Seattle rocket scientists turn attention to mining, nearing completion of zero-emission engine for huge, industrial dump truck

A Seattle mechanical engineering company is building one of the world’s first zero-emission engines for a giant dump truck in a Sodo warehouse full of Star Wars memorabilia and machines named after Saturday Night Live characters.

The company, called First Mode, is run by a former NASA rocket scientist. It will shortly ship the 45,000-pound engine to a South African platinum mine, where the engine will be installed in a bungalow-size dump truck.

“Success for us and our customers is to show everyone that you can bring this to an active operation … and it works,” said Chris Voorhees, CEO of First Mode.

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Voorhees and his team build and test a variety of machines for customers, including space equipment and clean energy technology for mines. Recently, the company even attempted a zero-emission racing car to compete in the Baja 1000, a grueling Mexican off-road race roughly 850 miles in length.

In 2019, First Mode signed a deal with Anglo American, a British mining giant valued at $ 30 billion. The $ 13.5 million contract called for First Mode to build a carbon-free engine for a haul truck that would move nearly 300 tons of rock. Trucks usually run on dirty diesel fuel. First Mode’s engine, more aptly referred to as the power plant, is eight feet tall and five feet long, uses hydrogen gas and lithium-ion batteries.

By replacing mining’s most carbon-intensive machine with clean energy, the two companies aim to “move their entire industry in this direction,” said Voorhees.

They also hope to open doors to other industrial processes to use hydrogen battery technology for energy needs of this magnitude. If successful, experts see this project putting pressure on other companies in the mining supply chain to make their own operations more sustainable.

“A steaming pile of problems”

Diesel fuel is one of the oldest vices in mining. Its cost efficiency and high energy per gallon make it the easiest way to power industrial operations.

The problem, unsurprisingly, is carbon dioxide. Mining causes up to 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, of which 75% is carbon dioxide.

First Mode says their engine doesn’t do any of this.

The company’s prototype uses compressed hydrogen gas instead of diesel. The engine separates electrons from hydrogen atoms and the flow of electrons creates a current that charges batteries and stores energy. The hydrogen atoms – which become individual protons without their electrons – combine with oxygen to form water, which is disposed of as waste.

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The engine is simulated in Seattle, but first tested with a real truck in Mogalakwena, the South African mine.

Hydrogen fuel cells have been around for decades. They were tested on cars, trucks, and airplanes. According to reports, the hydrogen equipment market could hit $ 200 billion annually by 2050.

But sparse charging stations and high costs have prevented hydrogen technology from scaling up. And the challenge of First Mode – powering mining vehicles – is “orders of magnitude” greater than what has been done before, Voorhees said. While powering passenger cars is a kilowatt problem, mines require megawatts (or thousands of kilowatts).

Of all the machines in a mine, dump trucks are the most energy-intensive. Large trucks account for more than 70% of diesel consumption at Anglo American’s mining sites, according to Julian Soles, the company’s director of technology and sustainability.

Voorhees found that these trucks operate 24 hours a day in dusty, hot off-road conditions. “It’s a steamy pile of problems.”

“I am impressed that [Anglo American is] the bull by the horns, ”said Neal Sullivan, associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines.

Australia-based Fortescue Metals Group announced in July that it had completed building its own zero-emission engine and started testing with dump trucks. While only a few mining companies have explicitly started building hydrogen battery engines, many have set themselves ambitious sustainability goals. Anglo American aims to be climate neutral by 2040. Glencore and BHP, two other major mining companies, say they will achieve it by 2050.

Metals mining released nearly 1.5 billion pounds of toxins into the air in 2019, making it the industry with the highest levels of toxin releasing, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Although this was less than in previous years, it was still almost three times as high as the next higher sector, the chemical company.

In addition to pollution and carbon emissions, mining has many negative effects on the environment, including water pollution, destruction of wildlife habitats, and exposure to radioactive elements from breaking rocks.

The success of this project would “seriously affect” mining emissions and work towards its goals, Sullivan said.

Where NASA meets googly eyes

The founders of First Mode did not initially look for underground rocks. On the contrary, they started looking for rocks in space.

Voorhees spent 17 years at NASA exploring Mars. He later ran Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company in Redmond. When it worked, Voorhees and 10 colleagues turned their tools to natural resources.

Just like in space, mining companies have no control over their surroundings, especially given mounting sociopolitical, economic and climatic concerns, Voorhees said. But building machines under resource constraints was something the team knew well.

In 2018, First Mode was born (the company states on its website that it was March 14th, or “Pi Day”). The company never looked for outside investors. Last year the team doubled its workforce to almost 140 and has outgrown its Sodo facility so quickly that it has makeshift offices outside in parking lot tags.

As with any other build, there was pressure. “It’s hard enough to build a working prototype to use in the field,” said Voorhees. “We built the organization at the same time.” There was no deadline, but the expectation was “as soon as possible”.

Time pressures meant that First Mode could only use parts that were already on the market and couldn’t build large components from scratch. Local stores helped with Boeing suppliers nearby. But the company ordered fuel cells from Canada, batteries from Great Britain, electronics from Switzerland and hydrogen from Germany.

Nevertheless, First Mode keeps the mood light. The office workers are greeted by a stormtrooper and a coffee table with Han Solo frozen in carbonite. A storage crane has two baseball-sized googly eyes. Pendants are adorned with decorative lights. The hydrogen battery motor is nicknamed “Tonka”, and two cabinet-sized electrical converters are called Hans and Franz, based on a 1987 “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

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“We’re working on pretty ridiculous things,” said Voorhees. The company’s roots in space are still very much alive having just shipped hardware to California to test and install on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft to aid in communicating with Earth using lasers. “We take it seriously, we just don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

Put pressure on the supply chain

Hydrogen fuel cells have a well-known limitation: The production of hydrogen itself requires a lot of energy, a large part of which generates greenhouse gases.

Anglo American is countering this by building its own hydrogen production plant on site in Mogalakwena with renewable energy sources. Mining publications have reported that they will rely largely on solar energy.

Also noteworthy is the decision to test this technology in Mogalakwena. It is one of the largest platinum mines in the world, and platinum is a key material for making fuel cells.

The project represents a broader shift in mining. Instead of decarbonising individual machines, companies are now wondering how to eliminate emissions at every step of their supply chain.

If successful, Anglo American will put pressure on truck manufacturers like Komatsu and Caterpillar to accelerate the development of zero-emission vehicles, said Cornelius Pieper, who heads the Boston Consulting Group’s Center for Climate & Sustainability.

Pieper added that truck manufacturers first need assurances from mining companies that there is demand for such vehicles before investing heavily in making the technology available. “That is the pressure that … is becoming more and more noticeable for companies along the value chain.”

According to Nikkei Asia, Komatsu will start developing its own hydrogen trucks later this year, which should be ready by 2030.

Still, mining companies hesitate to innovate, said Charlotte Gibson, assistant professor of mining at Queen’s University near Toronto. New technologies like this have to be tested in mines that are already in operation around the clock, which could disrupt production, which is already tied to raw material prices.

“Everyone is in a race to be the second to use a piece of technology,” she said.

Voorhees said Tonka won’t leave Seattle until he’s confident it’s ready to go. “A chapter of the process is complete when it gets on either an airplane or a boat,” he said. “We have the next chapter, bringing the system together with the vehicle. And then we have another chapter that is about getting the fleet up and running on site. “

“That’s the plan for the next few years,” he said, “one mine at a time.”