Ekona in 2024: Year-end Update
It’s been a whirlwind of a year, and the pace hasn’t slowed since we shared a mid-year update in May. Here are some milestones and highlights from the last six months, as we head into 2025.
Expansion activities continued in Burnaby: work at our Burnaby Test Facility has been ongoing throughout 2024 and we are on track to complete the expansion and commissioning of our 200-kilogram-per-day pilot plant in the new year. Onsite development and testing of our xCaliber™ reactor test platform also continued, and we’ve been making upgrades to our office and administration facilities, too.
We began construction at Ekona Gold Creek: Ekona Gold Creek is our clean hydrogen field demonstration at ARC Resources’ Gold Creek Natural Gas Plant near Grande Prairie, Alberta. Team Ekona has been hard at work throughout the year, preparing for the construction and commissioning phases of the field demonstration. We kicked off construction in September with a push to advance the project as far as we could before the onset of winter (read more on that here).
We opened an Alberta office: there’s a lot of interest and support for Ekona and our technology in Alberta; we needed to have a home base in the province. In January 2024, we moved into the Energy Transition Centre – a collaborative hub in downtown Calgary focused on accelerating the development and commercialization of clean energy technologies.
Our carbon-management program ramped up: how we capture and utilize the solid carbon we produce is a critical consideration as we scale production. We’ve recently completed a program with the National Research Council to test carbon black in asphalt cement, and plan to expand this program in 2025. In late November, the BC Centre for Innovation and Clean Energy (CICE) announced funding for solid carbon management activities at Ekona. This funding will help us enhance our testing capabilities, evaluate, and improve our carbon quality, and explore application-focused initiatives for our carbon, including in soil remediation and construction materials.
Minister Wilkinson came to visit: in July, we were proud to host the Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, at our Burnaby HQ. During the visit, the Minister announced a $1M investment in our methane pyrolysis solution for clean hydrogen production from natural gas. This builds on the success of a previous Ekona program supported by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), through the Breakthrough Energy Solutions Canada Program. The new round of funding continues to support ongoing reactor development and the expansion of the Burnaby Pilot Plant (read more here). We also hosted several Canadian Trade Commission visits throughout the year and are always thrilled to share our story, technology, and opportunity with countries around the world looking at ways to utilize their existing natural gas networks to produce clean hydrogen and decarbonize heavy industry.
We secured funding for a 20-tpd hydrogen production plant FEED study: we continue to raise funds to support the deployment and operation of Ekona Gold Creek, as well as further our commercial expansion activities, and are thankful for the ongoing engagement from all our funding partners and investors. In early December, we announced $1M in funding from NRCan and Alberta Innovates to support ongoing scale-up activities of our technology and the completion of a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) study for a 20-tonne-per-day (tpd) commercial clean hydrogen production plant in Alberta (learn more here).
Ongoing recognition for our cleantech innovation: we were humbled, once again, to make the Foresight 50 list (which recognizes Canada’s most investible cleantech ventures) and received another Global Clean Tech Challenge award from NGIF in the fall. We continue to take advantage of the many opportunities we have to tell our story at events around the province, the country, and the world. Some highlights for the year have included the BC Natural Resources Forum in Prince George, the Canadian Hydrogen Convention in Edmonton, CERAWeek in Houston, and the Hydrogen Technology Expo Europe in Hamburg.
Stay tuned for what we are sure will be an exciting and action-packed new year! Sign up for our newsletter here, and follow us on LinkedIn here.
