Boson Energy started up in Luxembourg back in 2008, when the idea of producing hydrogen from waste and biomass--the company’s mission--had very little public traction. “Nobody was interested in hydrogen,” Zatterstrom says.
But now, he continues, the world is starting to catch up. In the last couple of years, interest in hydrogen has exploded. “We believe that gasification [in this case the converting of garbage into hydrogen] has reached its Tesla moment,” says the communications chief, completing the analogy by pointing out that electric cars existed for a century before automaker Tesla managed to bring them into the mainstream.
“Tesla realised that building an electric car is not enough. You have to invest just as much, if not more, into charging infrastructure to make electric cars work.” Gasification is on the cusp of such a larger systemic shift, he says, adding that Boson Energy one of “a handful of other players in the world” that is already developing commercial projects. He also specifies that, while electric cars require a lot of infrastructure, gasification doesn’t: “The challenge is rather to build a robust system that fits into a sector-coupling business case.”
The waste-into-hydrogen future
In effect, if gasification goes mainstream, it will mean that instead of incinerating waste/biomass or chucking it into landfills--the two most common methods of dealing with it currently--it could be used to speed-charge vehicles or to produce green methanol (used to make plastics, paints, marine fuel), urea (used to make fertiliser, resins, adhesives) and cell glass (an insulating material). “If you ask me, you cannot get more circular than that,” says Zatterstrom, in summary of these many uses.
He also justifies waste conversion as a necessity, arguing that recycling and reusing can only get us so far. “The most advanced recycling economies in the world--Germany, Sweden, Norway--still have 40% to 60% refuse rates.” For him, waste is an inevitability. And unlike gas, coal, oil, wind, etc., he argues, non-recyclable waste is a resource that has nowhere to go if not into energy or all the way back to “virgin” molecules. “What makes waste interesting is that we have to use waste. We have to use it in some way.”
For Boson Energy, part of this particular future is also to that energy production goes local. Cofounder Wlodzimierz Blasiak, who began research on waste-to-hydrogen conversion back in the 1980s, had this concept from the start: “He had the vision to do this on a small scale everywhere,” explains Zatterstrom, “…to go away from a large-scale, centralised energy system--or complement it at least--with distributed solutions that are able to boost energy security locally and in a carbon neutral or negative way.”
Taking this vision abroad
Boson Energy has projects across Europe but, since 2014, has also taken particular interest in India. Why? “There’s a lot of people [there],” says Zatterstrom. “There’s a lot of waste. And it’s not taken care of properly.” In late 2022 the company made a declaration of intent to invest €100m in the state of Uttar Pradesh. It was also the first solid waste treatment technology globally to be accepted into the National Mission for Clean Ganga, an initiative to clean the Ganges River.
Asked to describe how cultural or other local factors affect the company’s projects in various world regions, Zatterstrom talks about the pre-existing situations on the ground.
For instance, in northern Europe, huge investments have been made in incineration technology, which Boson Energy seeks to replace with its hydrogen solution. “We usually call incineration the ‘fax machine of waste management’,” says Zatterstrom, illustrating how out-of-date he considers the practice. (“The problem is that [incineration] is not an end of waste--I mean, they have ash residues at 30% of the volume… and ash is very complicated to deal with… and now they’re coming up against the challenge of carbon capture… [which in order to meet] they would have to consume some 60% or more of the power they produce…” Incineration also burns the valuable molecules that can be converted into energy, he adds.)
In such places, Boson Energy sees itself as a next-generation technology. “We’re having very good discussions with incinerators,” Zatterstrom says, adding that these organisations are generally approaching a fork in the road: they can reinvest in incineration or find a new technology. “So that’s one scenario, kind of a brownfield scenario where we can upgrade, line by line, the lines in an incinerator.”
But in India--or some places in Europe, for that matter--incineration hasn’t made such inroads, which changes Boson Energy’s approach. According to Zatterstrom, Poland only incinerates about a tenth of its 10m tonnes of waste, while in India only a few of about 90 incinerators are actually functioning properly.
“There is an opportunity to leapfrog incineration,” he says, explaining that, for emerging economies like India’s or those in Africa, the business case for incineration is a tough one. “The incineration business model depends on gate fees to a large extent, which is what you are paid to receive the waste… if you are making €15-20 in profit per tonne of waste, and do that by charging an €80-100 gate fee, which is the case in Europe--if you then come to Africa or India and they pay you €20, you can imagine what happens with that profit.”
The profit potential that Boson Energy creates per tonne, according to the communications chief, is not €15-20 but more like €150-200. “So if we remove that gate fee, or reduce that gate fee, there’s still a business case.” Hence, the approach of skipping incineration altogether and going straight to waste/biomass conversion.
European politics
The European Clean Hydrogen Alliance--a European Commission initiative--has launched a series of groups (“roundtables” in the organisation’s parlance), each made up of some 30 companies, in order to further the rollout of clean hydrogen. Boson Energy sits on the Roundtable on Hydrogen Production along with “all of the major players in the space” in Zatterstrom’s phrasing.
“It’s very much electrolysis-focused,” the communications chief says of the roundtable, referring to a different method of producing hydrogen whereby electricity is used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. “We have the honour of representing [the process of getting] hydrogen from waste and other sustainable hydrocarbons.” Building a position for Boson Energy’s approach can be an uphill battle, he continues, because the electrolysis lobby is “very, very strong” and European regulations for waste-to-hydrogen model are still being drafted.
According to Zatterstrom, however, the tide may be turning in Boson Energy’s favour: “A lot of lobbying money is put into developing hydrogen in directions that are not always that useful,” he says, citing home heating as an example. “I think we will see… some sobriety in terms of how hydrogen can and will be used. And we are sitting quite comfortably there, because we’re not doing this for the hydrogen itself--we are doing this with hydrogen as a vector [for delivering] energy, molecules and construction material…”