June 11th, 2024 — In order to achieve global net zero goals, industrial companies must deploy both existing and emerging decarbonization technologies, but without robust techno-economic analysis (TEA) and lifecycle analysis (LCA) tools, it is virtually impossible to fully understand the economic and environmental implications of any decarbonization decisions. The speed and accuracy of today’s TEA and LCA tools are increasingly at odds with the pace of change required to decarbonize heavy industry, and the opportunity for software to accelerate industrial decarbonization is immense. Based on our analysis, the industrial carbon management software sector is expected to exceed $9B by 2030.
Market conditions have shifted towards industrial decarbonization: technologies including electric vehicles, renewables, and green hydrogen are being profitably deployed, legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides generous incentives for these technologies, and governments are starting to require companies to disclose their emissions. While industrial companies including chemical manufacturers, oil and gas majors, and steel producers are interested in accessing incentives while reducing public and regulatory scrutiny of their emissions, today's solutions for planning these decarbonization strategies are bespoke and do not scale.
Sesame Sustainability spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and its platform offers economic, environmental, and systems analysis capabilities based on fundamental physics and chemistry for both established and emerging decarbonization pathways, including hydrogen technologies. Its analyses are highly credible, use standardized methodologies across decarbonization pathways, and enable customers to conduct iterative scenario analysis delivered through an intuitive UI/UX that is accessible to stakeholders at all levels of an organization.
Heavy industry needs to decarbonize, and there is technology and finance available to do so
Heavy industry is responsible for 34% of total global emissions, which is greater than any other sector.
The IRA provides incentives for many of the technologies that will enable industrial decarbonization, including hydrogen, renewable energy generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). Initially, the Congressional Budget Office projected total IRA spending to reach roughly $400M; however, many of the incentives are uncapped and private estimates now project total spending to reach upwards of $1.2 trillion.
Industrial companies want to access incentives and future-proof their businesses, but they need to understand the costs and benefits before making decisions to pursue certain technologies.
Understanding the economic and environmental implications of decarbonization pathways is difficult
Industrial companies face several pain points, including the significant time and expense required to do TEA and LCAs under the status quo, an inability to easily iterate and analyze different scenarios, and difficulties maintaining analyses over time.
Current approaches also lack standardization and require the time-consuming interrogation of underlying methodologies and assumptions, which makes them less scalable across large portfolios where billions of dollars will be invested.
Sesame Sustainability enables customers to understand the economic and environmental implications of decarbonization pathways at scale
Sesame Sustainability is entering the market with its Hydrogen Toolbox product, a modeling suite for hydrogen developers to compare how different technologies will affect project carbon intensity and cost, and is already working with global energy companies like JERA Americas.
The Explorer product will launch shortly after, which enables customers to compare decarbonization pathways across hydrogen, CCUS, vehicle fleets, renewables, energy storage, power systems, steel, cement, chemicals, and electrification (as well as interdependencies between these pathways).
Lastly, Sesame Sustainability plans to launch an Enterprise Suite that will integrate with customer data and enable users to automatically access their own real-time operational data, make decisions at the plant level, and operate assets under the same parameters that they were modeled with, while ensuring compliance with relevant incentives and regulations.
Sesame Sustainability will offer a tiered SaaS model for its Hydrogen, Explorer, and Enterprise products.
Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures is proud to co-lead Sesame Sustainability’s $2.4M seed round with Flybridge Capital Partners. We look forward to working with CEO Emre Gençer, Head of Engineering Jim Owens, Head of Product Paul Sizaire, and the entire Sesame Sustainability team to decarbonize heavy industry.
Special thanks to Gabriel VanLoozen, Marie Thompson, and Jessica Makolin.
To read more about our work at Powerhouse and Powerhouse Ventures, visit our Insights page.