The Future of EVs Is Here: By Rethinking Recycling

Hello friends, you are watching a brand new episode of the Green New Perspective Podcast, your go-to place when you want to learn about innovations in tech, and if you want to discover marketing strategies that are fueling growth in this space. In today's episode, we are talking about the challenges related to the extraction of lithium, nickel and cobalt, critical minerals when we're talking about making of batteries for EVs, but that are also related to a number of problems, like high costs, environmental issues and geopolitical tensions. My guest today is Mahesh Konduru.

He is the CEO of Dallas based company, Momentum Technologies, and their tech is recovering critical minerals from waste, offering a sustainable alternative to mining. So we're going to talk about how they went from a small lab to a world class demonstration plant. We're going to explore the balance between innovation and sustainability, and we're going to see how today's waste can power the future.

Enjoy!

Welcome to the Green New Perspective Podcast.

Dunja, thank you so much for having me.

Can you introduce yourself, tell our audience a bit more about your background and how Momentum Technologies came to be?

Yeah, great. Well, my name is Mahesh Konduru. I am the CEO for Momentum Technologies.

My background, I've been in the industry for about 24 years. I've broadly been around the materials science, power, environmental, science, industry segment. In terms of education, I have a PhD in chemical engineering, got an MBA from MIT.

I have had about the last 40 years of my life, I've spent some of that as an investor, the rest as an operator in the sense that I've been helping companies take technologies from concept to commercialization. In some cases, taking companies from a distressed state to profitability as well. And all of this has been around broader material science, decarburization, clean tech agendas.

As you might say, people may call it de-states. That's a little bit of my background. In terms of Momentum and how it came about, so Momentum was founded by a couple of visionary founders, Preston Bryant and Rob Miles.

Preston was looking to have an impact on the critical mineral space, and he ended up partnering with a principal investigator at one of America's premier research laboratories called Oak Ridge National Lab. As he partnered with a principal investigator there called Dr. Ramesh Babay, and they ended up getting into an exclusive licensing agreement for a key technology that Dr. Babay and his team had initiated at Oak Ridge. And so Preston took that and started using that for radar of magnetic recycling.

And the beauty of that was the technology could be also used for lithium-ion battery recycling. And that's how Momentum came about and it was formed about seven years ago, I believe, and raised some institutional capital in December 2021. It's headquartered in the Dallas, Fort Worth area.

We've just finished commissioning a world-class laboratory and a demonstration platform that your team is very proud of. So, we're excited to be in the space. We believe the whole supply chain for critical minerals recovery is of utmost importance for global mobility, global use of handheld devices, storage and power, and everybody from our team is very excited to be part of that.

So the lithium battery industry, as we know, is pivotal for EV adoption. So how do you see it evolving and what's the company's role, Momentum's role in shaping its future?

Yeah, again, great question. So as you know, the whole trend towards electric vehicle adoption has been at the forefront of the news, at least in the last five years. There was a huge, I guess, increase in excitement around the COVID time.

And then you're seeing a little bit more tempered sentiment these days. We're in 2024, at the end of 2024. I think at the base of this, starting foundation for EV adoption, or at least the inventory of vehicles in the world is still quite small.

Any growth in that is going to be great growth, right? So while the expected growth projected or forecasted five years ago was significantly higher, I think even if you get to half of that in the next 10 years, it's still going to be significant for everybody. So from a long-term perspective, myself and Momentum, we are quite bullish on this segment, and we contribute, we believe, a very valuable part in that supply slash value chain.

Whereas you need these critical minerals, lithium, cobalt, nickel, obviously three of the more commonly mentioned ones, there's other in there, graphite, copper, several others. We believe that the supply for those minerals and metals is either captive to certain jurisdictions that are not friendly to the rest of the world. Well, number one, number two, may be using unethical practices.

The third is probably a burden by really cumbersome regulations that take a long time. I'm talking about mining. To go from a commercialization to get a, sorry, to go from pyramid seeking to production is a very long cycle.

So in that realm, what Momentum does is we help recover critical minerals from a lot of waste. So we believe we contribute a significant portion to the supply of these materials and we hope, while we're seeing that there is going to be projected growth in that. So we're quite excited to be a part of that very critical value chain, pun intended.

Well, you mentioned this closed loop contribution to environmental sustainability. But what are the long-term sustainability goals for Momentum? How do you plan to achieve them?

Yeah. Again, sustainability is an interesting word. It can be used in many ways.

For us, like you said, one way to look at sustainability is to use as little as possible of resources that are hard to find or hard to place. Number two is not to harm the environment, which is important. Number three is just long-term viability of a business.

That's how I look at it from three different buckets. In all those categories, we're very proud that Momentum is taking meaningful strides in making a strong impact. I think from the first perspective of being very careful in what we use.

For example, on core technology, we eliminate the use of kerosene, which is not good in terms of what contaminants it produces byproduct. So we have a completely closed system that eliminates harmful use of harmful agents. Number two, again, our permitting is very, very simple.

We don't produce what people call it. You need to get an air source permit and we don't need a major air source permit because it's a closed loop system. It's completely enclosed.

We reuse everything that is produced. We're proud of that. We use less water, less power, less reagents.

Another long thing is assembly perspective. For us, in this space where we offer flexibility and raw materials, because the battery chemistries keep changing, we believe we are gearing ourselves to capture any of these changes on the raw materials side of the product side. And we're also offering flexible business models that will give you a great opportunity to have a sustainable business in the sense that we can have a long term and a durable business.

And one of your recent milestones is the second pilot plant, which is quite significant. So what does that mean for your company's growth? We are in this segment of growth questions.

So I believe...

Yeah, look, for those in the audience who understand how technology adoption works and how technology growth works, it's a very rigorous, disciplined journey that is needed to get to commercialization. And we are very proud that we are well into that journey and getting close to commercialization. We started off in a lab in the garage of one of the co-founders, the classic American entrepreneur Storfi.

We then built a small pilot in the garage and then we moved to a larger facility to have a demo plant, which is what you're referring to. And the scale from the lab to that demo plant that we just commissioned is almost 2,000 times. And in between, we obviously ran another 10, a multiple of 10 lowers in scale to achieve what we call a very rigorous de-risking about technology.

So for us, it's a great milestone, demonstrate that this technology can scale. We understand, we've understood the risks. It still delivers strong unit economics and that's what matters.

And as a team, we really understood and solve a lot of challenges on the way, which give us proprietary knowledge on how to tackle this industry in the particular segment that we're tackling. On top of that, we are working on having a commercial plan in Ohio, which is about 10 times the plan we just commissioned Dallas area. So that Dallas biology is very helpful to learn a lot as we work on a detailed engineering construction of that plan in Ohio.

So all of these have very nicely contributed to us in getting to this scale and then we're excited to grow beyond that where we're talking to multiple clients about multiple plants of that scale globally. So I think we're, it's quite an exciting phase for the company.

You mentioned challenges, so can you tell us more like what challenges did you encounter while building this plant and how did you overcome that?

Yeah, it would be a great question. So something we internally we talk about as a team is that when you're trying to get into a completely new industry, it's very easy to stumble into problems that nobody ever has faced because you're trying to do something completely new. So it's very important that the team is resilient, resourceful and can persevere to be challenges because you're first of a kind in solving something like this.

So for us, the team has been very resourceful in, when they find problems, they together as a team have gotten together and used the right brainstorming mechanisms to really find a resourceful solution themselves when they can, and if not, not shy to approach experts in the market, maybe in adjacent markets that have a similar problem to solve that. So that's the way typically you solve science and engineering problems. So I mean, for us, there have been several in this space, which is generally, some of this is chemistry driven, some of this is mechanical engineering driven, some of this is chemical engineering driven.

And I can tell you that our team has faced challenges in each of those functions that I mentioned, and we have successfully solved them. And it has required multifunctional expertise from different team members to solve that, in which it has been very great to see. You know, in fact, you know, this week our team is facing a new issue, which is, for example, we get raw material from, you know, one of the big players in the space, and we have found that the raw material comes in what people call super sacks, and we found that not every super sack has the same quality of material.

So the challenge then is we've designed an intake equipment for handling raw material in a particular shape, and then the client was supposed to send that in a certain quality, but it didn't meet that quality requirement. So instead of our team complaining to the client saying, hey, you didn't send the right one, we found a resourceful way to take that and kind of change the process a little bit to actually get the first couple of campaigns done by, you know, kind of going away from a traditional news of what the equipment is designed for and finding their own way to kind of take this material, get it into a form that you can actually transport it into the vessel and then do the rest of the process. So it's been great to see the team actually doing that.

And you mentioned that technology is new. So how have you approached educating the market about your uniqueness? And how is your technology basically better or maybe not better, but different?

And how it can benefit your potential clients and partners?

Yeah. Great question. There's a multi-prong way to answer that.

I mean, let me start with a very high level. Typically in this industry, which is adjacent to the mining industry, especially you're recovering critical minerals, that most of the time used to come from under the ground. Everybody points to low cost.

If you want solution, that's low cost. Technology is great, but what does it do for me in the end, right? So I think what's been beautiful about technology is that because of the elegance of it where it combines five steps into one step, five conventional steps into one new step it automatically gives you look at low cost.

So for us, when you tell clients, you lead by saying it's a low cost, elegant new technology solution, it falls in the right years. So not all the time people want to say it's a new technology, then they're like, oh, does it mean it's going to cost them? In this case, the elegance of the technology lets us offer a solution that's very low cost.

So we solve that problem, number one. Number two, there is something in the industry about chemistry, flexibility of batteries. Battery chemistry is taking and improving, which also drives the cost down and also increases the life cycle of a battery.

Our technology can tackle any of these tasks, which is fantastic for people, resolving that problem for people. On the other side, products, because people use a certain purity, a certain state of a chemical to make batteries, and there's different people called OEMs, Original Equipment Manufacturers that have different specifications or specs, as they say it. Instead of reinventing the wheel, telling them this is what we make, we ask them what you need, and we can make that because our process offers a flexibility of a product.

So that's the third problem solved. Another problem we solved is, a lot of these collectors of this used material, is it whether it's from batteries that are producing these materials or end-of-life batteries, a captive material there, and for them to get it to a client to buy it, they have to transport it across borders, and that material is hazardous, so you sometimes need to get permits that are not easy to get, it costs you a lot of money. So we offer a solution where we come to you, we put a plan right next to you, so you can eliminate the logistics complexity.

When you go to clients and tell them where you ask them what the headaches are and solve them, and that's an easy audience in terms of receiving new technology in a manner that helps you adopt it faster.

It is a CEO with an engineering background. How involved are you in marketing and let's say storytelling of your company's mission and technology?

Yeah, again, great question. I think, look, from a storytelling perspective, it's a great story that our founders have, right? I mean, Preston started very young in his career.

It's a great American entrepreneurial story, and he's a great storyteller. His personal story is a good one. And our other co-founder, Rob, as a CTO, has had seven startups before, is successful.

So that brings a certain level of legitimacy to it. And when I come in, obviously having an advanced degree in engineering helps. I've also been a CEO before.

I was an investor before. I did product development before. So, I mean, all of that, I've been fortunate to pull that into a good story on putting investors in client and ease, to let them know that myself and the team together are good stewards of capital, good stewards of your product and raw material.

And we know what we're doing, right? Because of the best breadth of experience that we have. So, I mean, that kind of markets itself in a way for a better word.

And you mentioned you started as a pilot project. So as you turn the transition from pilot project to full-scale commercialization, how does your marketing strategy evolve?

Yeah, good marketing question. Yeah, the way I look at it is the marketing strategy is different for different products you offer. I mean, it goes without saying.

By my previous CEO role, we were selling what people call widgets and systems. So there's a marketing philosophy and game plan for selling widgets and systems, right? Because the check size are different, the clients are different, the value populations they're looking for are different.

So you've got to adapt to that. In this case, we are selling a technology platform. We're essentially selling a plant and design to clients, right?

So I think we are getting a little bit early in our marketing maturity, but I think the four pillars that I've mentioned to you is we ask, find what problems they face, and one by one we list how we're solving them. That's a very easy way to get people to understand what we are and how we solve their problems. So innovate markets itself to do that.

And again, to be honest, yeah, I found this to be a little bit different than before and then how to get better brand recognition, better adoption, right? So I think in an industry where you're marketing technology, it's first thing I've always found is highlighting the technical depth of your team is very important all the way from the leader of the technical team to the breadth function of your team and what we've achieved, how the technical knowledge that we have taken not only put up the system, but put out publications, intellectual property, all of that brings scalability in an industry where people are looking for technology innovation to drive adoption. So, I've found a key marketing aspect that you need to have in technology companies is highlighting the technical capabilities of your team, not only internally, but how third parties have already validated that.

So, that's where we do that. I think we've got a very good PR marketing lead, Amanda Gilbert, and her team has done a fantastic job in really multi-path thing, talking to multiple stakeholders. In this segment that we're in, which is a nascent industry, there are a lot of stakeholders.

There's regulators, there's government officials, there's industry partners, there's investors, and there's different global players that have a stake in all of this. So, we really have been methodical in having outreach and maintaining communication with all these stakeholders and highlighting to them how we are addressing these issues. They're important to their own constituents, where they are, and then solving their problem.

So, it's been, I could tell, you know, we've tried SEO websites, you know, I mean, obviously this podcast is a good marketing tool. And I think Amanda has done a fantastic job in a multi-channel marketing approach.

You mentioned regulations a bit.

Yeah.

So, how do you feel that recent global policy shifts have impacted the growth in the lithium battery or recycling industry?

Yeah, I think, I'm not sure you're referring to the recent election in America or globally, how things are going. But I think, broadly speaking, what I would say is, this is a nascent industry that's very important to a lot of what human beings do around the world. Critical minerals go into everything you touch every day, whether it's your handheld phone, your laptop, the vehicle that you take, whether it's your personal vehicle or a public vehicle.

And all of these are going to get better, faster, which means that demand is going to go up, which means you need more of these critical minerals. So the way we talk about this, the way I personally talk about this is critical mineral security is a nonpartisan issue globally. So I think it's our job to educate people that come in to understand that.

And we do our best in doing that. And we've got good investors that do their part as well in educating people as needed. But I have to be honest, a lot of the policy makers around the world have really gotten to understand the importance of chemical minerals.

And we believe that's going to be positive going forward the next 4 years, 10 years, 20, 40 years.

And what's next for Momentum Technologies? You've mentioned plants. Is there anything else on the horizon?

Yeah, great. I mean, as I mentioned to you, we have a platform technology which can go into multiple market segments, right? So for us, let me talk in the near term, midterm and long term.

In the near term, our heads are down, trying to get the commercial plant in Ohio up and running. That's double the profit generating and the sooner you generate, the sooner you short the market, that this is actually makes money, the better for everybody. So we would head down.

Most of our bandwidth is spent on that. Again, in the near term, we're talking to multiple people who want to build plants around the world. So, I mean, there's people in Europe, in the US, Korea, Australia, Asia that want to build these plants around the world.

So for us, in the medium term, we want to build about four plants in the next three years. So we'll head down, focus on top-end clients and working with them to see how we can bring that to their facilities. In the longer term, we want to tackle the rail road, magnet recycling, mining, tailings, and hard metal waste market segments as well.

So that's something that is on our plate as well. However, we need to augment our team appropriately to get there and we have a plan to get there in the next few years.

You mentioned a couple of times here that you have worked with many companies in the past and you know how difficult scaling can be. So what advice would you give to other climate tech entrepreneurs working to scale their innovations in this competitive industry?

Yeah, look, I mean, my personal experience has been across multiple market segments, multiple types of products. And again, I'll caveat what I see with this, that what works for the companies that I was at may not work for people in the audience. However, it's good to share your personal experience and say, hey, this is what worked for us.

So I think in my previous CEO role, we took a product, a material science product from the lab of a professor to a big client in the Middle East that took a pretty methodical journey. And as I mentioned earlier, you can plan as much as you want about methodical de-risking. So I think it's good to be disciplined about scaling and understanding risk at each scale.

Don't skip those steps. I mean, if you can, don't skip those steps. Sometimes you're under pressure to skip those steps, but if you can afford not to skip it, don't skip them.

You learn a lot. Your team learns a lot. Market learns a lot.

And so you're going from lab to a pilot to maybe a larger pilot to commercial. Do your best to understand the risks there. Have the right multifunctional team capability on your team.

Make sure the team is humble to know that, hey, not one person can understand all the problems. It's good to hear ideas from people with different experiences. The third thing I would say is that move fast.

Everybody says that and it's something that I've learned. And this is my second CEO role, which is sometimes people who have experienced at larger corporations have a methodical way of doing things. I think you need to combine that with speed from an entrepreneurial spirit, a delicate balance.

There's no one-size-fits-all, but as a CEO, if you're the CEO listening, you got to understand what mindset is needed for what problem you're solving that week, that month, that year. You got to really keep your eyes open and really step back and say, hey, what kind of mindset do I need to solve this problem? And not one-size-fits-all sometimes, right?

So that's something that I've learned as well. And again, what I tell people beyond all the people and de-risking issues is the number one role of a CEO that was taught well to me in my MBA class was to make sure you have enough money to pay, right? So I think the CEO's job is to make sure you raise capital, make one of the most important jobs, and keep sure that you have enough to keep going.

So I would say keep your investors, keep your partners at the forefront all the time because that's very helpful. I think the probably most important thing is getting client validation very early in the process is very important. I think so for Momentum, we're fortunate to have credibility from a very big third party from a raw material side and a very big reputed third party for an off-tick agreement sites that immediately communicates to other clients that credible parties are taking a chance on you, which is very important.

I think something that has been said in the tech industry sometimes applies to the material science industry as well, which is nothing like client validation. Don't sit in your garage lab demo plant for too long tinkering. Start something, show it to a client and see what they want.

Ask the client what their problem is instead of you telling them, here's a solution without understanding the problem. So that's another thing that needs to be at the top of the mind for everybody.

Thank you Regis, this is an excellent answer. Hopefully, our viewers, watchers, listeners are going to be inspired. And for people who want to know, to find out more about Momentum, get in touch with you to DM you or just want to know more about your industry.

Where can they do that?

Yeah, look, go to our website, momentum.technologies.com. I think my email is mahesh.momentum.technology, real feature, we shout anytime. And we're happy to work with you, whatever you're looking for.

And I'm happy to share my experiences and our teams that help us as well.

Well, thank you once again for being our guest here on the Green New Perspective Podcast. And I really wish you all the best with that plant opening and keep doing the great work you do.

Thank you very much, Dunja. Have a great rest of your day. And I appreciate you being on there.

And look forward to learning more about what you guys are doing.

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