Pitch Day Transcript

Halliburton Labs Finalists Pitch Day: AtmosZero’s COO Ashwin Salvi

Thursday, March 14, 2024 — New Orleans, Louisiana. AtmosZero co-founder and COO Ashwin Salvi pitched Boiler 2.0 to the Halliburton Labs judging panel, then fielded questions on differentiation, business model, cold-climate performance, and what’s next after the company’s Series A.

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The Pitch

Moderator
Our first pitch comes to us from AtmosZero, a Fort Collins, Colorado‑based company. AtmosZero is decarbonizing steam production for process heat with its development of modular heat pumps to generate industrial steam up to 200°C, covering 50% of the industrial heat market. The modular design allows customers to eliminate on-site construction costs. Here is COO Ashwin Salvi to tell you more about it.

Ashwin Salvi, COO & Co-Founder, AtmosZero
Hi, I’m Ashwin Salvi. I’m one of the co-founders and the Chief Operating Officer of AtmosZero, where we focus on industrial-scale decarbonization. At AtmosZero, we’re delivering low-cost decarbonized steam for industry. We replace fossil-fueled industrial boilers with a drop-in electrified steam boiler that eliminates on-site carbon emissions.

So why steam? Turns out steam touches every part of our life — from the food and drinks we had at dinner last night to the clothes you’re wearing today. Steam is a ubiquitous energy carrier that cuts across many different industries. In fact, it accounts for 50% of process heat in industry, which results in 8% of global primary energy use, or 2.25 gigatons of emissions per year.

Steam drove the Industrial Revolution over 180 years ago. Since then, we’ve been making steam the exact same way: we burn fuel in a boiler, make heat, and transfer that heat to water to make steam, and then use that steam for a variety of different processes. It’s clear that if we want to achieve our climate goals and the benefits of an industrial society, we need to decarbonize steam. We’re doing so by redefining boiler room efficiency — our boiler is twice as efficient as today’s boilers.

If you consider how we make steam today, we’re generally using combustion-based boilers fueled by natural gas or fuel oil, and in some cases even coal, which has some amount of inefficiency associated with it. On average, today’s boilers are about 80% efficient. These combustion boilers, however, produce CO2 and other emissions on-site.

If you wanted to decarbonize these boilers, the only real solution out there today is electric resistive, or electrode, boilers. Yes, these are more efficient than traditional combustion boilers; however, they’re not efficient enough to offset the increase in fuel cost from the higher cost of electricity compared to fossil fuels. That being said, this technology is actually starting to see increased demand, with an expected CAGR of 15% through 2030, even with its higher operational cost.

What we’re doing instead — instead of incurring efficiency losses, we’re producing efficiency gains. We do this with a product we call Boiler 2.0. Boiler 2.0 is a modular, air-source, steam-generating heat pump that pulls in heat from ambient air and upgrades it, using AtmosZero’s proprietary heat pump, all the way to 200°C saturated steam.

One of the key enabling features of this technology is that no waste heat is required. What that lets us do is solve two main barriers to adoption for decarbonized steam: using our technology, we’re operationally efficient but also capital-light. We don’t require any sort of bespoke engineering per facility. What that lets us do is create a product, not a project.

By creating a standardized product, we can now mass-manufacture our technology and reduce the cost of our system compared to competitive technologies. In addition, because we’re now a standardized product, this device looks the same whether you’re in the U.S. or in the EU. So if you’re a manufacturer with multiple manufacturing locations globally, you can now standardize your decarbonization solution and have the product install, integrate, and run the same way in all of your facilities. This also standardizes the training to operate, service, and maintain the boiler.

Our first customer taking our product to market is New Belgium Brewing, in the first quarter of 2025. We’ll be replacing one-third of their steam demand with one of our units, making process steam in revenue service. After a successful demonstration, we’ll do a full deployment — not just replacing steam at their headquarters in Colorado, but also their three other locations. That’s the beauty of being a standardized product: we can deploy and integrate with a facility in exactly the same way at all the different locations.

We’re a company focused on climate action, and for impactful climate action, we need to scale for global impact. To help with this, we have prototyped and tested our first system, a 650 kilowatt-thermal system — the same one that will be deployed at our first customer site within the next few months. We have established key supply chain partnerships to help with technology development and manufacturing. We’ve also established world-class research through our partnership with Colorado State University.

Since we’re solving a global issue, we’ve also established a subsidiary in the Netherlands to continue commercializing our technology in the EU. What we’re doing next as a company is transferring our technology from proof of concept in our facility into our customers’ hands, while setting up for manufacturing. We’re looking for customers and partners that want to decarbonize industrial steam and execute on climate action.

The three co-founders each individually have over 15 years of industrial experience in the clean tech world. We know what it’s like to be in a startup, as well as what it takes to commercialize technology — and that’s why we’ve been able to scale our technology and get it out the door in less than three years from inception. We’re AtmosZero, and we’re driving the next industrial revolution. Thank you so much for your time.

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