Imagine dropping a piece of a crushed soda can into a beaker of water and watching it instantly erupt in a furious cloud of steam. The water, at room temperature just moments before, is now boiling violently. This isn't a science fiction movie; it's happening right now in a lab in Boston, and it could be a peek into the future of clean industrial energy.
"I can just keep this reaction going by adding more water," says Peter Godart, the founder and CEO of Found Energy. He’s the mind behind this seemingly magical process, which harnesses the immense, locked-up energy in simple aluminum to generate heat and hydrogen without a single puff of carbon dioxide.
His startup, Found Energy, has moved beyond small lab-scale demos. They've just fired up what they claim is the largest aluminum-water reactor ever built. And soon, they're taking it out of the lab and into the real world to power a manufacturing plant, using the facility's own aluminum waste as the fuel. It's a bold plan that could transform a mountain of metal scrap into a powerhouse for a cleaner planet.
The Aluminum Conundrum: A Fuel That Puts Itself Out
So, why aren't we already powering our world with aluminum? After all, once it's been refined from ore, aluminum is an incredibly dense energy carrier. By volume, it packs more than twice the energy of diesel and nearly eight times that of compressed hydrogen gas. The potential is staggering.
The problem—and the reason your aluminum foil doesn't spontaneously combust in a rainstorm—is a fascinating bit of chemistry. The moment aluminum is exposed to air or water, it starts to react, but it immediately forms a super-thin, tough layer of aluminum oxide on its surface. This layer acts like a microscopic suit of armor, instantly sealing off the unreacted metal underneath and stopping the reaction cold. It’s like a fire that creates its own fireproof blanket as it burns.
This single obstacle has stumped engineers and scientists for decades. "People have tried it and abandoned this idea many, many times," Godart admits.
The skepticism is real and well-founded. Geoff Scamans, a metallurgist at Brunel University of London who worked on aluminum-powered vehicles back in the 80s, is blunt. He calls it a "crazy idea," arguing that the energy required to produce aluminum in the first place makes it inefficient as a fuel source. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg energy problem. But Godart and his team believe they've finally cracked the code.
Found Energy's Secret Sauce: A Catalyst That Rewrites the Rules
The breakthrough at Found Energy wasn't about trying to force the reaction harder. Instead, they completely rethought the approach. "The real breakthrough was thinking about catalysis in a different way," Godart explains. Rather than using a catalyst to bring the aluminum and water together, they found a way to put the catalyst inside the aluminum itself.
Flipping the Problem on Its Head
The company developed a proprietary liquid metal catalyst that gets dissolved directly into the aluminum fuel pellets. Godart is tight-lipped about the exact formula, but he says it's a "low-melting-point liquid metal that’s not mercury" and that it works on the same principles as the gallium-indium mix he researched for his dissertation.
Here’s how it works:
- The catalyst "permeates the microstructure" of the aluminum, spreading throughout the metal.
- When water is introduced, the reaction begins.
- Instead of forming a protective oxide shell, the catalyst forces the metal to froth and split apart from the inside out.
- This constant frothing action continuously exposes fresh, unreacted aluminum to the water, allowing the reaction to run away to completion at incredible speed.
Watching it in action is mesmerizing. A solid pellet of treated aluminum hits the water and immediately begins to bubble, releasing pure hydrogen gas. The reaction generates so much heat so quickly that the water vaporizes into steam, leaving behind a churning, gray mass of aluminum hydroxide. "One of the impediments to this technology taking off is that it was just too sluggish," says Godart. "But you can see here we’re making steam. We just made a boiler."
From Jupiter's Moon to a Boston Factory Floor
The idea for this Earth-saving technology was born from a mission to another world. Godart was a scientist at NASA, working on an incredible concept: aluminum robots that could explore Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, by literally consuming their own bodies for fuel.
When congressional funding for the mission was cut, Godart had a moment of clarity. "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 I was like, you know—I bet this aluminum technology would be even better for Earth applications."
He pursued the idea for his dissertation at MIT, started Found Energy in his Cambridge home in 2022, and quickly landed on MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators under 35" list. After a $12 million seed round, the company scaled up fast.
They went from a tiny 10-kilowatt test reactor to designing and building a 100-kilowatt engine—ten times larger. Taking up a good chunk of their lab, the new reactor resembles a large water boiler turned on its side, bristling with pipes, wires, and monitoring equipment. One end feeds in aluminum pellets and water; the other sends out the valuable products: high-pressure steam, pure hydrogen gas, and the aluminum hydroxide byproduct. Crucially, Godart says the catalyst is fully recovered and can be reused to make more fuel.
In September, they hit their target, running the engine at a full 100 kilowatts of power—roughly the output of a diesel engine in a pickup truck. Now, it's ready for its debut.
The First Real-World Test: Powering Industry with Its Own Waste
Early next year, Found Energy will install this 100-kilowatt engine at a tool manufacturing facility in the southeastern U.S. This pilot project is the ultimate proof of concept. The engine will supply the plant with both heat and hydrogen, running entirely on the aluminum scrap the facility generates as waste.
This is where the business model gets brilliant. The initial target market isn't just any industry; it's the aluminum 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 says. "They are begging us to implement this for them."
This "difficult to recycle" scrap—things like dross, shavings, and composite materials—is a "dirty secret" for an industry built on recycling. Globally, over 3 million metric tons of aluminum collected for recycling never actually make it through the process. Found Energy offers a way to turn that liability into a valuable, carbon-free asset.
The potential applications are huge:
- Hot Steam: The steam can spin a turbine to generate electricity.
- Superheated Steam: By burning the hydrogen produced in the reaction, the engine can create steam as hot as 1,300 °C, perfect for chemical refining and more efficient electricity generation.
- Extreme Heat: Burning the hydrogen alone can reach temperatures of 2,400 °C—hot enough to make steel or cement, two of the most difficult industries to decarbonize.
The pilot project is the first step. The goal is to raise the capital for a 1-megawatt reactor, and then keep scaling from there.
The Bigger Picture: A Closed-Loop Energy Cycle?
While using waste scrap is a fantastic starting point, there's a much grander vision at play. Eventually, the plan is to "recharge" the aluminum hydroxide byproduct. By using clean, renewable electricity, you can smelt the hydroxide back into pure aluminum metal, ready to be used as fuel all over again.
In this scenario, aluminum stops being a one-time fuel and becomes a revolutionary energy storage technology. It would be like a solid, incredibly stable, and energy-dense battery. According to Found Energy's estimates, a "closed loop" of about 300 million metric tons of aluminum could meet the entire planet's demand for industrial heat.
Of course, there's a catch. This recharging process would require an astronomical amount of cheap, clean electricity. "If you’re doing that, [aluminum fuel] is an energy storage technology, not so much an energy providing technology,” notes Jeffrey Rissman of the think tank Energy Innovation. In a world scrambling for clean power for everything from AI data centers to electric vehicles, the competition will be fierce.
But for Peter Godart, the challenges are just part of the journey. He's focused on the immediate opportunity: proving the technology works and solving a real-world problem for industry. He’s confident in the hardware they’ve already built, even hinting that it’s more powerful than they’ve let on. "We actually believe this can probably do half a megawatt," he says with a smile. "We haven’t fully throttled it." It seems the fire inside the humble aluminum can has only just been lit.
