Imagine a future where your discarded soda can doesn’t just get recycled, but becomes the very fuel that powers heavy industry. It sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi novel, doesn’t it? Yet, in a bustling lab in Boston, a startup named Found Energy is doing just that, turning the humble aluminum can into a potent, zero-carbon energy source. They’re not just experimenting; they’re about to launch the largest real-world test of aluminum as a fuel, a bold move that could redefine industrial power.
I’m talking about a reaction so energetic that a crushed aluminum pellet, treated with a secret sauce, boils room-temperature water instantly, releasing a cloud of steam and hydrogen. Peter Godart, the founder and CEO of Found Energy, demonstrates this with an almost casual flick of a water squirter into a beaker. “I can just keep this reaction going by adding more water,” he says, as if he’s merely brewing a cup of tea, not unlocking a massive energy potential that has eluded scientists for decades.
The Unseen Power of Everyday Aluminum
Aluminum has long been a tantalizing prospect for energy engineers. Once refined from ore, it holds an incredible amount of energy – more than twice as much as diesel fuel by volume, and almost eight times that of hydrogen gas. When it reacts with oxygen, in either water or air, it releases significant heat and hydrogen, both of which can be harnessed for power without producing carbon emissions. The dream has always been clear: tap into this clean, abundant energy.
But here’s the rub, and it’s why your soda can doesn’t spontaneously combust in your hand: as soon as aluminum begins to react, an oxidized layer forms on its surface. This layer acts like a shield, preventing the rest of the metal from reacting further. It’s like a fire that extinguishes itself with its own ash. This frustrating phenomenon, known as passivation, has led many brilliant minds to pursue, and then abandon, the idea of aluminum as a practical fuel. “People have tried it and abandoned this idea many, many times,” Godart admits, acknowledging the long history of skepticism.
Indeed, some metallurgists, like Geoff Scamans from Brunel University of London, remain unconvinced. Having worked on aluminum-powered vehicles in the 1980s, he dismisses the idea as a “fool’s errand,” questioning its efficiency given the energy required to smelt aluminum initially. “A crazy idea is always a crazy idea,” he contends.
Yet, Peter Godart, a former NASA scientist who once conceptualized self-consuming aluminum robots for Jupiter’s moon Europa, believes he’s found the missing piece. When Congress cut funding for his lunar rover project, Godart shifted his focus to Earth’s pressing climate challenges. He realized the principles he explored for space could be even more impactful here. “I was sort of having this little mini crisis where I was like, I need to do something about climate change, about Earth problems,” he recalls. And so, Found Energy was born.
Cracking the Code: Found Energy’s Catalytic Breakthrough
Godart’s breakthrough didn’t come from brute force, but from a fundamental shift in perspective. Instead of trying to accelerate the aluminum-water reaction on a catalyst’s surface, his team “flipped it around.” They developed a proprietary “low-melting-point liquid metal that’s not mercury” that dissolves directly into the aluminum itself. While the exact composition is under wraps, Godart’s dissertation work at MIT focused on a gallium and indium mixture, suggesting a similar principle is at play.
This liquid metal catalyst is truly ingenious. It “permeates the microstructure” of the aluminum, transforming it. As the treated aluminum then reacts with water, the catalyst forces the metal to “froth and split open.” Imagine a tiny, internal explosion constantly exposing fresh, unreacted aluminum to the water, bypassing that pesky passivation layer entirely. This continuous exposure is the key to a sustained, vigorous reaction that generates heat and hydrogen at an unprecedented rate. “One of the impediments to this technology taking off is that [the aluminum-water reaction] was just too sluggish,” Godart explains. “But you can see here we’re making steam. We just made a boiler.”
During a visit to their buzzing Charlestown lab, which now sprawls across two floors thanks to a $12 million seed round, Godart demonstrated this firsthand. With tongs, he carefully placed a treated aluminum pellet into a beaker. The moment water was added, the metal erupted in a flurry of hydrogen bubbles, the water instantly boiling and steaming away, leaving a frothing gray mass of aluminum hydroxide behind. It was a tangible, visually striking proof of concept that left little doubt about the reaction’s newfound vigor.
From Lab Bench to Industrial Scale: The Grand Experiment Begins
Found Energy hasn’t just mastered the benchtop reaction; they’ve spent the last year scaling it up dramatically. After refining their catalyst and reaction conditions in a modest 10-kilowatt reactor, they embarked on designing an engine ten times larger – big enough to deliver meaningful power to industrial processes. In January, the plans were finalized, and by July, their new 100-kilowatt engine was switched on for testing.
This larger engine, resembling a water boiler laid on its side, is a complex array of pipes, wires, and monitoring equipment. On one end, a piston precisely delivers aluminum fuel pellets, while water is injected. On the other, outflow pipes collect the reaction products: hot steam, hydrogen gas, aluminum hydroxide, and crucially, the recovered catalyst. Godart emphasizes that none of the catalyst is lost, meaning it can be reused indefinitely, a critical factor for economic viability.
By September, they hit their target of 100 kilowatts, roughly equivalent to the power output of a small pickup truck’s diesel engine. But this is just the beginning. Early next year, Found Energy will install this 100-kilowatt engine at a tool manufacturing facility in the southeastern US. What makes this pilot even more compelling is its fuel source: the very aluminum waste produced by the plant itself. This closed-loop approach, where waste becomes fuel for the facility that generated it, offers a glimpse into a truly circular economy.
The potential applications extend far beyond simply heating a factory. The high heat and hydrogen generated by the reactor are incredibly versatile. The hot steam could drive turbines to produce electricity, or the hydrogen could feed fuel cells for electric power. By burning the hydrogen within the steam, the system can generate superheated steam as hot as 1,300 °C, ideal for efficient electricity generation or chemical refining. Burn the hydrogen alone, and you reach temperatures of 2,400 °C – hot enough to make steel. This flexibility makes aluminum fuel a potential game-changer for hard-to-decarbonize industrial sectors like cement production and metal refining, which are notoriously difficult to electrify directly.
Fueling the Future: Scrap, Storage, and Sustainability
While the initial pilot targets the tool manufacturing facility, Found Energy’s broader vision is to integrate with the aluminum recycling industry itself. “Aluminum recyclers are coming to us, asking us to take their aluminum waste that’s difficult to recycle and then turn that into clean heat that they can use to re-melt other aluminum,” Godart reveals. He calls this unrecyclable aluminum a “dirty secret” of an industry striving for full circularity. Estimates suggest that globally, millions of metric tons of collected aluminum scrap go unrecycled each year, not to mention the vast quantities that aren’t collected at all. Recovering even a fraction of this could provide a significant initial fuel source.
However, the long-term vision isn’t limited by existing scrap. Found Energy aims for a “closed loop” system where the aluminum hydroxide byproduct is “recharged” back into aluminum metal using clean electricity, and then reacted again. This process would transform aluminum into an energy storage medium, much like a giant rechargeable battery. According to their estimates, this approach could theoretically supply all global industrial heat demand by continuously recycling a total of around 300 million metric tons of aluminum – about 4% of Earth’s abundant aluminum reserves.
Of course, recharging that much aluminum hydroxide would demand an enormous amount of clean electricity. Jeffrey Rissman, from the think tank Energy Innovation, rightly points out that in such a scenario, aluminum fuel functions more as an energy storage technology than a primary energy provider. This shifts the challenge to securing vast amounts of low-cost, clean power – a task that will become increasingly competitive as demand surges from everything from AI data centers to heat pumps. Yet, as Rissman concedes, if the fuel can be recharged cost-effectively with clean electricity, it still makes immense sense as a critical tool for industrial decarbonization.
Despite the inherent challenges and the critical eye of skeptics, Godart remains remarkably confident. He even believes their current 100-kilowatt engine has untapped potential. “We actually believe this can probably do half a megawatt,” he says. “We haven’t fully throttled it.” This ambition underscores the pioneering spirit at Found Energy, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
A Sustainable Future, One Can at a Time
Found Energy’s journey is a compelling narrative of scientific persistence, bold innovation, and a pragmatic approach to one of humanity’s greatest challenges: decarbonizing heavy industry. By unlocking the latent energy in aluminum, they’re not just building a new engine; they’re crafting a new kind of fuel, one that could leverage existing waste streams and, ultimately, become a cornerstone of a truly circular energy economy. The upcoming pilot project isn’t just a test of a technology; it’s a real-world audition for a future where clean, abundant energy might just be hiding in plain sight, waiting to be rediscovered, one crushed soda can at a time.
