Charting a path towards a clean-energy future is easier said than done. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that skepticism seems to be building around Omnis Energy, a startup that secured $200 million in funding from motivational speaker Tony Robbins two years ago for its promises to turn coal waste in hydrogen and other beneficial.
The Omnis website suggests that its technology would retro-fit coal-fired power plants to burn the commodity’s mining byproduct at temperatures half as hot as the sun, producing hydrogen and graphite. Hydrogen has the potential to be a clean source of power and is seen as the key part of advancing so-called “green steel” production that would create the important building material with fewer carbon emissions. Graphite is a crucial ingredient in producing the lithium-ion batteries commonly used in electric vehicles and the subject of U.S. trade tensions with dominant supplier China.
But the Journal’s reporting throws a bit of cold water on those ambitions, noting that Omnis, which has already reportedly returned $75 million of Robbin’s money, hasn’t explained or demonstrated how it will sustainably get coal waste to such high temperatures when the containers for such heat sources usually fail after such prolonged heat exposure.
The paper also notes that the man behind Omnis, Simon Hodson, has a history of running other companies that ran into trouble, including a packaging company that went bankrupt trying to mass-produce environmentally friendly Big Mac containers for McDonald’s. Robbins told the Journal that Hodson is either “the best con man in the world…or one of the smartest guys.”
An email address associated with Omnis bounced back when Quartz reached out to the company for comment.