Agora Energy’s Solution Will Turn CO2 & Electricity Into Industrial Feedstocks Cheaply
This is the third in a series of articles I’m writing about flow battery technology, with a couple of articles devoted to Agora Energy Technologies’ specific technology. The first article dealt with flow batteries in general, and why they are a strongly promising component for grid storage. The second dealt with Agora’s unique differentiators. This article is devoted to a compelling alternative use case for their technology, one that’s immediate and high value.
The past three years have been a deeper dive into industrial processes and chemical engineering for me, and the implications for global warming. The CleanTechnica report on Carbon Engineering was a major effort, as were the many articles on industrial processes for carbon sequestration. The assessment of cement manufacturing, with and without the nonsensical use of concentrating solar power was another.
This has led me to a deeper interest in the edge cases of climate solutions. My assessments and research over the past few years has led me to understand the major solution sets for energy, transportation, and biological carbon sequestration, but there’s still a lot of carbon and pollution emitted in industrial processes that needs to be addressed. As one example, there is the $44 billion global carbonates market.
Potassium carbonate is in a lot of things we use daily. It’s used in soaps, glass, and china dishes. It’s used as a drying agent in chemical processes. It’s in both Asian noodles and Dutch cocoa powder. Wine makers use it. It’s a water softener and a fire extinguisher. It’s used in welding and animal feed.
Sodium carbonate is equally widely used. It’s in glass, paper, rayon, soaps, and detergents. It’s used for water softening. It’s a food additive that controls acidity. As a weak, safe to handle base, it’s used in a lot of chemical processes. Over 40 million metric tons are produced each year, amounting to several kilograms for every person on Earth.
Between them, they represent a roughly $44 billion global annual market. And the current processes that make them are pretty nasty in a lot of ways.
Let’s take sodium carbonate as an example. About 75% of all the sodium carbonate used in the world is made by the Solvay Process. The US gets most of its sodium carbonate from a massive trona deposit in Wyoming.
Syracuse Solvay process works circa 1900 courtesy US Library of Congress
The Solvay Process was invented in 1861, and is still used everywhere today. It bubbles CO2 up through ammonia-based brine in a four-step chemical engineering process that produces and uses CO2 at various points in the process. And of course there’s the ammonia, which is highly toxic, with 15-minute exposure limits to levels of 35 ppm of gaseous ammonia per the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Ammonia is a manufactured substance in and of itself, using hydrogen created from fossil fuels today with 8-35 times the mass of CO2 as hydrogen. Prolonged exposure to small amounts of ammonia cause irreversible health effects. The ammonia is mostly recycled with only small amounts being lost, but eliminating it entirely would be beneficial.
The Solvay process actually captures some CO2 produced in one step to use in a later stage, but overall, the deployed process is a net emitter of 2.74 times the mass of CO2 as the mass of carbonates produced.
Solvay chemical process flow courtesy of UN IPCC
The source of heat in the first step interested me. That step in the process is the same as for cement, incidentally. It requires substantial heat, in the 600 to 1000 degree Celsius range to calcinate limestone to make quicklime and CO2. Some of the CO2 and all of the quicklime are used in later steps in the process, unlike cement making where all the CO2 is just emitted into the atmosphere.
As a side note, a Lafarge cement expert told me when I was exploring cement that they had no good process for capturing limestone kiln CO2 emissions, which clearly isn’t the case as it has been done as an industrial process for 160 years. Capturing flue CO2 isn’t hard, it’s just expensive, so it isn’t done unless there’s a very good economic reason.
Then there’s another temperature challenge, which is that the third step in the process is strongly exothermic, which means it gives off a lot of heat, just not usefully. One of the key challenges in the process is keeping the temperature low enough. That’s typically done with cooling water from ground sources, a challenged source in many parts of the world today, with thermal generation plants shutting down or running on diminished capacity as ground water heats up past the point where it works well with the designed equipment. The Solvay company shut down four of its 22 Sao Paulo, Brazil units due to the river they take water from drying up in 2014, a taste of the future for many heavy water consuming industrial plants located on water sources at risk from global warming.
The second instance of the application of heat in step 4 is also interesting. That requires another kiln with a temperature of about 300 degrees Celsius. Any time I see heat these days in industrial processes, I assume it’s coming from fossil fuels, and I was unsurprised to find that the preferred energy source for the Solvay Process was coke, a processed coal derivative.
That’s not all of course. The Solvay Process is much less polluting than the Leblanc Process it replaced, but inland sites end up with 50% more waste deposits of by-products than the sodium carbonates of value. Solvay, New York, which was renamed when the Solvay company built a plant there, has massive waste beds that have polluted the local area and contributed to the nearby Onondaga Lake being declared a Superfund Site.
Long wall trona mine image courtesy Government of Wyoming
I haven’t done the same assessment of the environmental impacts of the US trona mining and processing sodium carbonate stream, but at first glance it looks like a high CO2 emitter with a fair amount of use of toxic chemicals and a challenging waste stream as well.
Why is this digression interesting? Well, the Agora technology can create sodium carbonate in two steps without any heat and with barely any temperature management required.
Wait. What? It’s a battery, not a chemical plant, isn’t it?
Well, yes. The closed-loop model cycles the chemicals between their base form and their charged form and back. But the open-loop model, which changes in some of the details, produces sodium carbonate after the second cycle instead of turning it back into CO2, in a up to 35% by weight solution with water. And both act as batteries, taking in electricity in the charging stage and producing electricity in the discharge phase.
So the ammonia-based, high-heat, high-cooling, five-step process turns into a shorter process with much less harmful outcomes. It takes electricity when it’s cheap at night or other times, from renewables wherever possible of course, to ‘charge’ the battery. Then during the daytime, instead of reversing the process as in the open-flow approach, it sends it through Agora’s cells with a different chemistry and produces carbonates in solution and electricity. The entire daytime process from lights to pumps to drying the carbonate solution and the like can be run by a portion of the electricity that’s produced.
The output sodium carbonate is pure as well. It’s a pure compound in pure water. Heat the water to evaporate it off, and the purity should be well over the 98% purity typically guaranteed for food additives for the most expensive variants. There’s enough electricity in the battery to power the evaporation directly per my calculations with the CEO Dr Christina Gyenge, but there’s far more than enough to use heat pump technology with a COP of 4 to do that, or to pump it over a source of waste industrial heat elsewhere, and leave a lot of electricity left over for other uses in the industrial facility or to sell to the grid.
So, this technology can take a cheap feedstock we have too much of in the world, CO2, regardless of where it comes from and using renewable electricity produce very high quality industrial chemicals that are used globally in a market worth tens of billions of dollars.
Agora’s CO2-based redox flow battery technology is an industrial component from the future.
Full disclosure. I have a professional relationship with Agora as a strategic advisor and Board observer. I did an initial strategy session with Agora about their redox flow battery technology in late 2019 and was blown away by what they had in hand, and my formal role with the firm started at the beginning of 2021. I commit to being as objective and honest as always, but be aware of my affiliation.
Honda’s patent filings offer a clear glimpse into the company’s plans for an ultra-affordable electric motorcycle, integrating a proven chassis with a simple electric powertrain. It’s a clear glimpse into how the world’s most prolific motorcycle maker plans to challenge the nascent electric motorcycle market.
The filings in Honda’s new patent show a bike built around the familiar platform of the Honda Shine 100, a best-selling commuter in India, reimagined in electric form for a cost-effective future of urban mobility.
According to Cycle World’s Ben Purvis, Honda’s patent sketches outline a design that repurposes the Shine’s sturdy frame and chassis mounting points to house an electric motor and compact battery setup. Positioned where the engine once sat, a mid-motor drives the rear wheel via a single-speed reduction gear and chain – mirroring the essentials of the original gasoline-powered commuter bike.
Instead of a traditional fuel tank, the design features two lithium-ion battery packs, angled forward on either side of the spine frame and fitting neatly into the existing geometry.
What makes the bike revealed in this patent even more interesting isn’t just its clever packaging, but rather the platform. By leveraging the proven Shine chassis, Honda can significantly cut development costs, manufacturing complexity, and market price. That’s a big statement given that surviving in price-sensitive markets like India demands simplicity and reliability. And by piggybacking off a proven platform, Honda can dramatically reduce the time to market from the time the boardroom bigwigs give the project the final green light.
The design still seems to feature styling that would be fairly consistent with the Shine 100, even down to a gas cap-like circular protrusion likely on top of a faux-tank. Some electric motorcycles in the past have used this location to hide a charging port, keeping similar form and function to outdated fuel tanks and fill ports, though it’s not clear if that is Honda’s intention.
It’s not clear what power level Honda could be targeting, but the Shine bike from which Honda’s creation draws its design inspiration could provide some clues. The Honda Shine 100 features a 99cc engine that provides around 7.3 horsepower (around 5.5 kW) and has a top speed of 85 km/h (53 mph), solidly planting it in the commuter segment of motorcycles.
The electric motorcycle in Honda’s design would be unlikely to target much higher performance as it would drastically increase the required battery capacity, and thus similar speeds of around 80-85 km/h (50-53 mph) would seem likely.
There also appears to be no active cooling, which would also limit the amount of power that Honda would be likely to draw continuously. The patent describes a channel formed by the two battery packs, leading to the speed controller and creating ducted cooling that pulls heat out of the batteries and electronics without drawing extra power.
This emerging design is just one piece of Honda’s broader electric two-wheeler strategy. Their entry-level EM1 e: and Activa e: scooters launched with mobile battery packs and budget-friendly pricing. Meanwhile, high-tech concepts continually push the envelope. But this Shine-based bike aims squarely at the heart of mainstream affordability – a move likely to resonate with millions of new electric riders in developing regions like India where traditionally-styled small-dsiplacement motorcycles reign supreme.
Honda hasn’t revealed a timeline or pricing yet, but Honda’s patents offer real hope to fans of the brand’s electric efforts. If scaled effectively, this could be the first truly mass-market electric motorcycle from a major OEM, with a sticker price likely far below the $5,000 mark usually seen as a floor for commuter electric motorcycles from major manufacturers. That would also dramatically undercut models from brands like Zero or Harley-Davidson’s LiveWire, even as those brands rush to bring their own lower-cost models to market.
Electrek’s Take
Honda’s patent reveals a clever, no-frills EV designed to democratize electric two-wheeling, especially in developing markets that are even more price-sensitive than Western electric motorcycle customers.
Using a trusted frame, simple electric drive, and passive cooling, I’d say it definitely prioritizes cost over complexity, which is exactly what urban commuters need. If Honda can bring this to market, it would not just add another electric bike to the mix… it could create a new baseline for affordability in affordable electric mobility. Now we’re just waiting for the rubber to hit the road!
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Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to invest into xAI, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s private company, according to a post by Musk on twitter today.
Elon Musk is not just the CEO of Tesla, the electric car company that you may have heard about from time to time in Electrek’s coverage, but several other companies as well. And, famously, Musk companies often share resources – there has been much talk of incorporating SpaceX technology into Tesla vehicles, and putting xAI/twitter’s “MechaHitler”…. er, I mean, “Grok”…. feature into Tesla cars, among other collaborations that have happened over his various companies’ histories.
And today, Musk made it official that he will seek greater collaboration between three of his companies: Tesla, xAI, and twitter, in the form of an investment into xAI by Tesla.
The situation is a little more complicated than that, though.
Tesla is a public company, owned by shareholders. Musk is the largest shareholder, but only owns around 12% of the company himself.
This is a different situation than xAI, which is a private company, owned by Musk. While there are other investors, he can exercise much more direct control over the company, and doesn’t have to put big decisions up to a vote.
One of the recent decisions he made with xAI was to purchase twitter in March. You may say, “wait, I thought he bought twitter back in 2022?,” and you’d be correct. Musk purchased twitter for $44 billion in 2022, which was widely agreed to be far too high a price, and then rapidly saw the company’s valuation drop to under $10 billion.
Then, in March 2025, Musk had xAI purchase twitter in an all-stock deal, valuing twitter company at $45 billion – again, far too high of a valuation, but considering he purchased the company from himself, he could set the price at whatever he wanted.
The move was widely considered to be a bailout of twitter, and the numbers involved considered arbitrary, perhaps partially to help save face for Musk after he made one of the worst business deals of all time.
Now the two are the same entity, and it seems clear that he would like to bring Tesla into the fold, in some way or another.
Musk has already improperly used resources from Tesla, a public company, to boost xAI and twitter, his private companies. Last year, he gave up Tesla’s priority position for highly sought-after NVIDIA H100 GPUs, instead shipping those GPUs to xAI and twitter. Tesla could have used these GPUs for training its FSD/Robotaxi systems, which Musk has claimed is the most important thing to Tesla’s future, but instead graciously sent them to his other company that used them to, uh, train a bot to say Nazi stuff apparently.
xAI has also poached talent from Tesla, multiple times, showing how Musk is using Tesla as a farm team for his private company.
So it hasn’t been a secret that Musk would like to use public money to bail out his private companies, as he’s been setting the stage for for a while now.
Musk has previously “discussed” getting Tesla to invest in xAI in the past, but the idea was never made official until today, when Musk said that he will put the idea to a shareholder vote.
In response to one of his superfans asking for the the opportunity to waste money on an overvalued social media app (which would mark the third time it has been overpaid for in as many years), and the backend fueling “MechaHitler,” Musk said this:
Tesla traditionally holds its annual shareholder meeting around the middle of the year, so if it were a normal year, this shareholder vote might be imminent.
But it’s not a normal year, as just last week Tesla announced an exceptionally late shareholder meeting, pushing it back to November, the latest it has ever held the meeting.
This means that Musk will have around four months to campaign for this idea – something that he’ll perhaps have more time to do, now that he’s no longer cosplaying as a government official.
We don’t know what the structure of the deal might look like yet, but Musk has been clear in the past that he wants more shares in Tesla. After selling many of his shares in order to buy twitter, he later complained that he doesn’t feel comfortable having less than 25% of Tesla. Given that his recent xAI/twitter deal was an all-stock deal, Musk could attempt to fund any investment of Tesla into xAI via shares, giving himself more Tesla shares in exchange for the company gaining a portion of xAI. Though to get him to 25% voting shares in Tesla, that would require either an enormous valuation for xAI, a small valuation for Tesla, or purchasing a large percentage of xAI (or, perhaps, all three, given how much higher TSLA’s valuation is than xAI’s).
We may however have a hint as to how that vote will go, because the last time Musk campaigned for a clearly terrible idea, Tesla shareholders ate it up.
In mid-2024, Musk ended his yearslong absenteeism at Tesla in a flurry of activity, hoping to persuade enough shareholders to vote for his illegal $55B pay package.
That flurry involved firing 10% of the company (supposedly in order to save money – though Tesla’s earnings have dropped drastically since), including important leadership and successful teams, which caused chaos with Tesla’s projects. He also pushed back an all-important affordable car project (which we’ve still heard nothing about) and held Tesla’s AI projects hostage while shifting both resources and staff from Tesla to his private AI company, even as he claims that AI is the future of Tesla.
In the end, these bad decisions worked, and shareholders voted to give their bad CEO his $55B pay package, even though it was later ruled to still be illegal.
So it looks like we’ve got another campaign coming up, and if last time was any indication, expect some really bad decisions along the way. It worked last time, didn’t it?
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The off-highway equipment experts at Perkins and McElroy have teamed up to develop a plug-and-play battery electric power unit designed to help equipment OEMs and upfitters to seamlessly transition from diesel to battery electric power.
Designed to occupy the same space as the companies’ diesel-engined power units, Perkins dropped its new battery power unit into the similarly new McElroy TracStar 900i pipe fusion machine (specialized equipment used to join thermoplastic pipes like HDPE or polypropylene by heat-welding them end-to-end to form a continuous length pf pipe).
Perkins’ battery electric power unit replaces the company’s proprietary 134 hp, 3.6 liter 904 Series Tier V diesel engine, enabling units that are already deployed to be quickly upgraded to electric power – and helping trade allies and development partners to easily retrofit existing equipment in order to add zero-emission options to their operational fleet.
“We’re actively helping customers navigate the shift in power system requirements, with a range of advanced power systems including electric, diesel-electric and alternative fuel compatible engines,” says Jaz Gill, vice president, global sales, marketing at Perkins. “When it comes to the innovative fully integrated battery electric power unit, it can be ‘dropped in’ to a machine to replace a diesel engine. The system consists of a Perkins battery along with inverters, motors and on-board chargers – all packaged up into a compact drop-in system to support seamless transition from diesel to electric for our customers looking to make that move.”
McElroy believes that an electric, emissions-free power unit like this one will open new opportunities and applications for its customers.
“Their team has done a phenomenal job of integrating their battery electric system into our TracStar 900i,” explains McElroy President and CEO Chip McElroy. “We’re really excited to see what the market thinks about this concept.”
Development of the battery electric powered pipe fusion machine was completed in about nine months. Future Perkins-powered electric equipment running the 904 diesel (small excavators, telehandlers, pumps, and gensets) could be developed even more quickly. You can find out more in the company’s promo video, below.
Perkins electric power unit
SOURCE | IMAGES: McElroy, Perkins.
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