Emvolon is gearing up for a Series A capital raise later this year, on the heels of a recently completed seed raise.
The MIT spinout, which has technology using truck engines to convert waste gas to methanol, would use the proceeds to execute commercial agreements that support additional plants, co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Kasseris said in an interview.
The company this month announced an arrangement with Montauk Renewables to build a commercial-scale demonstration of recovering and converting tail gas from a landfill RNG site in Texas.
Emvolon and Montauk have agreed to an MoU to pursue up to 10 sites in total, Kasseris said.
In tandem, the company raised $10.5m in a seed round that included grants and private capital. Among the private investors were strategic backers Dorian, a shipping company, and Vista Energy, an Argentine oil and gas company. The seed capital raise was first reported by Axios.
The firm has several offtake arrangements in place at the MoU stage, one with a shipping company and one with a chemical maker, Kasseris added. A formal announcement is expected soon.
“The main idea is to repurpose an internal combustion engine from a truck, essentially as a small scale component of a chemical plant to convert methane into green fuels on site,” he said.
Emlovon’s modular technology can take waste gas from a number of sources – landfill gas, biogas, waste gas, biomass – and run it through a truck engine with low oxygen inputs to make carbon monoxide and hydrogen. An additional catalytic process turns the syngas into methanol.
The skid-mounted units offer the right size for applications at landfill, agricultural, and industrial sites where flaring takes place, Kasseris said, adding that converting the waste gas to a liquid like methanol allows for transportation in a standard chemical container at a manageable cost.
Instead of a one-off design for a field construction project, Emvolon repurposes a piece of hardware that is already mass produced, he said. The company is nearing an announcement of a partnership with a large engine OEM.
The standard size for an Emvolon plant involves taking in 300,000 standard cubic feet of methane gas resulting in eight tons of product per day. Kasseris declined to specify the cost of a standard unit other than to say it was in the single-digit millions.
In terms of a target market, “The lowest hanging fruit is obviously landfills,” he said,”where you’re not competing with RNG – all of these sites that are too far away from pipelines.”
He added that growth in gas production from agricultural products is a promising avenue, but that it requires an end market that values a carbon-negative product, such as in California. The shipping industry, meanwhile, is still studying how it will value carbon negativity, but is a huge potential market for clean methanol, Kasseris said.
