Episode 54 Transcript: APRA-E Innovation Summit: Electric Airplanes, Laser Steel, and More

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.

This week, a fun report from the field. In May of this year, I was lucky enough to attend the ARPA-E Innovation Summit in Dallas, Texas. ARPA-E stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy. It’s a division of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which you might have heard of because it’s the agency that created the Internet and is wholly or partially responsible for everything from personal computers to GPS to drones and voice interfaces. There are six technical agencies within DARPA and each one is responsible for finding and funding key technology innovations within their expertise. As you might imagine, ARPA-E is heavily focused on sustainability and energy abundance as a literal national defense concern and the innovation summit is where they showcase a lot of this high-risk high-reward technology that has gotten some of this government funding to try to commercialize. So let’s take a little tour of the Innovation Summit Expo Area and start with electric airplanes.

(SOUND ON TAPE)

Jeff Engler:

So my name is Jeff Engler. I'm the founder and CEO of Wright Electric, and we are at the annual RPE summit in Dallas, Texas. 

Molly Wood:

Amazing. And what is, uh, what's Wright Electric building?

Jeff Engler:

So Wright Electric is working on large commercial electric airplanes. Um, we look at the climate and the noise impact of the aerospace industry. The New York Times says that flying is our biggest carbon sin. And then from a noise perspective, the number one complaint that the FAA gets is about noise. So we're looking at building electric airplanes to reduce both, reduce both the noise and the climate impact of the aerospace industry.  

Molly Wood:

What um, before we started a recording, you alluded to starting this out of a personal passion. Like, what's your origin story? What got you excited about this?

Jeff Engler:

Absolutely. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. My last company is a medical device company for preventing people with chronic diabetes uh, from losing their feet for an amputation. And, um, I've always been interested in social businesses. Uh, so, you know, both good, good for the world and, uh, an ability to make money. And the thing about flying is that it's, it's obviously extremely important. It's important from a business perspective for people to be able to see their families, but also it has a huge climate impact. And when I looked at my own personal carbon footprint, I realized that 70 percent of my carbon came from flying and I wanted to do something about it.

Molly Wood:

And then there are various.  solutions on the table to tackle the climate impact of flying from hydrogen to sustainable aviation fuel to not flying so much. What made you hit on electrifying planes?

Jeff Engler:

Well, so one of the best marketing tricks that sustainable aviation fuel has developed is calling it sustainable aviation fuel. In some cases, it's definitely better for the environment, but there are some analyses, for example, done by University of Cambridge and the World Economic Forum. It suggests that some so called sustainable aviation fuels are actually worse, um, in the end at the tailpipe than actually, uh, regular even jet fuel, let alone things like electric or hydrogen fuel cells.

Molly Wood:

Yeah. I have heard everything from offset scheme  put kindly to actual kind of disaster. So  I, there doesn't have to be like a whole explanation, episode slash explainer on, I think this question, because it's getting a lot of attention and funding. However.  There's also this, I mean, like when people think about electrifying airplanes,  cars have just now made it to 300 miles of range, right? Like this is a hard problem. And so I wonder what made you go, Nope, this can work.

Jeff Engler:

Absolutely. No, it really is an extremely hard problem. I figured it was one of these sort of 20 year problems. Where if you look at, you know, Tesla was founded in 2003. It wasn't really until 20 12, 20 13 where it started to take off. And now, 20 years later is when it's starting to be, uh, you know, obviously take over. I think, I think that's what you're gonna have to see with electric airplanes. And I was early enough in my career that I wanted to be a part of that, and I was, I was really happy to be, um, able to push it.

Molly Wood:

Okay. So what are you building and for what types of flights?

Jeff Engler:

Absolutely. So, um.  95 or more percent of the carbon footprint of the aerospace industry is airplanes larger than 100 passengers. So you see a lot of people working on smaller airplanes, but if you really want to target the true largest area of carbon emissions, it's big airplanes. So what we're doing is we're building the components that enable airplanes of 100 or so passengers to become electrified and those components are basically electric aircraft engines and batteries.

Molly Wood:

And so it's my understanding from again, a brief conversation before we started rolling is that you started out building engines  and then what?

Jeff Engler:

Yeah, we started out building engines. So our original idea was that we were going to be like the funnel and we were going to take, we were going to make the engine and we didn't care where the electrons came from, whether it's a hydrogen fuel cell or if it's a battery or something else and all of it was going to need to turn that electricity into thrust. And so we would make the motor and we would just take in from whatever energy source came. Started the company in 2016, 2017. Figured there was going to be, you know, with the rise of clean technologies, somebody out there would make a battery that would be perfect for an electrified airplane.  And that's not really what happened. So we ended up starting to make our own batteries as well.

Molly Wood:

And when was that?

Jeff Engler:

Uh, we started a couple of years ago doing it kind of internally and stealth. And then we publicly announced it about a year, about a year ago, something like that.

Molly Wood:

So you had to go from aerospace engineers to electrochemistry experts. No big deal. What is the,  what is the, what's the battery innovation? Like what is the, what are the foundational technologies there?

Jeff Engler:

So one of the benefits that we had was our team is a bunch of mechanical and electrical engineers, but we ended up partnering with a couple of universities. So we started working with the Daniel Steingart Laboratory at Columbia University, one of the world's leading research universities in terms of building novel energy chemistries. And so we ended up collaborating where, uh, they would focus on some aspects of the internal chemistry, and then we would make the mechanical packaging on the outside. And one of the things that's difficult about all of the sorts of batteries that, that people are doing that could be very, very lightweight, which is what we need, is that it's not just, uh, a battery and then the packaging as two separate things. You need to really integrate the battery with the packaging in order to squeeze out every ounce of weight possible.

Molly Wood:

Got it. So you had, it sounds like you had a double challenge. One was finding the right battery technology at the right weight, but also something like this vertical integration just became obvious over time.

Jeff Engler:

Yeah. I mean, it was one of these things where we, we, we looked at, you know, we started with a spreadsheet. We said, can we use a regular lithium ion battery? No, we can't use a regular lithium ion battery. Why chemistries? For example, we're working with, uh, aluminum air batteries. We're working with high temperature lithium batteries and in those sorts of chemistries, you, you can't just do, uh, the battery completely separate from the packaging. For example, with the aluminum battery, it actually has liquid flowing around it. So it has a sort of mechanical system, sort of like our motors. Our motors have liquid around it from a thermal management perspective. These batteries also have liquid around it. So, a typical battery company, they're not used to having liquids flowing in and out. They're, they're, you know, doing chemical engineering. They're doing, um, Deposition of materials onto other materials, but it's not like a mechanical system, whereas these batteries are much more. You should, You could think of them much more like a complicated mechanical system, almost like a motor, which is what our core original business was.

Molly Wood:

And then we're here ARPA-E. Are you able to talk about that funding?

Jeff Engler:

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so we've been really fortunate. ARPA-E Is is truly one of the world's greatest resources for pushing the energy industry forward. They have incredibly smart thinkers who are often five to ten years ahead of, of where the industry is going to be. And they come up with programs that anticipate the needs and then start to  fund specific solutions bit by bit by bit. So they, they had a funding program, uh, focused on, for example, cables and connectors.

They had a funding program focused on motors, which is something we've been part of. And then they decided to do a funding program focused on batteries. And we're really excited that we were selected to join that program as well.

Molly Wood:

Great. Oh, so you had already, you had already joined their program for building motors, and then now you're in for batteries too.

Jeff Engler:

Yeah, that's exactly right. So we've, we've been doing, um, motors, uh, through the ARPA-E Ascend program run by Dr. Peter DeBak, um, and that's been an incredible effort. And what you see right behind you. We brought in a mockup of our multi-megawatt electric aircraft engine that acts essentially as a drop in replacement for the engine core of a regional jet aircraft. And what you're looking at behind you is both the mockup and an actual jet engine fan in the front of it. And then, um, we also have a new program run by Dr. Hallie Cheeseman focused on ultra lightweight batteries.

Molly Wood:

Um, are you able to describe, like, should we go over there and you can walk me through it kind of verbally?

Jeff Engler:

Absolutely. So what you're looking at here is, um, if you, if you ever walk, um, if you ever walk in an airport and you have to get onto an airplane, what you'll see under the wing of each airplane is a very large jet engine. The only thing you can see when you look at it is the fan in the front, which is, uh, pulling in a bunch of air and compressing it and then running it through a jet engine. So if you're looking at this display, what you'll see here at the ARPA-E Summit is we have a large jet engine, which is maybe  three or four feet wide in diameter, and it's got the nacelle on the front, which is going to pull air in and act as an acoustic shield. What it then does is it runs a large fan, and then that's going to  convert the air into thrust, and that's going to push the airplane forward.

Molly Wood:

And then is the Goal that you would develop this technology and license it to whoever currently makes airline like Rolls Royce or something.

Jeff Engler:

Yeah, we've looked at a number of different business models. Um, what, what we've basically settled on is for now we're doing as much of the integration as we can. Because we find, we find that we can do so pretty quickly, um, and pretty efficiently and speed is really the name of the game here. Um, the other thing too is that sometimes when we work with the larger companies, they tend not to be as interested in innovation. It's not their fault. Their board of directors, their shareholders, want them to essentially make money on their assets that they already have and are already depreciated. They're not, they're not always paid to innovate. Whereas our, we, from an existential perspective, have to innovate. Because otherwise we don't really add a lot of value to the world. So, we found working with smaller companies, uh, tends to be better. Um, and also keeping a lot of stuff in house as well.

Molly Wood:

Smaller, you mean smaller, like, engine manufacturers or smaller airplanes?

Jeff Engler:

All the above. Um, and also even companies that aren't themselves airplane makers, but they, they modify existing airplanes. So, so for example, um, we know about the big airplane companies like Boeing, but there's actually lots of companies that make modifications for airplanes. And there's a whole certificate certification pathway called the supplemental type certificate that the FAA organizes to allow people to modify airplanes. And we found some success working with those. As opposed to saying, Hey, all we want to do is work with like the large companies.

Molly Wood:

And then I want to go back to something you said earlier, which is that you're targeting big planes as opposed to smaller planes, which might, which again might have been easier, right? Like you're taking a big swing here at the biggest planes. Just talk a little bit more about that.

Jeff Engler:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's an interesting thing from a technical perspective. Any engineer will tell you that starting small is better than going big. And of course it is technically easier to do that.

The problem is that if you look at any spreadsheet or any pie chart, any sort of analysis of the aerospace industry, almost all the emissions are in big airplanes. So even if you capture a hundred percent of the market for these small airplanes, all you're going to get is, is five or so percent emissions reduction. Whereas, you know, if you look at the rest of that 95 percent, let's say half of that is the narrow, is the wide body space. So that's airplanes going very long distances. We're not going to be able to do that. You know, maybe these, uh, synthetic fuels or other things might be a good fit for that. But for the, you know, 50 percent of flights that are in the narrow body space, that's like a typical, you know, airplane where you walk in and there's a single aisle and there's three seats on one side and three on the other.

About half of those flights are shorter than 800 or a thousand miles. That means in aggregate, we're talking about 25 percent of the carbon footprint of the industry, but even up to 70 percent of the noise footprint of the industry. Because those airplanes are doing a lot more hops up and down in the day. So if you think of like a, you know, a big airplane like a 747 that's got 500 passengers, that's only going to do one takeoff and landing a day. So even though it's a big airplane, from the community noise perspective, the people living near airports, they don't really hear it that much because it's just one landing. Whereas a 737 that might be doing six or eight flights a day, people are hearing those hops over and over and over again. So if we want to tackle the noise impact of the industry, in addition to the climate, going after these airplanes that are doing one, two, three hour flights is a really great way to tackle that.

Molly Wood:

I think that's an important clarification because when you say big airplanes, it's easy to think international travel, which is not what you're targeting. It's more of those kind of effectively regional flights that are carrying a lot of people not very long distances, like Oakland to Dallas.

Jeff Engler:

Yeah, exactly right. It's one of these things people just don't realize that so much of the aerospace industry is these, you know, narrow body flights on a 737 or an Airbus A320 or something like that. And that's what we're going after and where we think we can make a real difference.

Molly Wood:

And then just one more note on the noise thing. I mean,  it's one of those, it's like when you first get into electric cars, right? And you're like, Oh, the sound is gone. I mean, it is one of those things that  people are mad about, but nobody thought was fixable.

Jeff Engler:

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And so where we're heading next is, again, what we have here is our first electric aircraft engine that it's a multi megawatt engine, so a couple thousand horsepower.

We've tested it to over a thousand horsepower. The next step is it's going to a NASA altitude chamber. And then after that, we're building our own propulsion test stand. So that's a fancy way of saying we're actually going to put a big jet engine fan on the front of it and test it. And that's going to allow us both to test the efficiency from a thrust perspective, but also from a noise perspective.

And the next thing we'll do after that is to start to tune it to make it as quiet as possible. So, so from, you know, the first couple years of the program where we were kind of sitting in the lab and building and now we're gonna, now we're gonna be actually testing it and trying to, to make it as quiet as possible.

Molly Wood:

What's, what's the like,  I mean obviously that's next, which is huge, but what, you know, what should we know about the rest of your timeline?

Jeff Engler:

Yeah, absolutely. So, in terms of the next major steps, uh, next major step number one is to do testing at a NASA facility for, uh, an altitude chamber. After that is, is what's called propulsion testing on the ground. And after that, we're putting it in a large aircraft and we're actually gonna run it down the runway. So, and then after that, prepare for a flight. So, we're doing a stepwise engineering approach, but it's one of these things where, you know, to go from what you're seeing here, which is a static display, to actually running down, you know, on a runway, It makes a really meaningful difference. And then, you know, we can start to plan for a certification as well.

Molly Wood:

Hot damn. I love it. Thank you for the tour.

Jeff Engler:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming by.

Molly Wood VO:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, more from ARPA-E and by more I just mean lasers.

Molly Wood VO:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. I’m reliving my visit to the ARPA-E Innovation Summit, where I had the chance to visit just a few of the advanced tech projects the agency is funding to get us to a more abundant future. There are dozens, but after electric airplanes I found myself distracted by asers. First, for making steel.

(SOUND ON TAPE)

Andy Zal:

I'm Andy Zal from Limelight Steel, I'm the CTO and co-founder, and we use lasers to make steel. So you start with rocks, and normally you have to burn coal to convert it into iron, metal, and steel. It's been done the same way for 2, 500 years. It's like the dawn of the Iron Age. And recently lasers have just improved in efficiency and gone down in cost. So it's It used to be about a million dollars per watt in the 90s, and now it's less than 10 cents a watt.

Molly Wood:

So Just to, like, make a laser blaze.

Andy Zal:

Yeah, to buy. To buy.

Molly Wood:

To buy? Okay, so then, um,  are, are you the people,  forgive the stupidity of this question, but are you the people who figured out that you can use lasers to make steel?

Andy Zal:

Yeah, because I think people who are trying to use hydrogen are trying to use hydrogen currently to decarbonize the steel industry. But there's just a limited,  I think it's going to be too expensive, and it's a limited solution because it can only work for high grade ore, which is less than 3 percent of global iron ore supply. So there's 97 percent of ore which doesn't have a solution and using lasers directly to convert iron ore into metal is a way to actually be cheaper than the blast furnace.

So this really old technology that's scaled is really good, but we need to be able to make iron for cheaper and using lasers directly to make iron is a pathway. to be cheaper than the blast furnace. So  that's why we got ARPA-E funding.

Molly Wood:

Clearly. How,  in terms that I could possibly understand, do you use a laser to make steel?

Andy Zal:

So you start with a rock, iron oxide.  You blast laser light on it and rapidly heat it up to temperatures where it decomposes.  So oxygen just leaves and you're just left with iron metal.  And it's as simple as that.

Molly Wood:

How did, how come, how come you figured it out and no one else did?  Like, I know that's always the question, you know, but like, what was the moment? What, what made you think of it?

Andy Zal:

Yeah. The best ideas are always like,  it's so easy. Why did no one else think about it? And I think it's truly because there's a big stigma against lasers. People like that's too expensive. It's just a tiny dot, but you just have to array the lasers to cover a big enough service area. You have to totally redesign the furnace and people, I think, kept trying to use old technology and how do we, let's say, capture CO2 from a blast furnace. How do we use hydrogen in this process, rather than starting from first principles. We have this rock, how do we extract the metal from it, and what are the existing technologies to do that? And, yeah, lasers are a very new technology.

Molly Wood:

I mean, it's so sci fi brain. Like, I really do love the idea that there is just something about your brain that was like, you know what would be sick? Is lasers.

Andy Zal:

Yeah, that's kind of how my brain works. It's like, wouldn't it be cool if you could do this? And, turns out you can.

Molly Wood:

Can you do it at scale? Like, do lasers involve a lot of  energy?

Andy Zal:

Yeah. So, lasers have become more efficient every year. So they, it used to be less than 1 percent efficient. So it takes, let's say a hundred times more electricity to get one watt of laser light out, but it's now over 50 percent over 70 percent efficient now to convert electricity to light. So you're able to build, you can think of like an led TV. It's like a massive array of million of light emitting diodes use the same material to just turn electricity into a big wall of light to process a bunch of more. So because lasers are so cheap and you can array them  much bigger, you're able to build big enough furnaces to replace the blast furnace.

Molly Wood:

And then, and then ideally you're using renewable energy or some source like that, and then it's a, it's a much lower carbon process that did, I hear this correctly is also cheaper than how we currently make steel.

Andy Zal:

Correct. So  we have to scale our technology, but if you use clean electricity for, let's say, Four to five cents per kilowatt hour, that's clean. You're able to be cheaper than the blast furnace, which is really hard to be cheaper than coal that you dig up from the ground, which is why hydrogen can't be cheaper than coal because you're comparing something that you have to make  hydrogen that takes energy versus digging a rock out of the ground. It's just so cheap to compete with a rock. But if you're just pumping the energy directly into the ore, you're able to be cheaper.

Molly Wood:

But you would need, it sounds like the only potential  hurdle is you do need new facilities.

Andy Zal:

Correct. You can't retrofit a blast furnace to do this. You have to have a Greenfields  iron making plant, yes.

Molly Wood:

And then tell us where you are in the process of building this company. You're about to graduate from the Activate Fellowship. You have some ARPA-E funding.

Andy Zal:

Yeah. So we are a team of eight now. We have Do you want to hear it right now? Proof of concept furnace, demonstrating the process and we're scaling it up to a 100 ton per year plant in the next year. So we're going to start designing that and in 2025 start building our pilot plant.

Molly Wood:

I'm here for it. Frickin lasers.

Andy Zal:

Frickin lasers.

Molly Wood VO:

Now you might have heard some sounds behind me and that’s because I was standing next to a big demo from another company, Foro Energy, which has developed an entirely OTHER set of laser innovations for the oil and gas industry including the ability to more efficiently cap abandoned oil and gas wells to keep them from leaking superheated methane into the atmosphere and to more efficiently and safely decommission offshore and subsea mines.

(SOUND ON TAPE)

So we have operations bases in Bakersfield, California and Milliken, Colorado. And then our headquarters is based out of Houston where we do all the R& D at as well. So, so what we have here is a mobile laser cutting unit and the reason why we have a mobile laser cutting unit is, our project with ARPA requires us to pump high power laser down into a tool for oil and gas applications on orphan wells, plug in abandoned wells. And the goal here is to create a connected surface area across single strings of casings, or two strings of casings,  and be able to pump a plug material across that zone. And the why we want to pump a plug material across that zone is Uh, there's a huge issue in the U. S. infrastructure. It's aging. It's getting old. All the oil wells have methane leaking. There's a tremendous amount of, uh, loss production. And the technology that exists today doesn't allow good access through the single strings of casings all the way out to formation.  What the laser enables is it allows us to go through the casing, create custom geometries, whatever the operator specifies for the plug program, And then once we've created that at, you know, that, that shot through the casing at the given geometry, we would go in with a bismuth alloy plug, snd the bismuth alloy plug,  you can see it here,  creates a seal across all casing strings all the way out to formation, if needed. And the nice thing about the bismuth alloy is once it sets, it actually hydraulically expands and creates a much better seal compared to what cement does. And the advantage to using this as well as semen also has, uh, methane production.

Um, so you're now putting more cement in the well bore, which reduces the overall, uh, methane. The advantage to doing this is, one, there's a huge market. There's a, I mean, there's an estimated 2 million orphan wells in the U. S. alone. So there's a huge, you know, size of the prize, it's very large. The operators need something out there that can be better than conventional technology, and a laser is that enabler.

So that kind of covers what the scope of the project is. But how are we going to do that? So the first thing is you need to be able to pump light from a surface to a downhole or to a surface application. And so we've built,  um, our mobile laser cutting unit. It's a complete integrated laser.  Um, it has a laser sitting inside. You can see inside the control cab.  In the back of the truck, we have the support systems. One is a chiller, and that cools the laser because we're running a 20 kilowatt laser, so it has some heat output.  And then inside of there we also have 500 gallons of liquid nitrogen, and we use that liquid nitrogen to push the material.

So anything we cut, the laser is going to create the molten,  but you need an assist, you need a push. And we use that nitrogen to push the molten into the formation or down. And the nitrogen also provides the tool with clean air. And gets the velocity coming out of the nozzle. So it's two fold for what we like. Clean optics, cooling the connector, and providing a push. So that's all built into the system.  And then we have an operator control cab, where we can control all the tools from our HMI, which is the Human Machine Interface. And we have closed circuit TV cameras within there that allow us to monitor the progress if we're doing an uphold project. So, that's the front end of the truck. The rear end of the truck, we have, it's multifunctional. We do a lot of surface work in California and Colorado around wellhead severing. So the truck is outfitted to be multifunctional both for downhole and surface applications. And so when we, we do a job, this would be all the truck that we would need to do it, to do a wellhead severing project using the laser to cut five feet below the soil.

So the operator would come in to a well, just like we're set up right now, He would lower the back door.  Once the back door is lowered, we use the integrated crane,  and the crane will pick up what we call our XMAC tool, and it'll sit over the top of the wellhead onto a, basically like a big overshot that's buried in the ground. And the tool head will sit about five feet below soil, and it varies based on the state that we're cutting in, but California for example has a five foot below soil regulation.  And then the operator from inside, doing this completely remote, no, no man in the hole, no confined space, no large excavations. He will activate the laser, using the control panel. He will monitor the penetration through all casing strings, and then he'll set the nitrogen flow as well, and he'll start the rotation of the cut. So, the way this works, is just this top piece rotates the cutting head,  and then the cutting head is actually down here with the nozzle, and that's where we're performing the cutting.

A cut on a well like this, this is a seven by nine and five eighths casing string, would take about ten minutes in total to cut all the way through and then about ten minutes more to be able to rig down. So this particular system has been commercial in the U. S. for about going on eight years now. We've done about 6, 000 wells with this particular application and tool cutting system across three different states, uh, here in the US. But the advantage to this is, yes, we can do the surface cutting, but let's say we had another well in the same field. We could literally take this truck, mow the coal tubing unit that we have built as part of the ARPA project, and then connect into our downhole tool and go down and do a plug in abandonment within the same field for a different application within the same day. So there's a lot of advantages to what we're developing here.

Molly Wood VO:

So many questions, right? That was Wright Electric, Limelight Steel, and Foro Energy from the ARPA-E Innovation Summit. As for me, I got to interview Jonathan Scott from the Property Brothers on the main stage at the actual conference who is not doing anything with lasers that I know of, but who is surprisingly into sustainable home building and goods. Who knew! That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. Thank you so much for listening. Tell a friend. Rate and review us on apple podcast and I 'll see you next week.