Sierra Energy’s FastOx Technology: The Key to Ending Landfills?

Sierra Energy’s FastOx Technology is revolutionizing the way we handle waste by turning garbage into clean, renewable energy! In this episode of the Octopart podcast "CTRL+LISTEN," James Sweetlove sits down with Mike Hart, the visionary CEO of Sierra Energy and Sierra Railroad Company, to discuss how his innovative technology is set to eliminate landfills and fuel a new era of sustainable energy.

Discover how FastOx gasification converts waste into valuable products like hydrogen, syngas, and even molten metals, providing a cleaner alternative to traditional waste disposal methods. Mike shares his journey in building America’s first hydrogen-powered locomotive, the challenges faced in bringing this technology to life, and why it’s the key to a zero-emission future.

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Episode highlights:

• "Gasification" + Train Power?
•  Aversion to Rail in the US? Pollution is Inefficient
• Sierra's Tech & Waste Reduction

Useful links:

Connect with Mike here

Learn more about Sierra here 

Transcript: 

James: Hi, everyone, welcome to the Octopart podcast, "CTRL+LISTEN," today, I have this very special guest for you. It is Mike Hart. He is the founder and CEO of both the Sierra Energy and Sierra Railroad Company. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Mike, it's great to have you.

Mike: Thank you. Appreciate being invited.

James: Anytime. To start, I guess, do you wanna tell people a little bit about both companies, their journey and your journey with them?

Mike: Sure, I've been the CEO of Sierra Railroad Company for 30 years now. We're a shortline railroad operator. We operate all over California. I think we're in eight counties right now where we operate both freight and passenger operations. We operate tourist railroads like the skunk train up in Fort Bragg or the River Fox tourist train over in Sacramento. We are the inventors of electric assist rail bikes, which we operate on those railroads, so it's a lot of fun. But our main business is freight and we handle over 14,000 carloads a year freight from our different operations. We operate the Port of West Sacramento, Concord Naval Weapons Station, Sierra Railroad out in the Gold Country down in Ventura. We operate the Sunburst tourist operation in addition to freight down there. So we do a lot of railroading all over California. The Sierra Energy came about 20 years ago. I was looking for ways to reduce our carbon footprint as a railroad, and we hit on the idea of biodiesel. In fact, we were the first rare in America to operate on a hundred percent biodiesel. The USEPA named us Environmental Heroes for the work we were doing 20 plus years ago, but my friends, where I graduated at UC Davis, kept needling me saying, you can do better than biodiesel. You know, that takes crops, so what can you do differently? So we hit on the idea of using garbage. And so we created the company Sierra Energy, just about 20 years ago now, and the idea to take any form of waste, trash of any sort and convert it to fuel. As we've gone through the stages of doing this over the years, turned out you can do it really effectively. The technology that we've developed with Sierra Energy is called FastOx, and that technology takes any kind of waste. People go, "Oh, you mean plastics?" It's like, no, the whole black bag, you don't even have to peek inside. We put it into our system and we inject oxygen and steam, and the oxygen reacts with the carbon that's in the waste itself to create a very high temperature. We operate at 2,200 degrees Celsius, so an extraordinarily high temperature, over 4,000 F, but at that temperature, all waste breaks down, and so you end up with either molten metal, so all the metals that were in that waste are recovered, inorganic slags, that means all the glass, rock, dirt, ash, anything like that that was in the way waste melts and is recovered as a glassy slag. That's actually a product that can be used as a cement replacement. Everything else is synthesis gas, and that synthesis gas, or syngas, is carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

James: So that process is what, if we go to your website, you see it called gasification. That's what you're talking about?

Mike: That's right.

James: Okay.

Mike: Yeah, it's the gasification process that we've developed.

James:  And you're saying that you're fusing that technology with the train, so using that gas that you're creating from the Sierra energy to power the trains for the railroad?

Mike: That's right. And so we take that synthesis gas, or syngas, and we can make a variety of things with it. Fuel is one, but you can also make fertilizer, protein. There are companies that take syngas to protein, but on the list of things that you can make, probably the most high demand item we're getting from around the world right now is hydrogen. And so for a metric ton, a thousand kilograms of trash, we can create 100 kilograms of hydrogen. And so hydrogen, extraordinarily valuable right now. People are looking for it all over the world. You can just make it out of garbage. And so that's our focus right now is making hydrogen. And so what we did years ago, we decided to start converting our locomotives to operate on hydrogen, which means we'd have zero emissions from operating trains. I mean, railroads are already the lowest emission way of moving anything across the country on a per ton basis. Trucks can't even come close. But what's fascinating is that if you then run on hydrogen, you're then moving all of that with zero emissions. So it's pretty exciting stuff. We now have America's first American-built hydrogen locomotive operating over in West Sacramento.

James:  Wow, that's very cool. I was gonna ask you this later in the interview, but I think it kind of ties in here. Do you see that in the US, the general aversion to rail transportation is holding back the evolution or progression of technology like this?

Mike: Yeah, it's funny, most people don't understand that railroads have never in history hauled more freight than they are today. People always think, oh, railroads, that was something, you know, back in the '40s or something before the highways and everything. It's like, no, it's the total amount of material that's moved is skyrocketing. I mean, that's just a fact. So as a percentage, railroads are hauling less of a total percentage of all the material hauled, but in absolute tons, it's never been higher than it is today. And railroads have never been more efficient than they are today. So we're trying to take them to that next step where we're now going to be moving all of that material with zero emissions, so. Now in your question about, is the aversion, I think the problem was is that it was subsidized opportunism. And that is that if somebody's basically gonna let you build your factory five miles away from the railroad out in the middle of nowhere, and where the land is cheap, well, that's fine because the highways cost nothing. And the truckers, you know, they don't work for much. So all of a sudden, you've pushed all of that transportation from low emission, low-carbon solutions on rail, and you've pushed it out onto the highways where we get to share with those truckers every day as those factories get the benefit of using free publicly subsidized highways. And the tragedy of the commons is all of that pollution is what we have to live with instead of what used to be more efficient is that you put big shippers on rail so the material can be moved at the lowest possible cost as well as with the lowest amount of pollution.

James: Yeah, yeah, on rails-

Mike: It's changing.

James:  A lot of the time that leads to the ports obviously, so straight from the factory, rail, ports, ship from there, if it's going internationally or somewhere far away in the US.

Mike: There's a lot of motivation right now globally, not just in the United States, where people are trying to reduce their carbon footprint, industries around the world, whether there's government involvement, whether government incentives, it doesn't make much of a difference. Everyone is trying to do better, and as they're looking at their carbon footprint, they're going, why is our factory over here instead of over there? I mean, why aren't we on rail? Why aren't we on some, you know, low-emission network? Because that's our biggest part of our footprint. Well, right, they're making those changes. And so across the country right now, industries are relocating to rail and railroads are dramatically reducing those emissions as a result.

James: Fantastic. Do you think that shift is completely to do with, I guess, efficiency and the carbon footprint, or do you think some of it's being part of the shift since COVID to restructure the way the business has done and make it more efficient overall?

Mike: Well, I'm sure COVID had a role, and it seems to have a role in everything these days, but I think the reality is that industry is looking for efficiency. Pollution is inefficient, it's inherently inefficient. And so industry looks for ways to try and, you know, get rid of that, and they try to look for what's the lowest cost, way of moving things. As government starts realizing that, wow, you know, carbon taxes and trying to target, you know, those high polluting trucks, as that starts to happen, that is a huge impact. I mean, right now, with two crew members, I can move a hundred car train that is the equivalent of 200 to 400 truckers with two men at an emission of something like 1/20th or 1/50th of the total emissions. And so the efficiency is staggering. And so people are beginning to wake up to the fact that railroads really are the solution. And now as we're substituting out, right now, my railroad has the lowest emission fleet in America, per unit, the lowest emission fleet in the entire country. As we now are shifting to hydrogen, we'll now be moving towards the first zero-emission fleet in America, I think where we've got 42 tier-three locomotives, which since that's what we have as a fleet, that means we have the lowest emission fleet, and as we're adding the zero-emission locomotives coming in, it's moving us all the way beyond that.

James: Wow, and I think that kind of puts you ahead of the game as far as regulation goes, because I know we've been watching Europe pretty closely, seeing what's happening with there, because they're really regulating that emission space. And there's some expectations, obviously, that the US is going to follow suit, maybe not immediately but in the next, you know, sort of few years.

Mike: The California Air Resource Board is a first mover. They're trying very hard right now to reduce the carbon impact of transportation. They made an agreement with the trucking industry where they're basically giving them a massive subsidy to try and shift trucks, starting with the dredge units that operate at ports, moving them to electric, hydrogen, things like that. They're trying to encourage the trucks to make that shift. Since trucks are generally regulated by the state, that is something they have a tremendous amount of ability to make that change. Railroads, on the other hand, are federally governed. So California Resource Board is taking actions, trying to create their, a nexus where they have more authority over railroads. I don't think they'll be successful with that, but I think the message is clear from what happened with the trucking. If they provide sufficient support for the railroads to make that transition to low emissions, it's going to happen. We're now making it available here in California voluntarily. So we're doing it ourselves first, and as I said, we're operating in eight counties. Our plan right now is we're going to build a factory here in California on rail, but as we build that factory, to build hydrogen locomotives, that'll be available throughout the state for the 260 plus locomotives that are used by shortline railroads, at least initially. And then obviously, the class ones, the big railroads, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe out here. We'll certainly make it available to them as well.

James:  So just jumping back a little bit to the energy production side of things. How big of a role could technology like this come to play in the future for both the gas generation and waste reduction?

Mike: I think the thing to keep in mind is that the world is creating 2.2 billion tons of trash a year right now. When you think about that on a daily basis, that's a line of garbage trucks stretching from San Francisco to New York City, bumper to bumper every single day. That is a staggering amount of waste. If you're able to convert that waste using our technology, because we can, you'll be able to create enough hydrogen, for example, to replace the energy requirements of diesel, for example, in the United States. So there is a huge amount of energy embedded in that waste, but instead of burning it, which is like what an incinerator will do, if an incinerator, it puts air in, and so you end up with a huge volume of pollution coming out of the stack. We inject oxygen and so the gas we emit is a product instead of a pollution. So that product we're creating actually has high value. And so instead of burning trash, which makes a marginally efficient amount of electricity, we have a dramatically more efficient solution that could make electricity, fuel, hydrogen, or just whatever, for example, with fertilizer, I mean, what are the places we import fertilizer from right now? The Middle East, China, Russia. It would be awesome if we could make it ourselves from our own trash or biomass leftover from farming operations, right? So any of those stock

James: Right, right. This is the best opportunity.

Mike: To make our own fertilizer using our FastOx technology.

James: Ah, especially, I mean, like, you're not only getting rid of waste in a clean way, but your byproduct is something that people are, like you said, really desperate to get their hands on. So it's a win-win all around.

-Mike: Well, you know, the funny thing is that when you throw a ton of trash into a landfill, you create two tons of greenhouse gas and people go, "Ah, doesn't make sense. The math doesn't work." It actually does, because what you create is methane, and methane is 86 times more impactful, as a greenhouse gas, than CO2. And so if you really want to have an impact on our carbon footprint as a planet, the first place you should be focusing is methane. CO2 is interesting. Methane is a problem. And governments around the world are beginning to recognize that. But if you can stop that waste from going into the landfill in the first place, prevent those tons of CO2 equivalent of methane from going into the atmosphere, convert it first to clean energy, you can then offset a fossil fuel at the same time. So it's a double win. You're preventing one kind of pollution and replacing another one with a zero emission fuel.

James: It's very impressive. It's seems like a no brainer that that's the path we should go down.

Mike: You know, we're a 20-year-old startup for a reason. And that is, I have to say that as a CEO of Sierra Energy, we self-funded for many of those years. Finally, in 2019, we raised our first outside capital led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. I think Bill Gates' organization, Cox Enterprises, BNP Paribas outta France, a number of other investors came in in that raise. I think we raised about $37 million in that raise to commercialize the company. But I have to applaud those people for their vision and their help in getting there, because what was frustrating for all of those years before, people adhere what you just heard, you can prevent greenhouse gas from the trash, prevent the need for landfills and all the toxic leaching that goes into the soils and everything else, a hundred percent recycling, zero emissions, and you replace fossil fuels. This sounds too good to be true. That phrase right there has caused us more harm as a company than anything else because people hear, they hear all this and they go, "Nah, that can't be right." And so it took the leadership of these sorts of organizations to actually do the technical due diligence. The US Army became our partner, California Energy Commission, but they had to do those deep dives in going, wow, this is really true. You can do exactly what you're saying. But that took years to get past all of the people being concerned that just sounded too good to be true. Now that we've gotten past that, we have now received, I think, over 10,000 requests from around the world, from different organizations, mostly communities, businesses that are looking to do something better with their waste than what they're doing right now, or to create some sort of fuel that they need for their processes. I think we've got ammonia in South Africa, renewable natural gas in Eastern Europe to replace Russian natural gas, sustainable aviation fuel in Singapore, ethanol in the Midwest, hydrogen all over the place. But in each of these cases, people are making something that they need from waste.

James: That's fantastic. That's just one more way that we can combat, you know, climate change and actually reduce carbon footprint. It's awesome. So I was gonna ask you as well, I remember reading on your site, you had a special project out at, I think it's Fort Hunter Liggett.

Mike: That's right, yeah-

James: You wanna tell us a bit about that?

Mike: Yeah, so in 2019 when we raised our financing, our series A from our investor group, we were able to commission our first commercial facility there in partnership with the US Army at Fort Hunter Liggett in Monterey County, California. Great partners. And they wanted to be the first zero waste and zero net energy facility between what they have in solar. But the problem for the military is, is that, you know, you can only fight, you know, wars when the sun's shining, you actually have to have some ability to create power around the clock. And so our gas fire creates that opportunity to run 24/7 from just waste. So they've been great partners in developing our facility there, which we've been able to operate and demonstrate how the technology works, come up with the improvements we need to go to full scale commercial for other users, and we're now moving on to do that. So Fort Hunter Liggett has been a huge step for us in commercializing the technology.

James: Wow, so structure-wise, how big is the actual building or facility required to perform this operation?

Mike: Shockingly small. The facility is less than an acre to handle a, let's say, a community of let's say 50,000 people, it would be less than an acre for the facility itself. Now, since we're in California, California has very strict rules about not only emissions, but also about how you handle recycling. And so it's very important in California that you pull out the recycling that you're able to first, after that's been pulled out, the waste that's left over typically is dumped into a landfill. We'll take it after that. In other words, that we'll take after the recycling has been done. And so the perfect location for us is next to a recycling facility where someone has done that recycling, pulled out whatever they can of high value. For example, aluminum, doesn't do us any good. It just goes into the mixed metals. It's much better if you pull it out first. Organic waste, you know, your food scraps. Where I live, we give it to the chickens. But if you throw that in your trash, it's just a bunch of water, really, smelly water. If the organics have been pulled out, it actually increases our throughput of our system. So we love it when they pull out the organics. If there's high value plastics, sure, you can pull them out, but we can handle all of the plastics, whatever is in there, we can take it all. You don't need to sort it out. Interestingly, one of the companies we're talking to right now, they wanna do cradle to cradle plastic. And that is that they wanna be able to take all of the plastics. Our waste is just littered with different kinds of plastic and only a couple really can be recycled, the rest of it's just garbage. People dutifully pull it out of their trash, they put it in a container, and then the recycling companies take it and put it back in the dump, 'cause people really don't understand most of it really can't be recycled. What we do is we take the whole waste stream with all of those different plastics, turn it into synthesis gas, CO and H2, you can make plastic from, so you can make virgin plastic from the syngas that's made from that entire waste stream. So we don't care which number plastic it is, it all looks the same to us. 4,000 degrees, it really doesn't matter what it was. It all turns to gas and all the metal rings and the contaminants in it and the, you know, the change you left in your trash bag accidentally, all of it, the metals melt, so they're a hundred percent recycled. The organics are basically turned into gas and then that plastic is turned to a synthesis gas that can be recovered. In California, about 20% of all waste is water. And so we capture all of that. So we don't need water for our system. And people always ask this question, I could explain this for an hour and after the show, somebody's gonna say, so what kind of energy do they use to run that thing? Is it natural gas? And it's like, no, we don't need external energy to operate our system. It's driven by the carbon in the waste itself. That's an important thing to point out. Exactly. Now it is true that we do use electricity to get it started or we use some sort of a gas or something like that, but just basically a thermal boost to get the system started. But once you get it running, it runs for pretty much continuously. So that is, it's a common question people ask. They go, where does the oxygen come from? Good question. 20% of the energy that we create needs to be consumed back into the system to create that oxygen. And it's called a parasitic load. So we lose about 20% of our total energy production to actually drive the process. But that's already factored into our outputs.

James: Quickly, you mentioned that ideal place for you is next to a recycling center. We actually had a guest on the show a little while back that had a fully AI-automated recycling offering, which just made me think of that and how useful that would be in California to you with the removal of those specific types of plastics and metals. So if you were next to a facility like that, it did all the automatic sorting and then right next door brought the finished product over to you. I imagine there would be an incredibly efficient process of actually running that system.

Mike: It's funny, one of the AI companies that I talk to pretty often, they actually have live market pricing going on in their AI about what's the value of aluminum metal? What's that value of this plastic? That plastic? And so when their sorters going back and forth very quickly, going through the waste stream, they're optimizing for highest value on the recycling. And so at some point, a number of products don't make sense to recycle or at least pull it out of the waste stream so they can feed it to us continuously. It's a fantastic opportunity for us to work with a recycler like that where they are optimizing for either the value to make syngas or the value as an end product, 'cause there are a number of processes like pyrolysis, anaerobic digestion. There are other technologies that do very low temperature, but they need to be very specific about one part of the waste stream is all they can handle. And so I'm perfectly fine working with them. We're just the goalie that doesn't let anything get past us, let them-

James: Everything else.

Mike: We sit at the end to make sure it's a hundred percent recyclable. But yeah, we're cooperatively with any kind of recycler, anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, whatever.

James: Awesome, so coming up to the end of the discussion, I want to ask you, are there any trends in the renewable energy space that stood out to you recently that people should be sort of keeping eye on or paying attention to?

Mike: In the energy space?

James: Mm-hmm.

Mike: Yeah, I think one of the things that a lot of folks are paying attention to right now is hydrogen. I mean, that is the opportunity to shift away from conventional fossil fuels to hydrogen. The problem is, right now, the people that are making the most money off of that shift are the oil and gas companies. Because to make hydrogen almost, well, not all of it, but an enormous percentage in the high nineties of where it's coming from is from natural gas. So you're taking a fossil fuel, you're cracking it to make, it's called steam methane reforming, but you take that and you make hydrogen. And so it is a potentially very polluting process. So hydrogen has a bad reputation because of the way it's made traditionally. And so they, unfortunately, are the big beneficiaries of all of the hydrogen activities that are going on right now. I think as people are beginning to go, okay, hydrogen could work, they're starting to shift towards the focus on renewable hydrogen. Their vast complex is being developed across the country and the thousands of acres of solar panels where they'll use solar wind to take water, crack it through a process called electrolysis where you can take water and turn it into hydrogen. That's a dramatically better solution from a carbon perspective for the planet. What's interesting is that those electrolyzers are very expensive and if you're using solar, for example, like most of these projects are, that means you're only able to run those for a relatively short period of time while it's sunny out and your expensive electrolyzer than sits around having nothing better to do for the rest of the evening and such. Putting our gasifier along with those solar panels has a double benefit. One is it keeps electrolyzers working around the clock 24/7, much higher efficiency. But the cool thing is, is that when you crack water to make hydrogen, your waste product is oxygen, right? You captured the hydrogen, which is the feedstock we need to run our process. So putting us next to an electrolyzer has a massive reduction in costs and can cut the cost in half of that hydrogen going to market and make it dramatically more carbon effective because you're now preventing methane from going into the atmosphere by taking that waste and adding that hydrogen that's coming from the sun. So it's a great combination and so those opportunities are coming up now all over the world. So it's a very exciting time for our company.

James: Fascinating. I didn't realize that. And then lastly, the last thing I want to ask is, are there any upcoming projects or anything exciting coming up that we should be keeping an eye on from the company?

Mike: Yeah, we're actually, we have been focused as a licensing company just supporting other people's projects around the world. Probably the first six projects of our gasifier, which will be in the hundreds of tons of waste per day, will all be done by other large companies using our gasifier as part of their process. We are now going to shift into development as well. So following the successes with those, our plan is to start building our own facilities starting in California, a very large project we have in mind right now, I can't name the location, but it's a very large project that we're working on at this point. But the idea is that we're now shifting into becoming a development company and I think we're gonna give the public an opportunity to participate with us and we'll be looking for investors in the not too distant future.

James: Oh, exciting. And then finally, if people want to follow along with the company, what's the best place to do that apart from the websites-

Mike: Our website, sierraenergy.com-

James: And social media?

Mike: Yeah, we're also on Facebook, and I'm sure we're on all the other things. I don't do that, but I'm sure we're on all the platforms you might've heard of. But it's sierraenergy.com is the thing that, I'm old school, I can barely figure out emails, so I'm still working on it, but we do have it out there, and so yeah, welcome people, letting us know they're interested and we'll be in touch with those folks that reach out to us.James: Fantastic.

James: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been fascinating talking with you.

Mike: James, I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. It's been a great time talking with you.

James: Thank you. And for anyone watching, come back next time. We'll have another guest for you.