From Venture Capital to Energy Transformation: Key Insights from Massimiliano Pieri
Massimiliano Pieri, CEO & Co-Founder of Tulum Energy, shared his insights in this exclusive interview with Eqvista. A visionary leader in the energy innovation space, Massimiliano draws from a rich background spanning startup leadership, corporate venture capital, and clean energy advancement at global firms such as Eni.
During his conversation with Eqvista, he highlighted how Tulum Energy leverages methane pyrolysis with electric arc furnace technology, enabling high scalability and energy efficiency while keeping production costs competitive. Massimiliano’s leadership is focused on validating and de-risking this advanced technology through operational pilots, ensuring a reliable hydrogen supply and robust industrial integration. The recent $27 million seed round raised under his guidance underscores the company’s momentum and investor confidence, marking a pivotal step toward commercialization and global expansion.
This interview offers a window into Massimiliano’s commitment to sound techno-economics, risk management, and the transformation of clean industrial feedstocks for a sustainable energy future.
Massimiliano, you have a rich background spanning startup leadership, corporate venture capital, and energy innovation at global firms like Eni. How did your experiences shape the vision and mission that led you to co-found Tulum Energy focused on scalable clean hydrogen production?
The main lesson I learned, as an entrepreneur, executive and investor in the energy innovation space is the crucial role of scalability for new technologies to succeed. Unlike other industries, the challenges related to scaling up new technology in the energy space are the critical ones. Being able to produce 1kg of clean Hydrogen doesn’t mean that hundreds of tons of clean hydrogen per day can be economically produced…
When I was presented with the Tulum solution, I saw a technology which could be scaled effectively and economically to produce low carbon hydrogen. Hydrogen users are mainly industrial players – refineries, ammonia producers, chemical plants – who use hydrogen as a feedstock for their industrial operations. Most of them need hydrogen in the range of 1-10 ton/ hour, i.e. a lot of hydrogen! Tulum is designed to meet the needs of those customers.
Tulum Energy focuses on clean hydrogen using methane pyrolysis. What sets your approach apart in the hydrogen sector?
Methane pyrolysis has been around for several decades, and different methane pyrolysis concepts have been experimented by several companies, both startups and big corporations. Methane pyrolysis has the potential to overcome the economic and infrastructural hurdles that have held back the development of green and blue hydrogen.
Nevertheless, several technical challenges have prevented many methane pyrolysis from succeeding thus far. What sets Tulum approach apart from other methane pyrolysis approaches is the combination of high scalability and high energy efficiency, which leads to competitive hydrogen production costs, even excluding incentives and proceeds from the sale of solid carbon.
If I have to list our key differentiators, I would say:
- The repurposing of existing and commercially available components and machinery. We use an electric arc furnace (EAF) as a high temperature heat source to crack the methane molecule, derived from the equipment currently used to smelt iron in the steel making industry. EAFs are big machines which can meet our target volumes for hydrogen production.
- The absence of catalysts.
- The very high efficiency of our system, which is at the core of our techno-economics.
What are the main challenges with current hydrogen production, and how do you address them?
Most of the hydrogen is currently produced through steam methane reforming (gray hydrogen), a solution that is both energy and carbon intensive. There are ways to produce low-carbon hydrogen, namely green hydrogen (splitting the molecule of water through renewable energy), and blue hydrogen, which adds a CO2 capturing system downstream the steam reformer. Both have substantial infrastructural and economic limitations:
- Green hydrogen has a very high energy consumption, c.a. 5X what Tulum targets, which, combined with the high costs of electrolyzers, leads to very high hydrogen production costs.
- Blue hydrogen requires the availability of a reservoir to store CO2 downstream the hydrogen production facility: a rare combination to be found.
Methane pyrolysis, and Tulum in particular, can solve these problems.
What unique technological hurdles did Tulum Energy face in repurposing electric arc furnace technology for methane pyrolysis, and how were they overcome?
Our electric arc furnace (EAF) is similar, but of course not identical to the EAFs used in the steel making industry. There are differences related to the architecture of electrodes, for instance. Plus, EAFs used in the steel making industry are designed for batch production, whilst Tulum EAFs will work continuously. We have the know-how and IP to ensure we can effectively repurpose the EAFs into hydrogen production reactors. And we can also rely on the expertise and skills of Tenova, our spinout partner and technology provider, to do so.
With your pilot plant hosted by Ternium, what are the key technical and operational KPIs you hope to validate before broader rollout?
To put it simply: our pilot needs to achieve two main technical milestones:
- De-risking the technology at system level, producing hydrogen continuously, at the expected yield and with the expected purity.
- Validate the solid carbon’s morphology. Our models and calculations give us a good idea about what our solid carbon morphology will look like, but only the pilot operations can validate that.
How do you approach industrial customer concerns about reliability, continuous supply, and integration with existing infrastructure for both hydrogen and carbon?
With some exceptions, the customers of hydrogen and solid carbon are different ones. That is the main challenge of commercializing methane pyrolysis: this is a technology which makes two different products (hydrogen and solid carbon), with different markets, customers and needs. Tulum is designed for the centralized production of hydrogen on a large scale, meaning we will build our plants close to our customers’ facilities to directly sell them the hydrogen and handle the commercialization of the solid carbon.
As our customers use hydrogen as feedstock for their industrial operations, the reliability of the supply is critical to them. Through our Pilot, we want to prove to them we can deliver hydrogen continuously and reliably.
How do funding, policy, and lifecycle emissions shape your global expansion plans, specifically in Europe and the Americas?
Tulum technology can be deployed wherever gas and electricity infrastructure are present. The key drivers for our production costs are the gas and electricity prices, meaning that we can be competitive wherever the electricity and gas prices are cheap enough. The geographies we are targeting are the Americas (North, Central and South) and Middle East. Europe can also be an opportunity, especially for biogas projects. When biogas instead of methane as a feedstock is used, Tulum technology becomes carbon negative, instead of carbon neutral, which opens new doors for us, where reductions of CO2 can be monetized.
Congratulations on the $27M seed round! How do those resources accelerate Tulum Energy’s commercialization goals?
The funding will be almost entirely devoted to the construction of our pilot plant in Mexico. We deliberately decided to avoid building a benchtop prototype, just because we knew well that something too small would not have removed the technological risk we will face on a commercial scale. Therefore, we went straight to a substantial SEED round, that will allow us to remove the technical risk and make us ready for a commercial deployment
Does securing this level of funding signal changing attitudes among European and global investors toward “turquoise” hydrogen versus green or blue hydrogen solutions?
This is more a question for the investors, but I guess that, to some extent, it does.
In any case, I believe that our investors understood that this level of funding – for this specific technology – was the most capital efficient and fastest way to de-risk the technology and bring it to commercialization.
What would you advise other startups looking to commercialize advanced energy technologies given your experience with Tulum?
To me, it always boils down to the reliability of techno-economics and the soundness of the business plan. You need to show that you know what and whose problem you can solve, that your technology is scalable and cost competitive, that you have a clear idea about the risks you need to remove, and how you plan to do so. Moreover, it is important to start your commercialization efforts soon, by establishing relationships with your future customers as soon as possible. Securing long-term contracts is a long process, especially in this industry, and the best way to convince your customers to adopt your solution is having them engaged along the way.
