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How Element 16 Hopes To Help Cut Power Use In Industrial Plants, Parker Wells

For this morning's interview, we sat down and talked with Parker Wells, the CEO of Element 16 (www.element16.com), based in Glendale, which has developed new heat energy storage technology aimed at use in the industrial sector. The startup was part of the Techstars Dubai Accelerator earlier this year. Parker told us about the origins of its technology, and how the company hopes to use its technology to make a big impact on fossil energy use at heavy industrial facilities.

What is Element 16?

Parker Wells: More than half of the energy used worldwide is used in the industrial sector. What Element 16 is focused on, is greenhouse gas emissions. We're focused on reducing those to have the greatest impact, by focusing on products that target the biggest fossil energy users, which are heavy industrial facilities. We focus on making them more efficient, with heat storage and by capturing waste heat. One of the easiest way to think about it, is that heat storage can capture and make useful that energy that is otherwise wasted as heat. If you look at a food processing, chemical, brewery, or power plant, what you tend to envision is a big building with a chimney out the top, with smoke and steam billowing out of the chimney. What that is, is wasted heat, which we burned fossil fuels to make. What Element 16 is focused on, is capturing that kind of waste heat, and delivering that as useful energy.

How do you do that?

Parker Wells: We do a lot of different things, but all of them are build around one core piece of technology, which we started working on at UCLA as researchers. We originally developed this heat storage technology for use in concentrated solar, for collecting heat from the sun. The University is still focused on that at higher temperatures. Element16, however, has figured and and focused on using the same core technology to make industrial facilities more efficient. Waste heat is cheaper and at a lower temperature. The way we do this, is we use sulfur to store heat. Sulfur is the sixteenth element on the periodic table. It's a waste product of the oil industry. It's really, really cheap, in some cases free, and abundant. By using something really low cost, we drop the cost of heat storage by fifty percent or more. We are looking at storing that heat in big, sulfur heat tanks. How is it used, is it is used in a factory or industrial facility in the same way they already uses that heat. That might be to dry minerals, to create a chemical reaction, or for sanitizing equipment, however that factory is already using heat. We just give it back to them in a way that it useful. That being said, we did just get a project this year that doesn't use our technology for industrial applications, but uses it to create steam, used to run traditional power generators, and create electricity. That said, that hasn't been our main focus.

The industry has talked a lot about molten salt for heat storage. What's the advantage of using sulfur instead?

Parker Wells: Molten salt is the standard, and the status quo. It's a great solution, because when it's a liquid, it becomes very hot, and it's easy to get heat into and out of liquids. On the downside, it's very expensive. One of the easiest ways to think about this, is your electricity bill and natural gas. Typically, you use natural gas to make heat, because the cost of natural gas is much lower. That's because electricity is very valuable, and heat is a lot less valuable. So, if you're going to store heat, you have to have a really low cost system. Molten salt is relatively expensive, at around $800 a ton. Although that might not sound a lot, sulfur is only $50 a ton. That's less than a tenth of the cost. By doing that, you make the places and facilities where you can install heat and use heat storage far more economical. It drastically increases the places you can use heat storage. That's the number one advantage, is using sulfur drives down the cost of heat storage in a really significant way.

How far along are you with commercialization?

Parker Wells: We spun out and created our own company in 2016, and we got our first funding from the State of California in 2017. That was a $1.5 million project, to demonstrate the Element 16 concept. That concluded this year. We demonstrated a 100 kilowatt hours plus unit that stored heat effectively, and is actually part of a small power plant we're building, which produces both electricity and heat, and stores that heat to drive an aborption chiller to chill water. It's something that you'd see installed in a large hotel, used as part of the heating, cooling, and air conditioning in a large hotel. In 2018, we got a grant to do a project with industrial processing here in California at a very large industrial facility. That project is still in the middle of development, capturing 1.5MW of intermittent waste heat. Factories do not tent to work 24 hours a day, so when they have heat, they have to exhaust it. What we're doing, is instead capturing that heat and giving it back to them later. Just this year, we also signed a contract for a new project, worth $3M, to scale up our technology, and demonstrate it on a larger scale. We're already headed for the megawatt hour scale, but there are applications in the gigawatt or tens of gigawatt range. We keep on moving up, and already have penciled out how the technology will scale. I believe, for us to have really world-changing impact, we need to be able to operate in the largest facilities in the world, across many industries.

What's the biggest challenge you see in getting this to market?

Parker Wells: There's a lot of challenges for anything capital intensive like this. Unlike a lot of apps, or web startups, or whatever, which have relatively small capital outlays needed to build their test systems and to iterate, we are making pretty large systems. Even our demonstration systems are large, the size of an SUV, and our next ones might be the size of a shipping container. Our technology is physically large, which takes time and money to bring to market. Plus, we're going after industries that tend to be less quick to adapt or adopt technology. If you look at an oil refinery, not every oil refinery is ready to adopt this technology to reduce their natural gas or fossil fuel usage, because of the risk that new technology poses. So what we do is focus on finding corporate partners who are forward thinking and willing to take on big challenges. We're making sure that the big companies and big government partners that we are working with, are concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and really actively pursuing those solutions, and actively supporting new technology and integrating those to meet those goals. That's our really big challenge, because it's not just a simple pay-per-click business, or launching a new website. It's building a brand new system to solve a major pain point for large corporations. But, that's also why we have the opportunity to make a really large impact.

As an entrepreneur, what's been the biggest lesson for you so far?

Parker Wells: I think the biggest lesson has been all about people. We have a really strong team, and we have had really strong partners, both corporations, and the Techstars Accelerator. We've been working with really good people, which is important, especially for a company like ours where we're looking at the long term. You have to be supported by good people. There is nothing more important than people that are on your side. You have to treat them very well, and when you do that, it pays back a thousand-fold. That's been a big lesson for me.

Thanks, and good luck!