The first time I met Kevin Bush and Caleb Boyd was at their garage, conveniently located in Kevin’s backyard. In that small garage, their curiosity was massive. The two experimented with everything from producing green cement to building a direct air capture unit. Beyond creative scientists, Caleb and Kevin are entrepreneurs. They understood that commercializing a garage breakthrough is its own challenge. And at this intersection of curiosity and commerce, their company, Molten Industries, was founded. Molten Industries is making zero-carbon hydrogen to decarbonize heavy industries.
Hydrogen today is a >$100B global market with up to 100M tons of hydrogen produced each year. In addition to this existing market, hydrogen demand is expected to grow as it plays a key role in decarbonizing many products such as steel, plastics, fuels, and ammonia.
Despite its large market and growing demand, hydrogen production today remains dirty. 95% of hydrogen is produced through steam methane reforming or coal gasification, which produces about 10 tons of CO2 for every ton of H2. This equates to around one billion tons of CO2 emissions yearly.
Many efforts to produce clean hydrogen are still nascent and do not meet the needed scale and deployment timeline to decarbonize heavy industrial sectors by 2050. Taking this urgency into consideration, Molten Industries is developing a simpler and higher-throughput methane pyrolysis technology that utilizes the United States’ existing gas infrastructure, talent, and resources to produce hydrogen (H2) at <$1/kg-H2. Molten Industries’ hydrogen can be carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative, depending on the gas input and the energy source.
USV couldn’t be more excited to back Molten Industries alongside Fifty Years, with participation from J4 Ventures, Moai Capital, and UVC Partners.
Molten Industries has come a long way since its early days as an experiment in Kevin’s garage. It moved into a new 10,000 sq ft facility in Oakland. It is part of the 2022 cohort of Breakthrough Energy Fellows. Yet, the journey is only beginning. So if you want to work with Kevin and Caleb on this massive opportunity and mission, they are hiring here.
