ABQ Journal: BayoTech to power hydrogen fill-up services
Originally published by Kevin Robinson-Avila, Staff Writer at ABQ Journal, on June 27, 2020
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Albuquerque-based BayoTech Inc. could soon provide hydrogen fill-up centers and direct-to-customer deliveries across the U.S. and Canada through a new partnership with Connecticut-based Cross River Infrastructure Partners.
Cross River, which provides financing and business development services to help sustainable technology companies build relationships with end users, will work with BayoTech to deploy the Albuquerque firm’s mobile hydrogen generators in strategic locations around North America to deliver low-cost hydrogen to customers. The partners will form a new gas-as-a-service company, Cross Hydrogen, to allow end users who don’t want to buy or lease BayoTech’s mobile generators to produce hydrogen themselves to instead receive deliveries from strategically-deployed units installed and operated by the new company, said BayoTech Chief Financial Officer Wendy Rollstin.
“We’ve been working on providing our equipment to customers for them to use, but many have asked to instead get hydrogen delivered to them, so now we’ll offer that as a gas-as-a-service option,” Rollstin said. “Cross River will finance and develop the deployment sites, and BayoTech will provide all the equipment to the new company, service the equipment, and potentially operate the equipment ourselves as the sales agent. We’ll also deliver gas to individual sites if that’s what customers want.”
Cross River has established similar partnerships with nearly a half dozen sustainable technology firms since launching in 2017 to deploy new options in carbon capture, agriculture and waste management such as waste-to-energy projects, said president Aaron Ratner.
“We work with growing, but established companies like BayoTech that can benefit from offering their technology as a service,” Ratner said. “We structure agreements, contracts and the business platform to get the service to market. We have capital providers behind us.”
The partners expect to deploy the first hydrogen generators at strategic sites in early 2021.
“We expect the sites to serve more than one customer,” Rollstin said. “We’ll concentrate on areas with various customers, such as the growing fueling-station market in California.”
BayoTech’s compact, mobile hydrogen generators, which fit in a 40-foot cargo container, are designed for easy transportation to provide on-site production. The company, which launched in 2015, licensed its base technology from Sandia National Laboratories, which invested $50 million to advance the original concept and platform.
BayoTech has raised $16 million in private equity to date to build out the generating platform, with first sales beginning this year in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. It currently employs 30 people at a 15,000-square-foot facility near Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta Park. It’s partnered with Farmington-based manufacturer Process Equipment & Service Co. to build its hydrogen production machines.