Leah Ellis and Yet-Ming Chiang
Photo courtesy The Engine
While Leah Ellis was earning her doctorate at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, she was a part of a team that did battery research for Tesla. After she graduated, her budding profession took an unusual turn.
“I could have gotten a neater job with my background in battery materials — quite a lot of my colleagues go work for Tesla or Apple. I could have done that, … and I might have made more cash at first,” Ellis, 33, told CNBC by phone Wednesday.
As a substitute, Ellis applied for and won a prestigious Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship that granted her two years’ salary to work with whomever she wanted.
Ellis took her Ph.D. in electrochemistry and went to work for Yet-Ming Chiang, a renowned material sciences professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who can be a serial clean-tech entrepreneur. Chiang co-founded firms comparable to American Superconductor Corporation, A123 Systems, Desktop Metal, Form Energy and 24M Technologies.
Now Ellis is working to scale up a latest climate-conscious technique of making cement, one powered with electrochemistry as a substitute of fossil fuel-powered heat.
Making cement using electrochemistry was Chiang’s idea, Ellis told CNBC in Boston at the top of May. Ellis said she worked with Chiang in 2018, just after he had began Form Energy, a long-duration battery company, and he was serious about the abundant intermittent energy that was being generated by renewable energy sources comparable to wind.
“Sometimes people pays you to take energy off their hands,” Ellis told CNBC. “As a substitute of putting that energy in a battery, what if we are able to use this extra low-cost renewable energy to make something that might otherwise be very carbon-intensive? After which the primary on the list of things which are carbon-intensive — it’s cement.”
Cement is a essential ingredient in concrete, which is the cornerstone of world construction and infrastructure, since it’s low cost, strong and sturdy. 4 billion metric tons, which is the equivalent of fifty,000 fully loaded airplanes, of cement is produced annually, in response to a 2023 report from management consulting company McKinsey. The worth of the market was $323 billion in 2021 and is predicted to achieve $459 billion by 2028, in response to SkyQuest Technology Consulting.
Cement powder is conventionally made by crushing raw materials, including limestone and clay, mixing with ingredients comparable to iron and fly ash, and putting all of it right into a kiln that heats the ingredients as much as about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That technique of making cement generates roughly 8% of world carbon dioxide emissions, that are a number one reason for global warming.
When Chiang had the concept to impress cement manufacturing, he turned to Ellis. “He’s super busy, so he was like, ‘Go off and figure it out,'” Ellis told CNBC.
So she did.
In 2020, Ellis and Chiang co-founded Sublime Systems to refine and scale up the electrochemical process they created for making cement.
Sublime has raised $50 million from some leading clean-tech investors, including Chris Sacca’s LowerCarbon Capital and Boston-based, MIT spin-out enterprise firm The Engine; from Siam Cement Group, a number one cement and constructing materials company in Asia; and via a couple of grants from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, program.
Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime Systems
Photo courtesy Summer Camerlo, Sublime Systems
Ellis likes to explain what they’re doing as developing the “electric vehicle of cement making.” An electrical vehicle replaces a combustion engine with an electrical motor, and that is what Sublime Systems does within the cement-making process.
“I believe for the layperson, it’s easiest for them to know how we take that high-temperature, fossil-driven process and replace it with something that’s powered by electrons. And we’re using electrons to push these chemical reactions,” Ellis told CNBC by phone Wednesday. “That happens at an ambient temperature below the boiling point of water,” she said, and that could be a critical differentiator.
Ellis said she didn’t know much about cement when Chiang bade her to go determine methods to make low-carbon cement. She began by reading Wikipedia, after which textbooks. Then she worked with one other Ph.D. student doing research that was later published in scientific journal articles on the subject. That led to the concept for what Sublime is doing now, and he or she’s continued to refine that idea ever since.
“And principally just have not stopped,” Ellis told CNBC. “It has been five years.”
Bringing the ‘magic’ of chemistry to cement
Ellis has at all times been curious. “I grew up pretty nerdy, I assume, reading quite a lot of books,” she said. “I at all times had that thirst for knowledge and a way of adventure.”
She also grew up in a spiritual household. Her father is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi from Texas, her mother grew up on a sheep farm in South Africa, and the 2 met after they were each in Israel. “Jerusalem has good enough rabbis. So he moved to eastern Canada, where they haven’t got quite a lot of rabbis,” Ellis told CNBC of her father’s move. Her family celebrated and encouraged having a strong mental life.
Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime Systems, works within the cement lab.
Photo courtesy Leah Ellis
Ellis and certainly one of her two younger sisters ended up getting their doctorates in chemistry.
“Each of us realize that chemistry is a really creative subject; it is also a really difficult subject. And I believe we each kind of gravitate to things which are difficult,” Ellis told CNBC.
When mastered, chemistry might be used to effect change. “It has quite a lot of creative power to make things occur in the true world,” Ellis said. “It’s almost like magic. Should you work really hard on it, you may create things that make the world a greater place.”
Battery scientists and cement producers haven’t historically worked together. “Cement typically sits in civil engineering, and battery science normally sits in chemistry or physics,” Ellis said. “They do not go to the identical conferences.”
But with Sublime Systems, Ellis and Chiang are bringing those two fields together.
That framework of using electrochemistry to drive reactions that when happened with highly regarded fossil fuel-powered reactions shouldn’t be exclusive to cement.
“It’s an enormous tool. I do not think Sublime is the one one which’s applying electrochemistry to wash tech. I believe the easiest way we have now to get around fossil fuels is to make use of electrons,” Ellis told CNBC.
“The electrochemical way is usually more efficient,” she said. “Heating things as much as make them go is usually not as efficient as electrochemistry, which is a little more surgical, a bit more efficient — or at the least might be more efficient with the suitable processes.”
That fundamental energy efficiency is why Chiang is confident of their solution.
“Decarbonizing cement production goes to be a really tough task. There can be quite a few approaches, all of which have challenges and most of which need to be tested,” Chiang told CNBC. “I prefer to face our challenges because we see a pathway to finish decarbonization at cost parity with today’s cement while consuming the smallest amount of energy. In the long term, the lowest-energy process normally wins.”
Yet-Ming Chiang, professor of materials science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks in the course of the 2016 IHS CERAWeek conference in Houston, Texas, Feb. 26, 2016.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The cement industry needs to wash up shop
“On the entire, the industry is extremely motivated to go green,” Mark Mutter, the founding father of Jamcem Consulting, an independent cement industry consultancy, told CNBC. Motivations to go green are highest for producers positioned in parts of the world comparable to Europe, where there’s a price on carbon dioxide emissions at around 80 euros (almost $88) per metric ton. That is “an enormous financial penalty for producers and it gives them an incentive to speculate” in green cement tech, Mutter told CNBC.
That is one reason investors are putting money behind Sublime.
“Customers are lining as much as partner with Sublime because they will supply fossil-free cement at a time when the remaining of the industry are all struggling to hit emissions targets and comply with carbon tariffs,” Clay Dumas, partner at LowerCarbon Capital, told CNBC.
“For Lowercarbon, their omnipresence and medieval production techniques are precisely the qualities that make constructing materials such an irresistible opportunity,” Dumas told CNBC.
Some cement producers are carbon capture technologies as a technique to manage their greenhouse gas emissions. But “this is extremely costly, and in some respects is just business as usual and burying the issue for future generations,” Mutter told CNBC.
Sublime is making clean cement without the expensive additive of carbon capture and storage technologies, which is attractive since it keeps costs low, said Katie Rae, CEO at The Engine. “Producing decarbonized cement directly, fairly than doing carbon capture, drives each energy efficiency and eventual cost parity,” Rae told CNBC.
Dumas said Sublime has “probably the most elegant chemistry, which runs on electricity at ambient temperatures while emitting zero carbon. Which means they haven’t any need for giant ovens or costly CO2-capture systems that might drive up capex.”
Siam Cement Group looks at hundreds of firms and makes only “just a few” investments a yr, Timothy McCaffery, a enterprise investor at SCG, told CNBC. For SCG, what’s attractive about Sublime is that it avoids the complicated and expensive carbon capture technology and works with existing infrastructure.
“We have now seen that Sublime Systems could disrupt the industry. The corporate produces a cement at room temperature that may drop into the prevailing ready mix supply chain and meets American Society for Testing and Materials standards,” McCaffery told CNBC. American Society for Testing and Materials is the body that creates test standards and protocols that manufacturers use to check their materials against.
Climbing stairs, making solutions, moving forward
Sublime accomplished its pilot plant at the top of 2022 and spent just a few months on quality control measures. Now, Ellis is concentrated on getting the product to partners, and the corporate hopes to do its first construction project by the top of the yr. The subsequent step is to go from the 100-ton pilot plant to a 30,000-ton-per-year demonstration plant.
While Sublime is just getting ramped up, Ellis knows speed is crucial within the race to decarbonize. “My mission is to have a swift and large impact on climate change,” she told CNBC in Boston.
Leah Ellis bikes in Africa.
Photo courtesy Scott Carmichael
It’s an audacious goal, and while Ellis has credentialed chemistry chops, that is her first time being the boss of an organization.
“I suppose I’m aware of my age. And I’m also humble about that. I’m a first-time founder. I’m a first-time CEO,” Ellis told CNBC. “I figure things out as I do them. And I’m really lucky to have great mentors and support and folks who consider in me, and, I believe, who recognize the undeniable fact that I even have quite a lot of energy, and I even have quite a lot of passion. And I will work as hard as I can for so long as I can to make this occur.”
Ellis knows methods to keep herself going, too. She makes sure she gets good sleep and he or she stays lively. She’s run seven marathons. She’s a cycler, and once cycled across Africa in about 4 months with a gaggle, a visit that averaged out to riding greater than 60 miles a day. She also participates in a “fitness cult” that climbs the Harvard stadium stairs every Sunday.
“I’m not a quick runner in any respect. I’m not a quick cyclist either,” Ellis told CNBC. “I just know methods to toe that effort line to identical to maintain the identical effort for a really very long time, and to maintain my very own spirits up.”
For Chiang, constructing solutions keeps him moving forward.
“It has been about 15 years for the reason that words ‘climate change’ entered the lexicon. It has been a present, and really energizing, to have potentially impactful solutions to pursue, versus sitting and fretting,” Chiang told CNBC.
“I think climate change has pushed all of us into a particularly fertile, creative period that can be looked back on as a real renaissance. In any case, we’re attempting to re-invent the technological tools of the commercial revolution. There isn’t any shortage of great problems to work on! And time is brief.”