Nor Any Drop to Drink

Nor Any Drop to Drink

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was his longest major poem and was written in 1798 and published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. It is the story of an old seaman who takes a perilous voyage where he gets stuck in Antarctic waters until an albatross leads him out. The most famous line in the poem that most of us have heard is:

Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

The mariner is decidedly old school and he kills the albatross for food, much to the chagrin of his fellow sailors, who consider such an act disastrously bad luck. Coleridge was a member of the Romantic Movement in literature and that led the literary community to the belief in the inherent goodness of man and nature. His physical weakness caused him to take laudanum and thus be one of the earliest victims of the opioid crisis. This all gave him the vision to see and write of Xanadu, the “stately pleasure-dome” of Kubla Khan. He also ended the Ancient Mariner’s story with an apologetic refrain, invoking the notion of the goodness of man and nature:

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

My company is all about electrochemical transformation to reduce emissions like CO2. We use water (super-heated into steam) to make hydrogen, and water and air to make ammonia. We spend 100% of our time trying to perfect that process into an efficient manner (with the lowest level of power possible). It seems that everyone in the world is looking at this process and hoping it will be achievable. It solves too many economic and environmental problems to list here. The technology it would replace for ammonia production is 110 years old and in sore need of improvement. Ammonia is the second largest industrial chemical in the world, headed for the top spot since it is so vital to food security. We and others also believe that ammonia has the potential to become the center of the worldwide energy production and storage industry for reasons of efficiency and chemical stability. If that happens, we move into an ammonia economy and that’s a big deal if you’ve successfully “cracked the code” of synthesizing ammonia in a green and cost effective way.

The reason I am doing this (since I am not a chemical engineer) is because it is such a BIG idea that can, indeed, change the world. I have rarely seen such an important idea. It is worthy of all our focus and if we can accomplish what we set out to do with just ammonia synthesis, I will be a happy man. However, the way venture companies work, you have to show focus AND breadth. You can’t be a one-trick pony, even if the pony is a Clydesdale. So we have preliminarily explored the follow-on businesses of energy generation and storage using ammonia, and making hydrogen, which is the first half of the ammonia synthesis process. Hydrogen is already a big business and ammonia fuel cells is bound to become a big business. And then there’s water.

We, like most good companies, like to listen to the marketplace. If you are using water and nitrogen to make ammonia and hydrogen. And you are reversing that process to turn ammonia into power and water, it suddenly gets people in arid areas of the world to wonder about running the entire pool table with one really good shot. Maybe we can make ammonia, power, oxygen, AND water. Wouldn’t it be nice to solve all of the world’s problems all at once?

Sure. I’m reminded of a meeting we took in the early 1990’s with Lloyd’s of London before it almost fell apart. We were showing them a new financial reinsurance concept and their comment was a bold, “If it was a good idea, don’t you think we would have thought of it in 300 years?” My variation of that silly comment is, “If it was so easy, don’t you think someone would have done it by now?” The point is, talking about this stuff in non-scientific and non-engineering terms does make it all sound easy, but it’s anything but easy. The number of people who understand the intricacies of electrochemistry and proton-conducting ceramics is in the category of hen’s teeth.

Now we do not think our disruptive technology will take 15-20 years to adopt as is the standard cycle in industrial chemicals. We’ve worked on the ammonia synthesis idea for five years and need one to two years more to be ready to commercialize. Granted the next generation of applications can stand on our shoulders and will take less time. I’m comfortable saying we can move to hydrogen and ammonia fuel cells in the visible future.

There will be lots and lots of other chemical transformations and they may well include water at the top of the list. There is no doubt that the intensity of the inherent demand for a solution will drive the prioritization and speed to market for that solution. Water could easily be in that high demand position and may get accelerated.

My team and I like to fight over water. They want to prioritize this with clients. I want them to recognize that our primary activity in ammonia is already a big piece to bite off and chew properly. Water may not help wash that down, but may rather drown us. I’m sure they feel like we are so close and can see the water, but I feel there may be water, water everywhere, but we need it for ammonia, not to drink. I loveth them and their ideas all but my Xanadu is ammonia.