In 2022, Via Separations had just finished a successful field test of their first-of-a-kind industrial separation technology, and instead of scaling up slowly, the company decided to build a commercial project that was 100 times larger than anything it had done before.
That choice put Via in a race against cash burn — and ultimately led to unexpected costs and challenges for the team.
“I’ll be honest. I had some moments where I said, ‘Are we going to finish this project? And how am I going to align all the parties that we have here?’” co-founder and CEO Sheya Dave said, speaking on the latest episode of The Green Blueprint podcast.
The challenges included serving as their own general contractor and choosing a site in Alberta, Canada, thousands of miles from their Boston headquarters. But their decision to pursue the 100x path set them on a harrowing path. Now having completed the project, which began operations in May, Dave is certain it was the right choice, but there were moments when the team asked itself, “is this worth it?”
“There are very few climate tech companies who can say they’re operating at commercial scale and that the customer is accepting the product,” she said. “And it’s a lonely place to be the only one and not know what’s on the other side in the thick of things.”
The stakes for the company were high. Dave wanted to prove that their first-of-a-kind technology — a graphene-dioxide membrane — could cut costs and emissions for large industrial operations. A range of industries, from pharmaceutical plants to paper mills, use industrial separation to extract useful things from mixes, like chemicals from wood pulp. Often that process involves costly, energy-intensive evaporation — essentially boiling off liquid. The goal was to replace that energy-intensive process with Via’s proprietary membrane.
According to Dave, at the industrial scale the membrane eliminates 90% of the energy needed for thermal separations. It’s also electrifiable, more modular, and therefore demand responsive. But proving that vision depended on their path.
“Do we do the classic chemical engineering 10x, or do we go to a full commercial plant?” she wondered.
Of the two paths, “100x mattered to the customer” but was more difficult to engineer. Scaling 10x was easier to engineer, but was only “a step to getting to matter to the customer,” Dave explained. Via also found that important fixed costs and lead times were the same regardless of how ambitious the project was.
Despite the risks, in June 2022, they chose to scale up 100x, choosing a wood pulp mill in Alberta, Canada as their first site. Choosing the site put their plans in a race against time. Because of the extreme Alberta winter, they would have to break ground by June 2023; any later and the ground would be frozen.
“If we delayed the project, then we were going to need to raise more capital in order to manage our burn to complete the project,” she said.
The mill was also thousands of miles away from their main offices in Boston. They chose the Alberta site over a different, closer option because of a strong relationship with the company behind the mill, International Paper. Dave explained that the team there was “incredibly enthusiastic and knowledgeable” and supportive of “shepherding a new technology.”
“When we were negotiating that contract, it was very explicit to all of us that this was the first commercial system,” she said. “Before that, we’d never delivered a project before, and some might look at that and say, ‘Well, why are you admitting that?’ And the way we looked at it was, ‘let’s be honest and open and transparent from the get-go with the customer so that — when we hit a road bump, because we will — we are all in the same boat together.”
One major road bump was labor costs. Instead of hiring a dedicated firm for engineering, procurement, and construction, they decided to serve as their own general contractor. It was a move meant to build engineering experience and drive down future costs. It would also help with speed. But as a general contractor with no single fixed-price contract to protect them, Via was “exposed to cost overages.” The project had to compete with high-paying construction jobs on the nearby Alberta oil sands.
“And as a result, it’s very rural. And labor is more expensive than other projects that we were considering,” Dave said. “We knew that, but we did not know to what extent until we were in process with the customer. So I think that was not an unknown-unknown so much as an area where the extent of the known was not complete.”
On top of unexpected costs, the distance from Boston also meant long trips and long stays on site in the middle of winter, an experience that took a toll on the team.
“I can remember a moment [in] a weekend board meeting, talking to the group, and coming out of it thinking, ‘Okay, this is what it takes. This is what people talk about. Startups are hard … This is what tough tech is. And if anyone can do it, this team can do it.’”
In the end, they did complete the project. And Dave learned a lot.
“One thing I would have done differently is recruited the project delivery team sooner,” she said. “I think I made some assumptions about what the company needed in the moment versus what the company needed a year or two years from that moment.”
But there were also things they wouldn’t have changed.
“I would say one thing we did correctly was picking our partner,” she added. “I think that the fact that when things were hard, we could feel confident that we were also sharing that as opposed to hiding that — I think that that was a big piece of value.”
This story borrows from an interview that appeared on The Green Blueprint, a Latitude Media podcast.
