Molten Industries

A toaster the size of a building, in a steel mill that forgot to die

Walk into American Steel in West Oakland and you expect ghosts - the kind of cavernous industrial shed that usually ends up as a film set or a brewery. Instead there is a reactor getting white-hot.

Molten Industries took 21,595 extra square feet inside that building to do something deceptively simple. It heats natural gas until it falls apart. Out the back come two things that have almost nothing in common: hydrogen, a gas that wants to be fuel, and graphite, a solid black powder that wants to be a battery. No carbon dioxide leaves the room. That is the entire trick, and it is harder than it sounds.

The company is small - about two dozen people - and young, founded in 2021. But it sits at the intersection of two enormous, anxious markets: the world's hunt for clean hydrogen and America's scramble to stop importing the graphite that goes inside every lithium-ion cell. Molten's wager is that you can solve both with one machine.

Hydrogen is clean. Making it usually isn't.

Here is the inconvenient part of the hydrogen story. Most of the hydrogen the world uses today is made by smashing methane with steam - a process that throws off a great deal of carbon dioxide for every kilogram of gas it produces. The fuel is clean. The factory is not. It is a little like advertising a salad and serving it deep-fried.

Graphite has its own problem, and it is geopolitical rather than chemical. The graphite that anodes are made of overwhelmingly comes from overseas, much of it processed in a single country. For a United States trying to build its own battery supply chain, that is a single point of failure dressed up as a commodity.

Molten's founders looked at those two problems and noticed they shared a feedstock. Methane is one carbon atom holding four hydrogens. Split it cleanly and you get exactly the two things both markets are desperate for. The carbon does not have to be captured and buried. It can be sold.

Two PhDs who decided the carbon was the asset

Dr. Kevin Bush and Dr. Caleb Boyd met as scientists, became Breakthrough Energy Fellows, and in 2021 placed a bet that ran against the prevailing instinct in climate tech. The fashionable approach was to capture carbon and hide it underground. Their approach was to turn the carbon into a product good enough that customers would pay for it.

That single reframing changes the economics. If the graphite co-product has real market value - in batteries, in steel electrodes, in tires and paint - then it subsidizes the hydrogen. The hydrogen gets cheaper because the carbon is no longer a liability you pay to dispose of. It is a second invoice.

Both founders were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Energy in 2023, which is the sort of thing that gets a startup meetings. What got it money was the chemistry working at a scale investors could believe.

Electricity, heat, and a refusal to emit

The reactor uses electrical resistive heating - the same physics as the wire glowing in a toaster, scaled up and pushed to temperatures where methane simply cannot hold itself together. Run it on renewable electricity and the whole process avoids the carbon dioxide that haunts conventional hydrogen production.

Two products come out. The hydrogen is a feedstock for clean fuels, ammonia, plastics, and green steel. The graphite is a solid co-product graded for lithium-ion batteries, but also useful in steelmaking electrodes, refractories, concrete, paints, plastics, and tires - an unglamorous list that happens to be worth a great deal of money.

Cleverest of all is the feedstock sourcing. Molten can pull methane from dairy farms, wastewater treatment plants, and landfills - waste gas that would otherwise leak into the atmosphere as a potent greenhouse gas. The reactor is designed to be modular: roughly twenty units stacked together to form a single commercial plant, which is how a startup gets to industrial scale without building a cathedral first.

What $25 million is supposed to buy

In June 2024 Molten closed a $25 million Series A led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures - the climate fund associated with Bill Gates - with Sozo Ventures, Steelhead Capital, and investor Mark Heising joining, alongside returning backers Union Square Ventures, 50 Years, J4 Ventures, Moai Capital, UVC Partners, Jane Woodward, and Peter Attia. Total funding to date sits around $32.4 million.

The money has a specific job: build the first modular commercial reactor in Oakland. The plant's targets are concrete enough to be held against the company later - roughly 5,000 tonnes of hydrogen and 15,000 tonnes of graphite a year, assembled from about twenty modular reactors.

The cheapest clean hydrogen on the planet - and a supply chain that comes home

Molten states its ambition plainly: produce the lowest-cost, cleanest hydrogen on the planet, and decarbonize heavy industry while doing it. The graphite half of the equation carries a quieter mission - onshoring the battery supply chain so that the materials inside an American EV do not depend entirely on a factory an ocean away.

It is a tidy alignment of climate and self-interest, which tends to be the only kind that scales. Steel wants cheaper clean hydrogen. Carmakers want domestic graphite. Methane producers want somewhere to send their waste gas. Molten is betting it can stand in the middle of all three and take a cut.

Why the steel mill matters

Hard tech is unforgiving. A clever reactor on a bench is not a plant, and a plant is not a profit. Molten still has to prove the modular machine works at commercial scale, hold its cost targets, and find buyers for both products at once. Plenty of methane-pyrolysis ventures are chasing the same chemistry - Monolith, Modern Hydrogen, C-Zero among them - and incumbents have made graphite for decades.

But the logic is durable. As long as batteries need graphite and industry needs clean hydrogen, a machine that makes both from waste gas, on American soil, without emitting carbon, is the kind of thing the world keeps needing more of.

So return to West Oakland, to that shed that should have been a brewery. The reactor is still getting white-hot. Methane goes in. Hydrogen and graphite come out. The carbon, for once, never reaches the sky - it leaves the building in a sack, with a price on it. A steel mill that forgot to die, quietly trying to keep the rest of us alive.