Texas is going through a transformation where half a million oil and gas workers will be redeployed into the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies.
Breakthrough Energy and Bill Gates have invested more than $130 million into Texas-based entrepreneurs, institutions, and projects and is betting that this workforce will help form the backbone of the world’s new clean energy economy, and it will cement Texas’s energy leadership for generations to come.
Some examples
Infinium
Infinium - turning waste CO2 and renewable energy into electrofuels—or eFuels—for trucks. ships, and even planes.
They’ve already signed a deal with Amazon, and sometime soon, if you live in the area, you might get a delivery supported by Infinium eDiesel.
Companies won’t have to adapt their fleets, removing one of the biggest hurdles to transitioning to a new fuel.
The work they’re doing on sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF—could potentially reduce emissions from air travel by as much as 90 percent,
How do they do this?
They are converting an old gas-to-liquid plant in West Texas into a new facility that will increase the company’s capacity for producing eFuels ten-fold.
Breakthrough Energy’s Catalyst program has invested in this first-of-its-kind plant, and I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.
Mars Material
Mars Materials are working on a different way to reuse CO2. Their business models assume that they’ll have access to lots of carbon!! They are developing technology that will turn captured carbon into one of the key components in carbon fiber, an ultra-light, ultra-strong material that is used in everything from clothing to car frames and pickleball fiber rackets!
The Direct Air Capture Hub in Kingsville
Direct Air Capture - seems to be a thing !!
DAC is the process of removing carbon directly from the air. The captured carbon can either be sequestered underground or reused by companies like Infinium and Mars Materials. A recent study found that Texas has the greatest DAC deployment potential in the country and could create as many as 400,000 jobs by 2050.
DAC is the fire extinguisher of clean energy technologies: It’s something you hope you will never need but should have ready if (and when) you do.
In an ideal world, we’d adopt clean energy quickly enough that we wouldn’t need to remove carbon from the air. In reality, that hasn’t happened. We already have decades of legacy emissions that we’ll need to clean up, so we need a significant DAC industry.
The DAC Hub in Kingsville, Texas is the brainchild of Occidental’s 1PointFive, and over the next five years, it will bring an estimated 2,500 jobs to the community.
Grants have been received from the Department of Energy as a result of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and Bill Gates is an early investor in direct air capture technology, and it’s super cool to see it evolve from a concept to real economic opportunity for a local community.
Air Liquide
Hydrogen will play a key role in the energy transition and at CERAWeek, one of the biggest annual energy conferences in the United States - you will see The Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub and Air Liquide’s hydrogen facility in the town of La Porte.
Their plant uses steam methane reforming to generate hydrogen fuel for industry, and it will be retrofitted in the coming years to eliminate its emissions.