Transforming the techno-economics of decarbonization in California’s bespoke industrial sector with a scalable front-end engineering AI
Skyven Technologies, Inc.
Recipient
Richardson, TX
Recipient Location
$1,110,492
Amount Spent
Completed
Project Status
Project Result
This project ended in Fall of 2024, resulting in the publication of the final project report. Results from the project were promising, as the Galileo platform was able to reduce the time it takes from the initial technical call with a customer to a completed decarbonization report to as low as 24 hours, compared to the four months that it would take to generate a similar report by hand; this far exceeds the factor of 4 timeline reduction goal. Additionally, Galileo costs 93 percent less and requires 90 percent fewer person-hours to produce a report than typical hand calculations. To date, Galileo has been used to scope projects at more than 135 manufacturing facilities in a variety of sectors, including chemicals (ethanol, sugar beets, plastics), pulp and paper (paper mill, consumer paper goods), and food and beverage (dairies, breweries, snack products), unlocking more than 4.3 million metric tons of potential greenhouse gas savings (the equivalent of the amount of emissions produced by 934,782 cars in a year) and more than $480 million in potential fuel cost savings for manufacturing facilities. As a validation test for the system, two pilot projects were analyzed using Galileo and the results were compared to best-in-class hand calculations.
View Final ReportThe Issue
Industrial decarbonization is critical to achieving California's greenhouse gas targets, however, exceptional variability and uniqueness exist among industrial plants. Sophisticated knowledge and expertise are necessary to conceptualize optimal decarbonization solutions for each facility's unique operations. Industrial manufacturers do not have the required expertise and are unable to judge the quality, fit, and risk of decarbonization measures. Furthermore, they cannot justify the cost and effort of hiring expert engineering consultants to perform front-end engineering, as the return on investment (ROI) cannot be known ahead of time.
Project Innovation
Skyven Technologies, Inc. will design and build a front-end engineer (FEE) artificial intelligence platform that will significantly reduce the time and cost of time-consuming and expensive engineering work needed for decarbonization projects in California's industrial sector. This project will build the FEE AI platform and pilot test the AI with non-expert users to create a study case for access to data and analysis. The proposed technology will demonstrate a scalable business model by cutting costs by 10x.
Project Goals
Project Benefits
The primary beneficiaries would be the industries themselves, in terms of lower overall operations costs coupled with efficiency and carbon-reduction benefits. This product will make it easier for industries to comply with AB 32. This technology is not expected to require public funding beyond TRL 6; Skyven Technologies will accomplish at-scale demonstration and deployment with private funding. This translates into positive benefits for California without need for ongoing state funds.
Affordability
Cost savings will be achieved via energy savings and fuel switching. While the exact amount of energy saved varies from project to project, the average Skyven project will save approximately 10 million kWh or 1 million therms annually.
Reliability
This project allows for greater industrial electrification, which supports greater grid reliability due to the baseload nature of the electrical loads. Adding baseload to the grid reduces the magnitude of the duck curve in proportion to the total grid load.
Subrecipients
VInay Chaudhri
DIM Group
Match Partners
Southwest Angel Network
