“At a high level, making aluminium and CO2 accessible as energy storage materials is a major contribution to the greater sustainability of our energy system,” Thomas Chepucavage, CEO & Dr Olaf Conrad, CTO, Flow Aluminum

Thomas Chepucavage is the CEO and a seasoned professional with over 22 years of experience building companies and leading teams across various industries.  Thomas began his career with Accenture, advancing to VIP-level roles in high-growth ventures and gaining exposure to Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) at PNM. He co-founded Flow Aluminum in 2023, producing recyclable, rare-earth-free Aluminum-CO2 batteries with industry-leading energy density for applications from drones to grid storage.

Over the past 20 years, Dr Olaf Conrad has created energy technology teams and organisations, from early concepts to full-fledged powerhouses in their respective markets. Stations of his career include Director of the Centre of Competence in Hydrogen and Fuel Cells in Cape Town, South Africa, Managing Director of Jenabatteries in Jena, Germany, and CTO Engineering and Manufacturing at Pajarito Powder in Albuquerque, NM. 

A PhD chemist with broad and deep expertise in electrochemical science and engineering, he has authored and co-authored nearly 40 scientific journal articles and mentored the next generation of industry leaders in Europe, South Africa, East Asia, and the US. Married for 27 years and with three adult children, he and his wife enjoy the great outdoors in their chosen home of Albuquerque, NM.

AL Circle: How would you describe Flow Aluminum to our readers? What led to the formation of the organisation Flow Aluminum?

Flow Aluminum: Flow Aluminum was founded by Thomas Chepucavage, Chris Fetrow, PhD, and Dr Shuya Wei, an Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM), to commercialise a breakthrough invention in rechargeable aluminium battery technology licensed from UNM.

AL Circle: Can you elaborate on Flow Aluminum's mission and vision for the future of energy storage and the energy industry? How do your aluminium-based energy-storage solutions align with your sustainability goals?

Flow Aluminum: Our mission is to revolutionise energy storage solutions by developing and commercialising the rechargeable aluminium-CO2 battery. Our vision is to be a leading force in reshaping the energy landscape with cutting-edge and sustainable battery solutions. Aluminium and CO₂ are abundant in every corner of the world. Our storage technology unlocks these materials for use in stationary battery energy storage systems (BESS) in residential, commercial, industrial, and grid markets. This eliminates the dependency on rare and costly materials and China-dominated supply chains and extraction industries.

AL Circle: What makes your aluminium-based energy-storage technology unique compared to other storage solutions?

Flow Aluminium: We first developed this technology in a sealed architecture, providing a long-duration energy storage (LDES) solution independent of the highly volatile and notoriously unpredictable lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese spot prices. This enables us to compete effectively with the established incumbent lithium technologies in price and performance. In the medium term, the follow-on development of an open architecture provides an avenue to couple the energy storage system with a simultaneous CO₂ capture and concentration functionality, providing a second revenue opportunity in the carbon trading market - something no other energy storage technology can offer.

AL Circle: How do your solutions specifically address the challenges in demand-charge management, grid-scale renewable power, small-scale solar-plus storage, and frequency regulation? 

Flow Aluminium: The demonstrated high round-trip efficiency at the cell level (up to 95%) provides an excellent platform for developing storage solutions for energy trading, load-balancing, and grid-stabilization services on the transmission and distribution grids. The extremely low cost of the principal energy storage materials, aluminium and CO₂, benefits medium-duration (12 to 36 hours) and long-duration energy storage solutions (multiple days).

AL Circle: Could you share some success stories or case studies where Flow Aluminum's technology has significantly impacted a commercial customer's operations?

Flow Aluminium: Flow Aluminum is an early-stage deep-tech company that brings innovative technology from the university lab bench into commercial reality. While we have not yet deployed our technology into real-world applications, we closed an oversubscribed pre-seed round raising $625,000. We are also a proud recipient of the NM Tech Award 2024, valued at $400,000.

AL Circle: How does Flow Aluminum approach research and development to stay at the forefront of energy storage technology?

Flow Aluminum: We are in the process of building out our first laboratory in our hometown of Albuquerque, NM, preparing the basis for continued innovation on our proprietary Al-CO2 cell chemistry. The inventors and co-founders are Chris Fetrow, PhD, who serves as our Chief Scientist and Dr Shuya Wei, who chairs our Technical Advisory Board. With Olaf Conrad, PhD, serving as our CTO, we were able to attract one of the world’s top scientists in electrochemical energy conversion technologies whose career spans 20+ years in energy technology leadership positions across three continents with research published on all relevant aspects of our technology. Rechargeable Al-CO2 technology forms the tip of a spear. Beyond Lithium technology, and as a leader in this specific field, we have a pole position to push the envelope of its electrochemistry beyond energy storage into CCS&U and fine chemicals production. While we focus our engineering efforts on the development of sealed BESS, our scientific work will explore chemistry and electrochemistry more broadly to fully capitalise on the groundbreaking innovation.

AL Circle: How do you collaborate with commercial customers to develop tailor-made energy storage solutions? Can you discuss any notable partnerships instrumental in achieving your goals?

Flow Aluminum: Our current focus is on translating university laboratory data into a minimum viable product, which will subsequently allow us to engage with pilot commercial customers. Having our home base in the Southwest of the US aligns very well with efforts, both by federal, state, and local governments and by the investment community, to form a new green energy hub right in our backyard. We actively engage with the stakeholders in preparation for our product launch.

AL Circle: What steps does Flow Aluminum take to ensure sustainability and minimise its ecological footprint?

Flow Aluminum: At a high level, making aluminium and CO₂ accessible as energy storage materials is a major contribution to the greater sustainability of our energy system. Our first product is going to be a sealed system containing all required materials in a closed loop during its lifetime. Our product engineering will focus the sustainability efforts towards making the product easily recyclable through a combination of material choices and design-for-disassembly to ensure clean material streams that can go directly into established recycling operations. At an operational level, we intend to initially implement best practices for ISO 14001 certification with a view to getting fully certified during the company’s growth stage.

AL Circle: How does your commitment to a circular economy influence manufacturing processes and material choices?

Flow Aluminum: Aluminium has a very established recycling pathway, and we expect it to be readily separable from the spent battery as it is not mixed with conductivity promoters, binders or other contaminants. Likewise, the cathode support and the current collectors are single metal components that should be easily separable from each other. The EU Battery Passport and its underlying regulations provide a clear timeline and blueprint for future battery generations. We are in a fortunate position to build our manufacturing processes and cell engineering from scratch, taking these regulations as a guideline for fully circular battery technology.

AL Circle: How do you see the market for energy storage evolving in the next five to ten years?

Flow Aluminum: Our target markets are initially all stationary energy storage in the residential, commercial and industrial (C&I) and grid-scale markets. We expect these markets to continue exponential growth over the next five years and transition into a sustained linear growth phase with CAGRs of 10 to 20% after that. Unlike in the EV and traction battery markets, we believe that in critical energy infrastructure markets, non-lithium battery technologies will gradually replace the incumbent as China’s hegemony over the lithium battery materials and cells supply chain will increasingly drive the adoption of alternatives to reduce dependency on a foreign and potentially adversarial power.

AL Circle: What role does Flow Aluminium play in transitioning to a clean energy ecosystem?

Flow Aluminum: We aim to become a leading force in reshaping the energy landscape by providing our customers with the most cost-effective, entirely domestically sourced battery. In the long term, we plan to expand the benefits of our innovation to deal with the global threat of rising CO₂ levels in the atmosphere by providing ancillary CO₂ capture and concentration services to the carbon trading markets.

AL Circle: Can you explain the concept and advantages of the Aluminium-CO2 battery for electric vehicles, drones, and storage?

Flow Aluminum: We will focus our product development efforts on stationary storage applications as the most compelling benefits - high round-trip efficiency and independent scalability of power and capacity - are best utilised in medium to long-duration applications. Here, we can provide a highly resilient product that can operate across an extensive temperature range (-40 °C to 80°C short-term, even broader long-term) and whose power and capacity can be modularly matched with the use case. While the technology has shown an extremely high storage capacity in the laboratory, making it a potentially very attractive technology for electric vehicles, drones and other traction applications, this requires a fundamentally different engineering approach, which we chose to de-emphasise to focus on the stationary application.

AL Circle: How does this technology integrate Direct Air Capture, and what are its potential benefits for reducing carbon emissions?

Flow Aluminum: CO₂ is an active component in the electrochemical energy conversion reaction that ultimately gets stored as a solid component inside the battery during discharge. Upon recharging, CO₂ is released from the cathode. In our first product, we will encapsulate this principle inside a sealed battery system so that the battery will have all the required CO₂ within. Conceptually, for Direct Air Capture (DAC), the cathode needs to be engineered as an open system. This will allow CO₂ either directly from air or - more efficiently - contained in the concentrated CO₂ stream from a DAC unit to enter the cathode during battery discharge. During battery recharge, the open cathode releases pure CO₂. The Al-CO2 battery thus acts as a CO₂ concentrator and purifier system while it functions as a BESS. DAC is notoriously energy-intensive and costly, and to date, technology has yet to be identified to provide a CO₂ capture cost of less than $50/tonne CO₂. By coupling an energy service-providing asset to a DAC or CCS asset, the resulting cost per ton of captured CO₂ can reach the DOE target.

AL Circle: How do your energy storage solutions enhance the integration of renewable energy sources at grid-scale and small-scale installations? What are the main challenges in promoting the widespread adoption of renewable energy, and how does Flow Aluminum address these challenges?

Flow Aluminum: Renewable energy generation is not readily dispatchable to match energy demand on the grid. While demand-side management can account for this mismatch in real-time when the overall fraction of renewable energy in the grid is modest, an increasing share of renewable energy requires temporary storage capability at the grid level. Traditionally, pumped hydro and, more recently, rapidly responding gas-fired power plants (GFPP) have provided this capability, but pumped hydro is reaching its capacity limit. At the same time, GFPP is expensive and emits CO₂, so it is not a long-term solution. For further increase in the share of renewable energy in the grid, large LDES (GWhs per installation) are needed. Currently, the leading technology is a variant of the lithium battery, lithium iron phosphate (LFP), which has two major drawbacks: (1) It is an adaptation of a high-power battery to a high-capacity application and thus not really an optimal solution, and (2) it suffers from the same supply chain disruptions, raw material price volatilities and geopolitical implications of the dependence on a foreign hegemon that the entire lithium battery industry is facing. Flow Aluminum offers a battery technology that can be entirely sourced from domestic suppliers in any world market and that can, in fact, be deployed in all major markets in Europe, the Americas, East and Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The principal storage materials, aluminium and CO₂, cannot be dominated by any global power, removing the major obstacle to the widespread adoption of renewable energy in the grid.

AL Circle: How do you plan to expand your market presence and further your mission of revolutionising the energy industry?

Flow Aluminum: We expand our market presence in two phases. Phase 1 will introduce a modular, sealed Al-CO2 battery system targeting three markets: residential, commercial & industrial, and grid-scale. With this product, we will offer our customers a highly efficient, highly scalable, and cost-effective solution. In phase 2, we introduce an open-cathode variant of the product specifically engineered to take CO₂ from an incoming source (e.g., a CO₂ point source or a DAC unit) and purify this incoming stream to a pure CO₂ output stream for downstream markets.