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PJM is projecting nearly 50% demand growth through the end of the 2030s.
The former Department of Energy chief commercialization officer talks about the public sector’s role in catalyzing new clean energy.
Kneecapping demand from clean energy is a funny way to boost supply.
It’s not just AI companies taking a beating today.
And it just raised a $20 million round of Series B funding.
A century ago, prospectors tromped through remote areas, hoping to spot valuable, mineralized rocks simply poking out of the ground. Eventually, after they found all of the obvious stuff, they progressed to doing airborne geophysical surveys that used tools such as electromagnetic sensing to identify minerals that were just below the surface or highly concentrated. But there’s always been a lot more out there than we had the mechanisms to find. So now, companies are training artificial intelligence models on heaps of historical data to help locate untouched reserves of minerals that are key to clean energy technologies such as electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines.
One of the biggest players in this space is Earth AI, a Sydney-based startup that today announced a $20 million Series B round, bringing the company’s total investment to over $38 million since its founding in 2017. While the company had initially sought to raise $15 million in this round, investor interest was so strong that it exceeded its target by $5 million. Lead investors were Tamarack Global and Cantos Ventures.
Earth AI has a two-stage business model. First, it uses its proprietary software to locate likely deposits and purchases the mineral rights to the land. Then, it sends in its drilling rig and in-house team of geologists to produce mineral samples. The team then shows these samples to mining companies to prove that the area warrants further development and — assuming the miners are interested — sells them the mineral rights. “Because of the scarcity of this, because of the deficit of where we are and where we’re going, these price tags are $500 million to $2.5 billion,” Monte Hackett, Earth AI’s chief financial officer, told me. Huge as that may sound, it’s much less than what a mining company would typically spend doing traditional exploration themselves. This latest funding will allow the startup to purchase additional drill rigs and increase its project pipeline to over 50 sites.
“The problem is obvious,” Hackett told me. “We need $10 trillion of critical metal production by 2050. We’re producing $320 billion, a $9.7 trillion shortfall.” To better locate the trillions of dollars worth of minerals necessary for the energy transition, the startup’s CEO, geoscientist Roman Teslyuk, digitized decades of old Australian geophysical survey data, then overlaid that with remote sensing data such as satellite imagery to train a model to recognize the Earth systems and geological processes that created minerals deposits millennia ago. “Another way I like to think about it is that our algorithm looks for the geological shadow that is cast by a dense mineral body,” Hackett explained in a follow-up email.
Hackett told me that Earth AI focuses specifically on “greenfield” applications — that is, areas where no mining activity or substantial minerals exploration has previously occurred. So far, the company’s discoveries include a significant deposit of palladium, which also contains platinum and nickel, as well as a gold deposit and a molybdenum deposit. “We’re finding things that go against what has been the common sense of the industry so far,” Hackett told me, referencing the company’s palladium discovery. “There was geological consensus that there was no platinum palladium on the East Coast of Australia, and our algorithm learned what it looked like on the West Coast and then identified it on the East Coast.”
While Hackett said Earth AI is open for business anywhere, right now all of its projects are in Australia, where the company has “600 ‘x’s on our treasure map” — that is, likely areas for deposits, Hackett wrote in a follow-up email. Outlining the advantages of doing business there, he explained, “We don’t have to go somewhere where there’s unsavory working conditions or there are issues where we have to put our principles into balance. Here, everything is very regulated and above board.” Plus, mining has long been an important component of the Australian economy. “They’re incredibly efficient at doing this well. So the timeline for development is the shortest compared to other places,” Hackett told me.
This tech could have important domestic implications too, though. As the newly-inaugurated President Trump prioritizes ramping up U.S. production of critical minerals, Earth AI could one day help locate deposits here, as well. And since Australia is a close American ally, the nation could play a key role in helping wean the U.S. off of Chinese imports, providing the U.S. with critical minerals that it can’t now, or perhaps ever, produce in sufficient quantities itself.
It’s useful for more than just decarbonization.
Now that President Donald Trump has been officially inaugurated and issued his barrage of executive orders celebrating fossil fuels and shelving climate technologies such as wind energy and electric vehicles, climate tech startups are in a pickle. Federal funding can play a critical role in helping companies scale up and build out first-of-a-kind projects and facilities. So how to work with a government hostile to one of these startups’ core value propositions: aiding in the energy transition?
Talk of clean tech and electrification may be out of vogue, but its utility is not. The potential of many of these companies goes beyond mitigating climate change and into the realm of energy security and resilience — something the Department of Defense is well aware of.
The White House’s climate webpage has gone dark; the Department of Defense’s climate resilience portal lasted a little longer, but that’s now down, too. Once upon a time, though, the site read, “The changing climate is one of many threat multipliers to National Security, which adds complexity to Department of Defense decisions.” That’s a major reason why this agency can’t stop, won’t stop funding climate technologies. Another reason is that many technologies that happen to be good for the planet might also simply be the best tool for the job, meaning the DOD need not utter the word “climate” at all when justifying its decision to deploy new solutions.
“The Defense Department, so far in our experience, has framed things largely in terms of alternative benefits that our technology can have, such as fuel supply chain redundancy and reliability,” Ted McKlveen, co-founder and CEO of the hydrogen storage company Verne, told me. Verne received a $250,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Army last May to work on the development of hydrogen vehicles.
Cindy Taff, CEO of the next-generation geothermal startup Sage Geosystems, told me something similar. “What the military likes to talk about is energy resilience,” she said, though she has heard the DOD tout the climate benefits of her company’s tech, too. Sage currently has multiple DOD engagements, including feasibility studies with both the Army and Navy and a $1.9 million grant to build a demonstration project for the Air Force.
That’s not to say it’s clear what the Department of Defense’s funding priorities under Trump will be. When I contacted the DOD in mid-December to request an interview for this story, a spokesperson initially told me they would help connect me to the right person. But as Trump’s inauguration drew nearer, I got a message saying the agency would have to hold off until it got more guidance, as “it remains to be seen in the next few weeks what direction the new administration is going.”
Regardless of how the priorities shake out, practically every climate-focused company and venture capitalist I talk to emphasizes that their companies will only succeed if they can make or invest in products that can compete on economics and/or quality alone, sans government support. That was true even before a second Trump turn in the White House started to look like an inevitability, and this new administration will at least partially reveal which companies can do that. But while everybody aims to be independent of federal support, they might not actually need to say goodbye to that funding stream, so long as they can tout their economic and performance benefits to the right customers.
Take Pyka, for example. When Michael Norcia co-founded the autonomous electric aircraft company in 2017, the ultimate goal was to design a passenger plane. “We want that to be our legacy, but we were also very, very realistic about the challenges associated with actually doing that,” he told me. So when the DOD took an interest in the company’s commercial cargo planes and their potential ability to deliver supplies in contested environments, the startup jumped at the opportunity, delivering its first aircraft to AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, early last year. Interest from such a lucrative government customer helped the company to close its $40 million Series B round in September.
Of course, the decarbonization benefits of electrifying military cargo delivery would be huge. But unsurprisingly, Norcia told me that the DOD primarily frames the opportunity in terms of the capabilities of all-electric or hybrid-electric planes, which could take a variety of fuels, operate quietly, and give off minimal heat, making them more difficult to detect via thermal imaging. Plus, the more equipment is electrified the better, “in terms of having them be able to operate in a highly contested environment, where moving fuel around maybe is not feasible,” Norcia explained. Not to mention the fact that if a manned aircraft is shot down, people die, meaning that in a counterfactual sense, Pyka’s tech is saving lives.
Verne’s North Star is also decarbonization. And given that the military is the world’s largest oil consumer, McKlveen was excited to partner with the Army to put its hydrogen storage tech to use in medium and heavy-duty vehicles. The company stores hydrogen (ideally green hydrogen, produced via renewables-powered electrolysis) at high density as a cold, compressed gas, making it possible to build hydrogen vehicles with greater range and lower cost than has traditionally been done. Similar to Pyka, the Army is enthused that these vehicles would be difficult for adversaries to detect, as they’re quiet and give off little heat. Likewise, McKlveen told me that hydrogen power could replace the Army’s notoriously noisy generators.
While Verne has also partnered with the Department of Energy and its R&D arm, ARPA-E, McKlveen said that working with the DOD has been unique in a few ways. “The key difference is the DOD is a customer and a grant provider. So they can say both what their needs are as a potential customer and represent a potential customer,” he explained. This, along with the agency’s clear, phased approach that it puts companies through, helps bring a level of transparency to the whole process, from pilot to full-fledged military implementation, that McKlveen appreciates.
And lest we forget, “they also have a very large budget,” he told me. For fiscal year 2025, the DOD has requested $849.8 billion, while the DOE, by comparison, has requested a mere $51.4 billion.
“I find military people to be get-it-done type of people,” Taff of Sage Geosystems told me. “So I think that helps to create a sense of urgency and also push things along a lot faster than you would see with maybe other organizations.” Sage uses drilling technologies adopted from the oil and gas industry to access heat for clean electricity production across a wide variety of geographies. This is an especially attractive option for the DOD as the majority of geothermal infrastructure is underground, and thus well protected from attack. And unlike other renewables, this tech can provide 24/7 energy no matter the weather conditions. So it’s no surprise that the military is pouring money into this sector, pursuing partnerships with other big names in the geothermal space such as Fervo Energy and Eavor.
Electric planes, hydrogen, and geothermal all felt intuitively justifiable to me from a defense standpoint, but I was more surprised to learn that the DOD has gotten into the alternative proteins, a.k.a. “fake meat”, industry. Though meat substitutes won’t power tankers or keep the lights on, the Defense Department’s $1.4 million grant to The Better Meat Co. is intended to strengthen the American supply chain. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs views lab-grown meat as critical to its five-year agricultural plan. “So we don’t want to have the United States be importing clean protein in the way that we’re currently dependent on Asia for our semiconductors and photovoltaics,” Paul Shapiro, the company’s CEO, told me.
The Better Meat Co. produces a protein called Rhiza that’s derived from microscopic fungi, which it then sells as an ingredient to other companies to make either 100% animal-free meat or a meat blend. “This isn’t an alternative protein program. It’s a domestic biomanufacturing program,” Shapiro told me when I asked if military funding for meat substitutes could be at risk under Trump. Looking at some of the other companies that got grants through the same program, he said, “it’s literally like bio manufacturing things for military planes and jet lubricants and chemical catalysts for bullets.” That is, probably not Republican targets for defunding. “It’s clearly solely about wanting the U.S. to be a leader in biomanufacturing for the products that the world is going to depend on in the future.”
The DOD also sees promise in numerous other clean energy technologies, including nuclear microreactors for their portability and ability to provide off-grid energy in remote locations and alternate battery chemistries that could help the U.S. move away from a dependence on Chinese-produced lithium-ion batteries.
But despite the deep well of funding and pragmatic approach to deployment that the Department of Defense offers, agreeing to work with the DOD isn’t always an obvious choice. Many fear their company’s tech could be used in ways and in wars that they oppose. In 2018, for example, thousands of Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s participation in Project Maven, a partnership with the Pentagon that uses artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy of drone strikes. Supporters of the project said it would lead to fewer civilian deaths, while protestors argued that Google “should not be in the business of war.” Google did not renew the contract. More recently, employees at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have signed petitions opposing their company’s provision of cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government.
Norcia noted that most, but not all of his employees were neutral to positive when it came to working with the Air Force, while “for a small minority of the company, it unfortunately was not something that they really wanted to devote their life to.” While he understands that perspective, Norcia does believe that Pyka’s work with the DOD is a net positive for the world. “If you assume wars are going to keep happening — which, unfortunately, I think is the reality — I’d rather have it be the case that they’re more of a robot war than a human war,” he told me. And at the end of the day, passenger planes are still the goal.
As for his team at Verne, McKlveen told me everybody was on board. “The Defense Department has led to some of the biggest innovations of the last century, whether that’s the internet or GPS. And our team knows that.” Plus, even if the DOD doesn’t talk much about the climate benefits of sustainability-focused tech, that doesn’t negate them. A 2019 study revealed that the Pentagon purchases an average of 100 million barrels of oil per year, so from that perspective, “it’s hard to find a bigger customer that we can address,” McKlveen told me.
Norcia agreed. “I think the gains of your impact get turned way up if you’re doing work with the DOD,” he said, “as opposed to, you know, building an app that makes something incrementally more efficient or more addictive.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that DOD’s climate resilience portal has been taken down.
