On the chemistry side: In step 1, you say using adsorbents, so i'm guessing some combo of iron oxide to desiccant to activated carbon for the siloxanes, and then maybe ZnO (based on your likely catalyst chemistry). At typical anaerobic biogas H2S concentrations, that's quite a bit of OPEX for media I imagine, and the risk of some breakthrough poisoning your reaction catalyst. Are you only working with partners that have desulfurization in place already? And how much attention do these skids need day to day, are you expecting full-time operator presence? Remote monitoring? How are you catching breakthrough before it takes out a catalyst charge?
I'm guessing bi-reforming is partly how you tune your way out of the carbon deposition problem, but in my experience real biogas composition drifts around depending on what's going into the digester, so i'm curious how much margin you actually have on the H2O/CO2/CH4 ratio before you're back in the coking regime. Are you trimming steam in real-time based on gas composition or running fixed excess (further trading economics)? Was the bench-scale test run on a simulated dynamic biogas stream? Was there much activity decline over the run?
On the economics side: DME into cosmetics seems like a great high-margin entry point. As you point out, most methanol is produced from large centralized plants, but they have real fixed-cost advantage that a modular approach structurally doesn't (along with storage and distribution headaches from many smaller production sites). Are you assuming some customers will pay a premium for the resilience of a distributed network? How much of the methanol case is cost reduction at your expected scale versus 45Z-type credits? And you probably can't share, but I'm curious the most you can pay a producer for their biogas and still pencil relative to RNG buyers who may be bidding for the same stream?
I'm curious how hard the go to market in hard tech like this is? What is the long term economic model in terms of what you think the margin can be and what the incentives for plants to adopt this technology?
In the long term, we will look to be build, own and operate these units. Based on chemical engineering simulations and techno-economic modelling, we think we can be price competitive with fossil-derived DME and be the cheapest green methanol on the market with pretty strong margins for the chemical industry (where margins usually hover around 10%).
Let me know if you have more questions!
Our process is also more efficient with CO2 so we actually like the CO2 being present.
Initially we will likely have an operator on-site keeping an eye on the first few units. But as we scale the idea is for these units to be automated. No labor needed to run it. We can keep tabs on all of the units from a centralized location and if there are any process hiccups it shuts down automatically. We could then send a technician (who oversees multiple sites in the area)_come out to the site and restart the unit.
Hope that answers your questions!
Natural gas is abundant in some areas and is wasted. If you can prove that you can build cost-efficient small-scale synthesis units, then moving to biogas should later be a no-brainer.
I'm also pretty sure that you need to pre-treat the gas to remove stuff like sulfur or ammonia from it. And you can get that for "free" in places that distill the LPG from the well gas.
From a "cynical investor" point of view, it looks like you're knee-capping yourself by going for a vastly smaller market. To me this is a huge red flag, usually pointing to companies that either do green-washing, or already plan to pivot once they get the initial investment.