Transcript placed here before the article vaporizes
New electric industrial heat technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
TMO: Now to get started, how is your technology different from other heating and
drying technologies that are currently on the market?
Clark: Our technology is an electrification of industrial process heat technology and
so what we are trying to do is reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the electrification
of heating processes that are typically fired by fossil fuels currently, either natural
gas or oil and we’re doing that in a way that really addresses the industry’s need for
that electrification or decarbonization to be as efficient as possible so that costs
don’t increase while you’re trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So we’ve done
that in a way where we’re using electromagnetic energy to create the industrial process
heat and what that does is it uses the properties of the material you’re trying to heat,
whether it’s mining ore or in the case of oil and gas, in situ oil sands or heavy oil,
using the properties of these materials themselves to actually assist in that process
of heating and thereby driving the efficiency way up and getting those greenhouse gas
emissions without increasing costs.
TMO: Have you faced any obstacles with commercialization? And if so, have you overcome it?
Clark: I think the main obstacles that we’ve overcome is first getting industries such
as oil and gas, mining and agriculture to look at the technology and say, yeah, I can
believe these efficiency numbers so that this is a viable economic path for us to decarbonize.
So really showing the physics behind how our technology can be so efficient and getting
them to trial the project. We have two pilots going on currently, one in oil and gas and
one in potash mining and both of them required us to show that economic message both in
field trials and in numerical simulations and really getting by into the economic message,
not just the decarbonization emissions reduction message.
The second obstacle is always raising enough capital to get pilots done, to get the
technology demonstrated. We’ve been able to do that fairly successfully by getting
non-dilutive capital, either through provincial and federal government, we’ve got great
partners there but also through industry in both of our verticals, we’ve been able to get
very good financial support from industry in a non-dilutive way and then our shareholders
and public markets have stepped up to supply the balance.
TMO: Do you have any new applications that you’re exploring with your technology?
Clark: We started out as a technology that was primarily focused on the heavy oil and
bitumen market here in Alberta and Saskatchewan and we’ve recently branched out into
the mining space where we’re looking at drying mineral oars, particularly potash but
in the future where we’ve got interest from other mining applications such as drying
other critical mineral ores such as copper and lithium. As well as in the production
of copper heating heap leaches and trying to create a situation where copper is refined quicker.
TMO: Finally, do you have a message that you would like to share with potential investors?
Clark: Acceleware I believe is a great investment currently because when you think
about the scale of the issue of industrial process heat, think about 15% of global
GHG emissions. When you think about that as a market size, it’s a trillion dollar market.
We’ve got a great technology that addresses a number of applications in this space and
I think it goes beyond oil and gas and mining goes into agriculture, pharmaceuticals,
steelmaking, pulp and paper, a variety of applications. We think it is great future for
Acceleware and a great investment currently.