[Music]
i'm paige amora i work at y combinator
i'm on our work at a startup team so
we're the team that helps our portfolio
companies hire
for this event we'll do um three tech
talks these will just be about a
technical topic that the founders find
interesting or a bit about their company
as well
and then we will have two quick pitches
um to hear about other companies and
then we'll initiate breakout rooms
so with that let's
go to jeff
i'm going to talk for 5-10 minutes or so
about
the electric airplane industry and in
particular energy storage
i'm going to cover a few different areas
first a little bit about
the aerospace industry and the
particular market segments that we're
working on
number two some of the main technology
challenges and then some of the major uh
opportunities in the energy storage
space especially funding opportunities
which i think will be relevant for early
stage startup companies um and happy to
take questions at the end um just
briefly about us we went through yc in
2017 we're about 20-25 people uh we're
based up in albany new york we're funded
in addition to private uh investors by
nasa the us department of energy the u.s
air force and the u.s army as well
very briefly the carbon footprint in the
aerospace industry is is very very bad
um you would have to eat vegetarian for
over a year to offset the carbon from
even a single relatively short
round-trip flight
we focus on electric uh solutions to the
aerospace industry because um there's a
bunch of research that's come out that
um other different technologies
involving combustion things like
biofuels or electro fuels or even
hydrogen combustion um when stacked up
against um jet fuel aren't even you know
necessarily that much better
and electric technologies have the
potential to be substantially lower in
total greenhouse gas emissions um so
what this chart looks at is not only
carbon but it looks at carbon nitrogen
oxides contrails and a bunch of other
things as well and tries to get to a
total global warming equivalent and what
you see is that
you know in some cases combusting
hydrogen is substantially worse
um and you know electric is sort of uh
in many ways the best environmental
solution
um when we looked at the aerospace
industry we were you know surprised to
see that when companies like boeing
announced a new airplane that has let's
say a 15 improvement in fuel burn
compared to a previous airplane a lot of
the underlying benefits come from
engines so for example the 787 which had
a 15 fuel burn benefit over the 767 a
lot of that came from propulsion
technologies
we then looked at the aerospace industry
we thought wow there's a lot of people
working on relatively small airplanes
but unfortunately small airplanes
smaller than 100 passengers represent
smaller than five percent of the carbon
footprint of the entire aerospace
industry and in fact actually most of
the carbon footprint of the aerospace
industry is airplanes larger than 100
passengers and in particular in what's
called the narrow body segment so that's
the seven three sevens the seven uh the
a320s a typical airplane like you might
be on carries sort of 100 to 200
passengers and so that's the industry
that we work in um for you know for for
sort of the business development people
on this call we're this is an enormous
market uh these are companies that are
each worth 100 billion dollars um there
are expected to be 30 000 new narrow
body airplanes purchased over the next
20 years
billions and billions of dollars of jet
engine sales per year and billions of
gallons of jet fuel so this is a large
potential market opportunity if you
could create the underlying technology
and so what's needed number one
propulsion and number two energy storage
propulsion essentially being ultra
lightweight engines energy storage of
ultra lightweight ways to store
electricity
so this is our um uh electric engine
that we built uh it's basically meant to
be a replacement of a jet engine of a
narrow body class airplane
so it's a couple megawatts in power
which is about 3000 horsepower
substantially more powerful than
anything that's out there in the
aerospace industry
in-house developed inverter designed for
high altitude operations
just finished some testing at the faa
technology center and planning for um
faa part 33 certification
in the
2025-2026 time frame so that's kind of a
little bit about what our company does
what we're planning to do as our next
step is we're taking a 100 passenger
airplane and we're
removing one of the four engines and
replacing it with our electric engine to
make it essentially an electric test bed
so this is one sort of quick point to
the group if anybody is working on
propulsion technologies and is looking
for a relatively inexpensive way to do
testing please reach out to us because
we're already going to have this
platform in place i mean we're happy to
do testing with you if you're working on
technologies like this um the nice thing
about this airplane is it's a four
engine airplane but it can actually fly
on three of the four engines so we're
using basically one of the four engines
as a um as a laboratory in the sky
um i want to talk now a little bit about
energy storage requirements um
so
no lithium ion battery is going to get
to you know greater than 750 watt hours
per kilogram um typically um you know
lithium ion battery best case scenario
is going to get up to 400 450 500 sort
of absolute best case scenario so you
really need to be looking at new
chemistries
and what what this industry is really
looking for is even above a thousand
watt hours or 1500
you also need high c rates you need
relatively high discharge it doesn't
have to be as high as the vertical
takeoff and landing airplanes but you
know sort of three to five uh c's uh
also has to be altitude capable
and in terms of energy storage what you
really need is electricity you don't
necessarily care if it's a battery so
the two different technologies that have
been mostly
in development are sort of energy
carrier technologies
and then one quick note if you look on
the right this is essentially the energy
profile so you have a huge amount of
power um up front during takeoff and
climb out and then you have about a
third of the power needed during cruise
and this is a similar path so you see a
huge spike in power needed right here
and then it sort of drops off for the
power that's needed it's about you know
a third to a quarter of the power needed
so
two different major technologies under
development and this is what we would
encourage people in this group to work
on i'm very happy to talk about this
with people later number one aluminum
air fuel cells or other metal air
chemistries and number two hydrogen fuel
cells so in terms of aluminum air
aluminum air is is generally in the
category of other metal air chemistries
zinc air for example has been used in
hearing aid batteries since the 1970s
forum energy is a company that's raised
about 300 million dollars maybe even
more than that um to focus on an iron
air battery so it's a new chemistry
that's sort of
it's it's something it's old but it's
new a lot of people are working in this
space and actually at the most recent us
department of energy rpe summit in uh
earlier this year there was specifically
um a group that was talking about
putting together uh funding related to
this topic
the disadvantage of this is that you
can't uh recharge these batteries uh you
have to recharge them uh by taking them
you can't recharge them by plugging them
in you have to recharge them by sending
them back to a facility so there's a lot
of operational challenges with this but
at the same time it's a major advantage
um i just have two more slides
a lot of people are also working on
hydrogen fuel cells obviously everybody
knows what a hydrogen fuel cell is but
there's a lot of applications
potentially in the aerospace industry
and um people are looking at
technologies that could be greater than
a power density of two kilowatts per
kilogram by 2030 and that's sort of what
a lot of people think of as the number
that's needed for large aerospace
applications so if you're working for
example on ultra lightweight fuel cells
aerospace is a great industry for you to
be in
the last thing i want to say in this
space is there's a lot of money going
into the space right now so you know
everyone wants to go get venture capital
money as i mentioned form energy has
raised a whole bunch of money in this
space but here's just
four different opportunities or three
different opportunities that are sort of
live opportunities to raise money if
you're in europe there's the clean skies
i think they've put up 700 plus million
euros work in this space um ati fly zero
is a program out of the united kingdom
the us department of energy is doing a
lot of work and then there's obviously
other things as well so we think this is
a strong space because it's a huge
potential market there's a lot of money
going into the space and
major opportunities to revolutionize the
us aerospace industry so i'll pause
there i wanted to keep this speech
relatively short please feel free feel
free to reach out to me um take down the
email address i'm not going to be able
to stay for a breakout session but if
folks want to schedule one-on-one call
um happy to do so so thanks very much
for the opportunity
you have a couple of questions here in
the chat
um how were your relationships with the
doe in the air force established
oh great question um you know so uh
let's see we've had um
a few different contracts with nasa a
few different contracts um
with the air force and with the army
um
some of them are sort of serendipity
nasa puts out a request for a proposal
and it's exactly the thing um that
you're working on and that's a sort of
luck but you know it occasionally does
happen um
but
sometimes also you you
these organizations have open
solicitations so for example with the
air force um we're we're we're being
funded now to turn on to an ultra
lightweight generator for them
and that came about because
we found a unit within the air force
that was looking for an ultra
lightweight generator we said hey we
could we could do that for you um and
then we sort of put together a proposal
together so i would say it's um
maybe the short answer is
um
some uh advice that uh that i was given
during the yc batch sort of try
everything you can think of and then try
it again and then try it again and try
it again um so it's you know it'd be
nice to say like oh it's just an easy
path but really i'm just sort of trying
over and over
um
let's see what do i think of the ion
engines which made flight a couple years
back um i don't know as much about ion
engines but if you send me some
information i'd be happy to talk with
you about it
um are these the ones that came out of
mit um that are uh they they
i think this is the concept that it's a
um
uh
um essentially a no moving air concept
if that's what you guys are talking
about i saw the video too and it's like
absolutely insane um it looks like it's
relatively small
but you know obviously there's there
should be tons of money going into that
space
next comment it could be cool to use a
catapult agree 100
catapults or ramps or other things i
think have a big opportunity um it's
just that's a lot of infrastructure on
the ground um but no i love that concept
as well
um
yeah so that's yeah that's exactly uh
that's the concept um you were talking
about how does an engine compare to
engines used for smaller planes like
that were used for firefighting is it
adaptable to that purpose in fact it is
actually um the airplane that we're that
we're working on this um
100 passenger airplane called the
bae-146 so i'll go back to it
it's actually used in the united states
as a firefighting aircraft so it is
adaptable for that purpose
um i think that's the last question so
thanks everybody
next up we have max from charge robotics
uh hi everybody uh first i just want to
say thanks to paige for setting up this
event um
my name is max justice uh co-founder and
cto of charge robotics
we were in the y combinator summer 2021
batch
and charge robotics uh builds robots
that build large-scale solar farms
when i talk about large-scale solar
farms i'm talking about like what you
see in the background of this slide here
so
these are pretty huge sites uh they're
often hundreds or thousands of acres
large um
generating hundreds of megawatts to
sometimes gigawatts of power
um
so a couple quick things to know just
about the solar industry in the us
right now about four percent of our
power in the u.s comes from solar
and by 2050 it's going to be about half
so there is a tremendous amount of solar
that needs to get built
in the next few years
the problem is that labor is actually
the key bottleneck preventing
solar adoption right now so if you think
about it it kind of makes sense like
these sites are built often out in the
middle of like very rural areas
and getting hundreds of people out there
for months or you know sometimes years
at a time
is just really challenging
um
and so you know as charge robotics like
i don't really know how to source 300
people to get them out to a solar site
for a year but i absolutely know how to
ship a couple of shipping containers
full of robotic equipment out there uh
to build the site uh so that's kind of
our thesis we think that robots are the
right solution
to solving this labor shortage
um so if we're talking about deploying
robots to build solar farms
i think it's important to kind of
understand the sorts of tasks that these
robots are going to be doing
and so i want to talk about how solar is
actually built today
there's kind of three main mechanical
steps that go into basically every solar
farm that gets built
first is pile driving so you send out a
crew and they
hammer these large metal i-beams into
the ground in a huge grid this covers
the whole site
then you send out another crew
and they bolt tens of thousands of these
large metal rails between the i-beams
and those are actually what support the
solar modules
then you send out another crew
and they bolt the hundreds of thousands
of solar modules onto that racking
structure uh so those three steps are
common to
again basically every site that gets
built today
um
and i think one thing just to note here
that's uh kind of funny is that
basically everything on a solar site is
really heavy uh so like a single solar
module um like one of those rectangles
weighs like 50 or 60 pounds um so as a
single person like you really don't want
to have to carry one very far
and so what they do on these sites is
called material staging so they send out
crews with forklifts and they basically
move pallets of materials kind of like
close to where they need to go
um and the idea is that you know if i
need to pick up a solar module it's
maybe only 10 feet from where it needs
to end up
um and so what this made us realize is
that kind of no matter how we're
automating the solar industry a key
primitive that we're gonna end up
needing is this like stuff mover this
robot that can move things from point a
to point b
um on the solar site
and so that's actually what we built uh
towards the end of last year uh
beginning of this year um is a giant
robotic forklift and that's kind of what
i want to talk to you guys about today
um
one second i think
i just realized that uh
i didn't have it in video clip sharing
mode so it might be a little choppy
all right
i'm just going to unshare and be sure
really quickly
all right that should be coming through
a little smoother now
um so yeah this is how we built that
robot our robotic 25 000 pound forklift
so the vehicle of choice for this
application uh turns out to be this
thing called the telehandler
it's basically a big forklift it has
these massive tires um and the kind of
relevant thing to know about these is
that they're already used on solar sites
uh today these are super common vehicles
they navigate crazy terrain
um and the construction workers on these
sites kind of know how to how to operate
with these uh already
and if you're gonna automate one of
these vehicles uh
there's a whole bunch of different
systems that you have to control from
software um so you have the fork angle
um as well as the boom extension angle
you need to be able to move those just
so that you can pick up pallets
there's also steering
throttle and brake
as well as gear shifting because you
need to be able to go from forward to
reverse this is kind of like the bare
minimum set of stuff that you have to
control from software to be able to
build this vehicle
uh the first system that i want to talk
about as the hydraulic system in the
vehicle so there were two systems that
we needed to control that were on the
hydraulic circuit here um that's the
steering and the brake so for the
steering um this is kind of the sort of
complicated looking hydraulic circuit
for this hearing system in the top left
here
we ended up deciding just
in the interest of time
to basically bypass that entirely and
3d print a custom bracket
to bolt to the steering column um so
this actually ended up working uh great
like we ended up 3d printing a bunch of
different pieces
and then just buying an off-the-shelf
motor and motor controller and gearbox
to control the steering so this is kind
of what we ended up with this is
actually what we shipped uh to our first
pilot deployment
uh the other hydraulic system was the
brake uh so similar to the steering uh
we ended up mechanically actuating this
so we had a steel cable going from the
brake pedal uh to a linear actuator
sitting underneath the vehicle
um and
what is sort of nice about this design
is that if i'm a person sitting in the
cab of the vehicle i can jam on the
brake
and this cable will just go slack and
it'll still function like a normal brake
pedal and so this was actually a design
philosophy that we decided to use for
all the systems in the vehicle that we
could at least so
for example if you
move the joystick as a person in the cab
that manual input will actually override
any automated control of the vehicle so
this is kind of a philosophy to
automating vehicles that we
that we tried to use everywhere
the next systems that we automated that
i wanted to talk about today um sorry to
interrupt i think there's a
i don't know if it's a zoom window or
something but it's blocking part of your
slide
uh is it on the right hand side that guy
yeah you're right on it now
oh okay yeah weird that's the
thing with all the faces in it i'll just
minimize that
uh that should be better
so
yeah so next i'll talk about the
electronic systems so uh that's the
joystick the throttle and the gear
shifter
so the the first step in getting these
systems working was to do uh was to
reverse engineer this thing called the
can bus
this is a a protocol that's common to
basically every vehicle that you've ever
been in uh it's used to send data from
system to system inside the vehicle
and so if you want to take over control
of some system inside the vehicle you
can figure out what can messages it's
sending
and then send those messages for
yourself so the the trick then becomes
how do you figure out what the relevant
can message is um and so what you can do
is basically take all the can messages
and graph them
and then if you move the relevant input
or change some variable and you see for
example a line on this graph like shoot
up then you know that it's very likely
you found the the relevant message
and you can start sending that message
for yourself
for the signals that weren't on the can
bus we built this custom cable that sort
of just kind of went in between the the
main computer inside the cab and the
rest of the vehicle and then we could
just splice into signals directly
and so when you tie all that work
together uh you end up
uh with a vehicle that you can control
completely from software so um this was
uh pretty shortly after we got the
vehicle uh do not try this at home uh
this was uh when we got the boom working
on the canvas so we we quickly kind of
whipped together this interface that i
had on my phone
um
and then uh yeah i was able to
you know
take the telehandler for a ride uh
through remote control and actually when
we were in y combinator um
a demo that we we put on was we sent
that webpage to one of our batchmates
who was in mexico and she was able to
control the telehandler from another
country which i thought was was kind of
funny
and there you can see kind of when we
got the joystick working we had it
ripped out and everything's running off
my laptop there so this is this is what
the early days of charge robotics look
like
so yeah then we wrote uh kind of a full
autonomy stack and got this thing
deployed onto an actual solar site in
iowa back in march um so i'll skip
through this video just because it's a
little bit long um but
we dock with uh an actual palette of
solar modules
uh we do some path planning
we
you can see the vehicle
uh following a path here and it's
localizing off of some cameras that are
mounted to the vehicle
we
drive to the
final location and we put it down so
yeah this was back in march
and
with that deployment behind us uh we
started moving on to our next major
project which is actually
um
building this portable robotic factory
uh let's see if i can advance yeah so uh
portable robotic factory um basically
there's a bunch of solar hardware that
needs to get assembled on site
and so we're building uh this factory
that fits in the form factor of a
shipping container uh that we send out
to the site and it produces those
assemblies so these are massive
assemblies like i mentioned everything
on the solar site is heavy uh these are
36 foot long uh panels they weigh uh
several hundred pounds um and uh
yeah
it's basically like a car factory like
you'd see you know like an automated
tesla factory or something but made
portable such that we can ship it to a
solar site so here's one of the arms
that we got in the mail a couple weeks
ago
um so with that in mind if this is the
sort of work
that sounds exciting to you
we're currently hiring for mechanical
engineers uh so i'd love if you could uh
reach out uh if this is the sort of
thing you want to be working on but uh
thanks very much
thanks max
we have some questions for you in the
chat um so joshua's asking
does the one elevation or two terrain
surface especially uh irregularities or
slopes limit your deployments
got it um so yeah for the most part
these sites are quite flat uh just sort
of by design it adds a lot of cost to
the site uh if they have to do a lot of
breeding um so like if the land's not
flat enough they actually send out
construction equipment to flatten the
land
so it's it's very well specced how flat
these sites are in general um and for
the most part we are focused on the
biggest flattest sites
um
what type of control theory are you
using pid baby pid all day every day
that's uh that's what we use to get this
prototype working uh as we kind of
advance our technology um
we're almost certainly gonna be using
some some more advanced stuff but uh for
the purpose of that prototype it was all
pid
uh and then uh it was pure pursuit was
the the path following algorithm because
we had a ackerman steering vehicle
um
so cool how much time in labor discharge
saves a typical solar project site oh
sorry uh how much time in labor does
charge save a typical solar project site
also curious who your first customers
would be and why thanks good luck yeah
so um
uh it turns out that labor is something
like 30 of the project costs and of that
uh mechanical installation is about half
of that so uh what's kind of crazy is
that there's this labor shortage is big
enough right now that we don't really
need to charge less than human
contractors
charge for people to be really
interested in our product um so for
example we signed some lois with some of
the largest solar construction companies
in the country for about 31 million
dollars and those contracts were
actually priced at the same price of
human labor uh so
people are just desperate for more
installation labor periods so we don't
actually need to charge less than people
um
how many fewer people are needed out of
deployment site by using a robotic
forklift some of the videos seem to show
a few workers watching the forklift yeah
i was one of those people in that video
that was uh
this was very much like a prototype
deployment uh this thing is not uh ready
to you know it's not a product yet um
our our complete system uh will
require dramatically fewer people than
than conventional labor today so a
single one of our systems can do the
work of something like
uh several dozen people i i hesitate to
give an actual number but our models uh
have it as something i think it's like
between 70 and 100 people
um and that's for a complete system so
that's like six of the the robots that
you saw
uh how are you controlling the forklift
exact positioning uh yeah we're going to
be using rtk gps uh so we weren't for
that demo but all these sites have an
rtk gps base station on them
so that's what we'll be using to aid our
localization
how long does the forklift last per
charge uh how long does it take to
charge fully uh so
fun fact they burned thousands of
gallons of diesel per week on solar
sites we did the math to make sure that
these sites offset themselves relatively
quickly
but every vehicle that you see on these
sites is diesel-powered including the
one that we automated
uh what is the most labor-intensive part
of the entire project uh
so you hear varying opinions on this uh
but i would say the most popular opinion
and the one that i share is that it's
the module installation step uh that
takes a lot of work um it's just those
things are really heavy and you have
like you know hundreds of thousands of
them
so that's i'd say the most labor
intensive part um
if there is that much of a shortage
can't you charge more
uh
potentially
it's a great point um
uh very very possibly yeah
and also there's things that you can do
with robotic installation that uh it's
easier for robots than for people so you
know one thing that we're excited about
is we can produce a certificate that
shows that literally every bolt on the
site was torqued to within the proper
specifications which like you know
person just can't really do very easily
are you considering making an electric
model um right now we're mostly not
focused on like building construction
equipment we're focused on uh using
off-the-shelf stuff wherever we can i
think it would be very cool if we could
use off-the-shelf uh electric
construction equipment but we have no
plans to build that in the immediate
future
um
and then i think there's one last
question
i've seen some projects that are also
trying to automate the module
installation with robots are you
thinking about something like this in
the future yes so um when i alluded to
the robotic factory that we're building
towards the end of my presentation
that is the step that will be doing the
module installation so the robot that i
showed you in that video was really a
prototype
that did one thing well which was move
materials around
our goal is to do complete mechanical
installation of the site so that
includes eventually doing pile driving
installing all the racking structure
installing all the modules so that's the
the vision of the company
cool i think that was it um thank you
guys very much uh and again if you're
interested in working on this uh feel
free to shoot me an email at max charge
robotics.com or just go to charge
robotics.com we have the careers page
but uh thanks again
and next up we have oliver oliver from
impossible mining
hello everybody i'm super excited to be
here i'm oliver i'm the ceo and
co-founder of impossible mining and we
are building underwater robot vehicles
which collect battery metals from the
seabed and we're doing it in a way that
really doesn't harm
the the ecosystem that lives down on the
seabed
we're actually a b corp
and so that's really much
very much in our dna
so if we talk a little bit about the
problem i mean we want everyone to drive
an ev
you know we want to move away from
fossil fuels and gas and and the good
news is there's a lot of growth coming
um but the down side is that all of this
needs a lot more critical minerals
battery metals in fact
an ev needs something like six times the
amount of metal of a traditional
uh gas vehicle and that's really driven
by the battery
and so we've got a need for all of this
material whilst we also want to have
good esg we don't want to hurt the
planet in the process of the transition
so the fundamental problem with the
supply chain is the fact that we don't
have enough of this material the esg
characteristics are pretty poor and the
material that does exist in the ground
tends to be controlled by china
a lot of places in indonesia and africa
are under the influence of china so here
in the west we really need to solve this
problem
so our approach is to really go after
what are called polymetallic nodules i'm
actually going to hold one up on the
camera here so this is a rock that forms
over millions of years on the seabed and
it's super rich in battery metals
it actually is
the world's biggest resource of nickel
and cobalt
it also has copper and manganese and
there's estimated to be something like a
hundred trillion dollars
worth of these battery metals just lying
on the seabed on the floor so we don't
have to blast or cut we just have to
pick them up
now the challenge in picking these up is
how do you do it and our competitors are
basically building dredging technology
this is a short clip from uh their
approach these are massive machines they
get
they get lowered to the seabed floor and
they generate all of these sediment
plumes these clouds of dust effectively
that that really destroy wildlife and
they indiscriminately remove everything
by basically squirting water into the
sediment and then sucking it up over
this long
riser tube
we don't like that approach so what
we're doing is we're building fully
autonomous robots and
here's a little animation of of what
we're building
so these robots will be launched from a
traditional um shipping container vessel
they're fully autonomous they have a
battery pack they have a built-in
buoyancy engine allows them to go up and
down and we use a parallel fleet you can
see others returning once they get to
the seabed they don't actually touch the
seabed they use the buoyancy engine to
maintain mutual buoyancy and then they
use cameras and ai to selectively pick
up the rocks avoiding any that contain
life this could be sponges
or corals or other forms of life and we
actually leave behind a certain percent
to maintain the habitat once the payload
is full the battery pack adjusts the
buoyancy engine to make the vehicle
float to the surface where it's
recovered
now the payload will be emptied
the battery pack will be swapped and any
maintenance is performed and now the
vehicle can be redeployed on on the next
mission
um and so you know we're basically
building the team in canada to build
these robots and we're just in the
process of testing our first proof of
concept
we were a yc winter 22 company
um and so we announced uh just a few
weeks ago that we had closed over 10
million dollars in in funding so we're
quite well funded at this seed stage and
now we have to build these proof of
concepts and and so we have four uh
roles that are currently open um in
collingwood so collingwood is a a town
north of toronto actually on the
georgian bay and we've just rented a
very large 10 000 foot square
facility and this is where we will be
building these robots and and so if
anybody uh is in the area and is
interested please spread the word i
would love to have you come and join us
and and help us deliver this vision of
making it easy and
less environmentally damaged for
everyone to drive an ev
okay thanks i will attempt to answer any
questions let me see let me scroll back
um okay
dimension size of these nodules uh yeah
i'm holding one up they are about two
inches diameter uh they vary a little
bit but they're relatively small um they
form over millions of years there's like
huge numbers of them
uh what's the relative density against
the water um they they have they are
they have some some weight so they're
just lying you know they're rocks they
lie on the seabed uh not attached but
they're there
will they
control the food
we rent um we have designed our robots
so that they will work with traditional
shipping containers
and that's a big part of lowering the
cost of collection
and so we need minor modifications to a
traditional shipping container vessel
and we also use that vessel to not only
launch and recover the vehicles to
charge them but also to transport the
payload the actual modules uh to port
where they'll be processed uh in to get
the metals out
um uh how deep is the machine able to go
so uh
unfortunately these nodules these rocks
they only form in areas of water that
have been that for millions of years
typically three to five millions of
years
and so that means they have to be deep
so the typical depths are about
five thousand to six thousand meters so
you know three and a half to four and a
bit miles deep very very deep
are you using rgb cameras are
hyperspectral we're using rgb
at that depth there is no light
and so we provide our own illumination
we're using visible light and
potentially infrared
and just using traditional images
uh how are you treating the biologics
what will be on the surface
um not 100 sure about this i mean there
are lots of studies that show there are
corals there are sponges and there's
also other forms of fauna that lay eggs
and so our ai will detect these and
avoid picking up those nodules
we will also
choose to leave a certain percent behind
for working with a team of marine
scientists to kind of co-design this
collection vehicle
how environment economically viable
versus others uh rare earths
yeah we think it's really economic
we want to be about a third of the cost
of the dredging
but if you take a brand new mine on land
there are real issues with that first of
all in the us it takes eight to twelve
years to permit mainly because nobody
wants a mine in their backyard and you
often have to displace people often
indigenous people and so that goes
through the courts so we think the
permitting will be a lot quicker
secondly we have a very high grade
resource
this nodule has
nickel cobalt copper and manganese at
much higher grades than we find on land
all the high high-grade metals on land
have already been mined
also on land they're typically very
remote so you have to build a lot of
infrastructure you have to build a train
line or a highway
to get there and on land you don't
typically find four medals in one so all
of these things will come out to be much
less costly
uh who owns the rights to the minerals
great question
there are two jurisdictions if it's
within the exclusive economic zone of a
country i.e 200 nautical miles off its
coast it belongs to the country if it's
outside of that it's in areas beyond
national jurisdiction or the high seas
it's regulated by a united nations body
called the international seabed
authority or the isa
and they were established in the 1990s
and they have issued something like 32
expiration permits
uh are these on international waters uh
yeah okay so yeah if two jurisdictions
you're in international waters it's
regulated by the isa
or you're in the jurisdiction of a
country like the cook islands
that has established their seabed
minerals authority that is issuing
permits and regulating
can these rocks be treated in existing
facilities to extract the minerals or
you need new facilities great question
um you need some modification
of the traditional refining but actually
we also have a team that is trying to do
a really innovative way to do this using
naturally occurring breathing
metal breathing
bacteria so we have a team in la that is
attempting to uh to do that
why are you not using sonar um we
actually do have sonar on the vehicle
and that's mainly for when it is being
deployed
to make sure that it doesn't hard
impact the seabed it's for maintaining
neutral buoyancy
but specifically we feel that rgb camera
works better for the vision system and
picking up and the fact that we control
our own uh lights uh means that it's
relatively easy
uh how long are you out to see how much
material do you harvest per hole
we will do about three million metric
tons in a year that will generate about
two billion in revenue
we have a cycle time of about two weeks
so every two weeks the shippers are
coming and a new crew is going on
station
uh won't you cry extra metallurgical
isolation yeah we talked about that we
have something called bioextraction
that we're working on to do that
why collingwood um incredible
engineering talent
the university of waterloo is is very
close by and that's where our cto went
and also access to the georgian bay
uh environmental purpose of these rocks
and are they part of an ecosystem uh yes
um life has evolved uh to use them as i
mentioned there there is
life that uses them to lay eggs it's the
only hard substrate and so it's really
critical in our approach that we don't
remove all of them we leave a certain
percent behind so that life can exist
do you intend
lbs or other spectral density analysis
um we don't need to choose which rock to
pick up the percentage of the metal in
each rock doesn't vary from one rock to
the next they're all pretty much the
same so the distinction to pick up the
rock or not is based on whether any life
is on it or we want to leave it behind
good on you for knowing your numbers
are far away from building the prototype
um we built for yc at the start of this
year um we built the arm in the test
tank and we now have the shallow water
proof of concept in the water uh we are
hoping to be able to demonstrate that in
the fourth quarter of this year
um
okay why seven percent i don't know what
that refers to but uh anyway i should
probably stop there and um hand over
you know please feel free to to reach
out to me um my email is you can reach
me at
oliver at
impossiblemining.com
in this next portion of the event we
will have
two quick pitches to hear about two
other climate companies
we'll start with inside muji meats
i am inza i'm ceo and co-founder of
mujimeets as you probably know meat is
one of the biggest drivers of climate
change but fortunately nowadays we have
meat alternatives so you probably all
heard of companies such as impossible
and beyond but you might also have heard
that on top of that that grown meat is a
big emerging trend
the entire meat alternative industry has
one big problem though which is they
can't produce good whole cuts so if you
go to your local supermarket and you
look at your real meat section you see
like steaks fillets chicken breasts
whatever but if you look at meat
alternatives you will find only ground
meat and maybe some sausages and patties
muji meat is a habit spin-off that
develops a scalable 3d printing process
to produce whole cuts at mass production
level and just to give you a sense of
how cool the technology we're working on
is we do have a corresponding nature
publication that completely blew up and
it broke the record for most number of
readers a nature paper ever had in the
first month after publication
and yeah we are a growing team we hire a
large variety of backgrounds from
electrical engineers to buyer engineers
to food scientists so if you have any of
these profiles or are just generally
interested in our mission um i'm happy
to get in touch with you
does anyone have one question for india
can you please describe what the printer
is like
okay yeah um so there's two main
differentiators that are relevant for us
so for once you probably know 3d
printers most of them have only one
nozzle per printing hat and we print
with more than 250 nozzles at print per
printing hat which sounds very easy but
there's a very complicated pressure
regulation system behind that the other
main differentiator is that we can do
the material switch within each nozzle
up to 50 times per seconds and which is
much faster than if you all only have
one material per printing hat and always
need to relocate that and it also
enables much more precise
structures and textures if that makes
sense um and next up we have josh
hey everybody oh yeah great to be here
thanks for
allowing me to present and i'm josh
santos the co-founder and ceo of noya
and neue converts existing cooling
towers into carbon vacuums
if you have never seen a cooling tower
before they look kind of like this
they for our purposes at least are
basically just big boxes with huge fans
that move lots of air
we take advantage of this moving stream
of air sitting on top of a facility that
has already been constructed
to capture carbon dioxide directly out
of the atmosphere we do that with a
machine that looks kind of like this
our machine consists of a few key
components that we are developing
entirely in-house
we're developing something we're calling
the contactor where air plus
our carbon capture material contact each
other and come together that material
gobbles the co2 up as it's passing
through our equipment on its way into
the cooling tower
the second thing we develop is a way to
move the material from the contactor
beyond to where it needs to go
our material is a solid and so we're
basically using some fancy conveyor
belts think um conveyor sushi but for
climate
the last piece of equipment we're
developing is something called a co2
regenerator it's called that because it
regenerates
the co2 that we capture into a pure
stream it also regenerates the material
that we are using so that we can use it
again to gobble up more co2 i would be a
bad ceo if i told you that this is
exactly what it's going to look like
it's not it's the vision but we are
designing to this and we just uh
finished
our first build and we're hiring lots of
folks we got
different kinds of engineers like
chemical mechanical electrical
manufacturing controls
and uh we're hiring some materials
scientists as well um we're hiring the
electrical engineer actively and the
rest are coming later on this year so if
you're interested in cooling towers or
uh carbon capture let's talk you can see
my email there and that's probably my 60
seconds
does the load change during use i'm not
sure exactly what load uh you're
probably referring to the cooling load
or the electrical load required to cool
and then where are you storing the solid
end product i know i said one question
but all good so the the cooling tower
with our equipment retrofitted is
designed to be able to perform up to 95
or more of its peak cooling capacity
we're able to do that because of the
specific type of material that we're
using that essentially provides both a
low pressure drop across the material
and also a high surface area as air is
flowing through it we actually store co2
in a gaseous form
excuse me on the liquid form it's
regenerated as a gas we then compress
into liquid and we store that in a big
tank in the service area of the
buildings or industrial sites that we
are retrofitting
foreign
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you