Driven by a vision to advance the future of manufacturing, we started building chemical reactors in a garage at Stanford.
Our simple process, now running at pilot scale in our facility in West Oakland, splits methane or natural gas into hydrogen and graphite using electrical resistive heating, similar to a toaster.
US-Made Graphite for Lithium Ion Batteries
Graphite is the primary anode material in lithium ion batteries in your phone, laptop, and electric vehicle. It is actually the largest material by mass in the battery, comprising > 25% of the battery mineral content.
Existing graphite production for batteries is an energy intensive, environmentally damaging process, and over 95% of graphite anode processing occurs in China.
We are the only team in the world that can use methane to make graphite that drops directly into the existing lithium ion battery anode supply chain, fundamentally changing the cost structure and geographic constraints of the graphite supply chain.
Clean Hydrogen for Heavy Industry
The world uses 100 million tons of hydrogen each year to make fertilizers, chemicals, and fuels. But today's hydrogen production emits 10 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of hydrogen. Molten’s methane pyrolysis technology delivers carbon neutral hydrogen in a continuous process at cost parity with existing hydrogen production.
While clean methods of hydrogen production exist – like water electrolysis – they rely on large amounts of renewable wind and solar energy. Our solution uses five times less energy than water electrolysis and can use existing natural gas networks to continuously produce clean hydrogen where it is consumed, avoiding expensive transport and storage of hydrogen.
Our technology unlocks the potential of hydrogen, enabling world-changing shifts in industries such as steel, heavy transportation, and firm power generation.
Kevin grew up in the Pacific Northwest as an environmentalist and aspiring inventor, and his mission for the last decade has been to decarbonize America’s energy infrastructure. During his Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt, he was constantly tinkering in his spare time and built anaerobic digestion systems, a biodiesel-powered, subsonic ramjet engine that won a NASA student launch competition, and an amphibious vehicle for a DARPA project. Kevin holds a PhD in Materials Science from Stanford University, where he developed record-efficiency perovskite-on-silicon tandems and the world’s first perovskite-on-perovskite tandems. He co-authored 25 papers with over 5000 citations in 3.5 years. Before founding Molten, Kevin was a co-founder of Swift Solar, a startup commercializing high-performance perovskite solar cells with lightweight, flexible form factors. Kevin holds 7 patents, is a Forbes 30 under 30 in Energy, and is a Breakthrough Energy Fellow.
Caleb has global experience including VC investing in climate tech at UVC Partners in Munich, Germany and building the world’s most affordable air purifier in Kolkata, India. He studied Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, during which he took time off to work in product design at Apple and co-founded the UC Berkeley Hyperloop team. Caleb received his PhD from Stanford University as an NSF graduate research fellow, where he split his time between Stanford and the National Renewable Energy Lab and developed some of the world’s highest efficiency perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells. Caleb has co-authored 15 peer-reviewed publications with over 2000 citations, including first author publications in Science and Joule. He is a Forbes 30 under 30 in Energy and is a Breakthrough Energy Fellow.
