Monolith claims it is the “only producer of cost effective commercially viable clean hydrogen today” as it has developed a proprietary technology for methane pyrolysis using 100% renewable electricity, producing clean hydrogen and carbon black. We like this turquoise hydrogen theme and its potentially strong economics.
The company is based in Lincoln, Nebraska and has a $100M demonstration facility at Hallam, Nebraska, constructed in 2016-18, following a pilot was build in California in 2013-15. The next step is a $1bn expansion of its Olive Creek facility and a tender of 2M MWh pa of renewable electricity (or equivalent RECs) to energize the plant.
Overall this was not one of our most successful patent screens, as we found many of the patents to be disjunctive, thus it was hard to de-risk the technology. Some specific question marks are noted in the data-file.