger sisters ended up earning PhDs in chemistry.
“We both realize that chemistry is a very creative subject; it’s also a very challenging subject. And I think we’re both drawn to things that are challenging,” Ellis told CNBC.
When mastered, alchemy can be used to effect change. “She has a lot of creative power to make things happen in the real world,” said Ellis. “It’s almost like magic. If you really work hard at it, you can create things that make the world a better place.”
Historically, battery scientists and cement producers have not worked together. “Cement usually falls into civil engineering, and battery science usually falls into chemistry or physics,” Ellis said. “They don’t go to the same conferences.”
But with Sublime Systems, Ellis and Chiang are bringing those two fields together.
The framework for using electrochemistry to guide once-occurring reactions with superheated fossil fuel reactions is not limited to cement.
“It’s a huge tool. I don’t think Sublime is the only one applying electrochemistry to clean technology. I think the best way to get around fossil fuels is to use electrons,” Ellis told CNBC.
“The electrochemical method is often more efficient,” she said. “Heating things up to make them work often isn’t as efficient as electrochemistry, which is a little more surgical, a little more efficient — or at least it can be more efficient with the right processes.”
Core energy efficiency is why Chiang is so confident in their solution.
“Decarbonising cement production will be a very difficult task. There will be many approaches, all of them challenging and most of them worth testing,” Chiang told CNBC. “I prefer to meet our challenges because we see a path to complete decarbonization at cost parity with today’s cement while consuming the least amount of energy. In the long run, the process with the least energy usually wins.”
Following Ming Chiang, MIT professor of materials science and engineering, speaks during the IHS CERAWeek 2016 conference in Houston, Texas, February 26, 2016.
bloomberg | bloomberg | Getty Images
The cement industry needs to clean up the shop
“On the whole, the industry has a great incentive to become green.” Mark Mutter, founder of Jamcem Consulting, an independent cement industry consulting firm, told CNBC. Motivations to go green are higher for producers located in parts of the world such as Europe, where there is a price tag for carbon dioxide emissions of around €80 (about $88) per metric ton. Mutter told CNBC that this is a “significant financial penalty for producers and gives them an incentive to invest” in green cement technology.
This is one of the reasons why investors are putting their money behind Sublime.
“Customers are lining up to partner with Sublime because they can provide fossil-free cement at a time when the rest of the industry is struggling to meet emissions targets and comply with carbon tariffs.” Clay Dumaspartner at LowerCarbon Capital, told CNBC.
“For Lower Carbon, their ubiquity and medieval production techniques are exactly the qualities that make the building material such an irresistible opportunity,” Dumas told CNBC.
Some cement producers view carbon capture technologies as a way to manage greenhouse gas emissions. But Mutter told CNBC that “this is very expensive, and in some ways it’s just business as usual and buries the problem for posterity.”
Sublime makes clean cement without expensive additives for carbon capture and storage technologies, which is attractive because it keeps costs down. Kate RayCEO of The Engine. “Producing decarbonized cement directly, rather than capturing carbon, leads to energy efficiency and ultimately cost parity,” Ray told CNBC.
Dumas said Sublime has “the most elegant chemistry, running on electricity at ambient temperatures while emitting zero carbon. That means they don’t need large furnaces or expensive CO2 capture systems that would increase capital expenditures.”
Siam Cement Group looks at thousands of companies and makes “few” investments annually, Timothy McCaffrey, an investor in SCG, told CNBC. For SCG, the attractive thing about Sublime is that it avoids complex and expensive carbon capture technology and works with existing infrastructure.
“We’ve seen that Sublime Systems can disrupt the industry,” McCaffrey told CNBC. “The company produces room-temperature cement that can fall into the existing ready-mix supply chain and meets ASTM standards.” American Society for Testing and Materials It is the body that sets the testing standards and protocols that manufacturers use to test their materials against.
Climbing stairs, making solutions and moving forward
Sublime completed its pilot plant at the end of 2022 and spent a few months on quality control procedures. Now, Ellis is focusing on getting the product to partners, and the company hopes to have its first construction project in place by the end of the year. The next step is to move from the pilot plant with a capacity of 100 tons to a pilot plant with a capacity of 30,000 tons per year.
While Sublime is just being condensed, Ellis knows that speed is essential in the race to remove carbon. “My mission is to have a rapid and massive impact on climate change,” she told CNBC in Boston.
Leah Ellis Cycling in Africa.
Image courtesy Scott Carmichael
It’s an audacious goal, and even though Ellis has degrees in chemistry, this is the first time she’s been the head of a company.
“I suppose I’m aware of my age. I’m also humble about that. I’m a first-time founder. I’m a first-time CEO,” Ellis told CNBC. “I realize things the way I do them. And I’m really lucky to have great mentors and support and people who believe in me, and I think they recognize the fact that I have so much energy, I have so much passion. And I’m going to work as hard as I can for as long as I can to make that happen.”
Ellis knows how to keep herself going, too. Make sure she gets good sleep and stays active. I’ve run seven marathons. She’s a cyclist, and once cycled across Africa in about four months with a group, a trip that averaged over 60 miles a day. She also participates in a “fitness cult” that runs up the stairs of Harvard Stadium every Sunday.
“I’m not a sprinter at all. I’m not a fast cyclist either,” Ellis told CNBC. “I just know how to follow that streak of effort to keep the same effort for a very long time, to keep my spirits high.”
For Chiang, building solutions keeps him moving forward.
“It’s been about 15 years since the phrase ‘climate change’ entered the lexicon. It’s been a gift, and very invigorating, to have solutions with potential impact that can be pursued, instead of sitting around worrying,” Chiang told CNBC.
“I think climate change has catapulted us all into a very creative and fertile period that will be seen as a true renaissance. After all, we are trying to reinvent the technological tools of the Industrial Revolution. There is no shortage of big problems to work on! And time is short.”
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