Seventeen years after the military complex closed, and 13 years after the Navy donated the property to the city, the sprawling Naval Support Activity site at the bottom of Poland Avenue is finally getting refurbished.
Even as work crews revamp interiors and bulldozers grade empty areas of the site, environmentalists have raised some cautionary red flags about one of the redevelopment’s planned tenants.
Along with affordable apartments and retail space, the $300 million redevelopment plans include a brand-new $50 million industrial facility, built to house Brooklyn-based Newlab, an incubator for business startups focused on “deep tech.”
Startup businesses are expected to rotate in and out of the Newlab New Orleans facility over time. All of the first nine startups focus on two energy-related processes—carbon management and creating hydrogen.
But climate experts are wary of many of the startups’ technologies, because they can be framed as “green” solutions while some scientists say that they are ineffective and provide cover for polluters.
“It would be great if any of these startups were actually about improving the efficiency and deployment of solar energy, or ensuring that we are transitioning Louisiana’s grid,” said Jane Patton, a campaign manager with the Center for International Environmental Law. “We are twisting ourselves into a pretzel to figure out how to use all of these emerging, new climate technologies to perpetuate the oil and gas industry.”
Break-through innovation, or false solutions?
Set on the Industrial Canal edge of the site behind the three redeveloped Navy Base barracks, Newlab’s startups will use lab facilities in the new structure to build prototypes. The platform will focus on three areas: industrial power and hydrogen production, carbon management, and maritime technology. A fifth building is being prepared as an expansion space for companies from the Newlab incubator, but will remain unused for now.
The Newlab New Orleans hub, slated to open early next year, will provide its startups with specialized equipment such as “shared access to tools like high load power access, overhead cranes, and walk-in fume hoods.”
The public-private partnership supporting the development includes the City; GNO, Inc; industry partners including Shell, and others.
Newlab and the startups’ backers have grandly framed the effort as the commercialization of green tech that will allow Louisiana’s energy sector to transition to net-zero carbon production. “This is not a hallucination, this is not theater, Newlab is the real deal,” said Michael Hecht, the head of GNO Inc., “This is where we stake our claim to the world and say that Louisiana is going to be the once and future great energy state demonstrating how we can meet increasing global demand in a lower-carbon environment.”
Experts warn most are false solutions
The nine startups coming to Newlab are Airhive, Arculus Solutions, Banyu Carbon, Encore CO2, Mantel Capture, Molten Industries, Parallel Carbon, RepAir Carbon, and Vaulted.
Newlab, which began in 2016 as a startup incubator inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard, has hubs in four other cities from New York to Saudi Arabia, partnered with Shell to develop the New Orleans site, alongside the companies Battelle and Carbonvert, as well as GNO, Inc. and Louisiana State University.
Patton sees startup pitches that may look good at first glance, but “I don’t see anything that is actually going to benefit Louisiana’s people or environment at all.” Most of the startups revolve around carbon capture or other technologies that put an environmentally friendly spin on the continued use of fossil fuels, she said.
Others were more ambivalent. “It’s a total mix,” said Tina Swanson, a senior scientist with the independent nonprofit Project Drawdown, which has closely examined a range of proposed climate solutions, conducting thorough quantitative analyses to determine the practicality and effectiveness of each.
Ultimately, Newlab is a venture fund, not an environmental-solutions company.
Sahil Jain, the VP of strategy for Newlab who formerly worked for Shell, told The Lens that Newlab’s goal is “to drive economic development through innovation.”
But a closer look at the hub has raised criticism from some clean-energy advocates, who note that none of the startups are developing renewable energy, while some are backed by oil companies—and one was founded by an Israeli weapons developer.
Newlab has developed a pipeline of over 200 companies that could come through the New Orleans hub, Jain said. They’re increasingly focused on biofuels, and have started working with one company on coastal restoration.
But, for now, the nine chosen to kick off the project are looking mainly at carbon management and hydrogen fuel. Jain hopes that they will begin work this summer.
Direct Air Capture
Three of the initial nine startups—Airhive, Parallel Carbon, and RepAir—are developing direct air capture (DAC), which aims to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Proponents say that DAC must be deployed eventually because the world will need to reduce the amount of CO₂ already added to the atmosphere, and address certain hard-to-abate emissions that result from the production of materials like cement and steel.
But Patton said DAC is less feasible than using natural means to remove carbon dioxide from the air—like reforestation or restoring wetlands. Of the solutions that Project Drawdown has looked at, DAC “is not one that we recommend,” Swanson said. “Not necessarily because it doesn’t work but because it’s pretty well captured by the fossil fuel industry.”
Fossil fuel companies promote the concept of carbon capture, which allows them to claim tax credits when added to their facilities, because it “will allow them to keep doing their fossil fuel emissions.” DAC is also a very energy-intensive process, Swanson said, “So it only makes sense as a solution if it is run on renewable energy.”
Hydrogen fuel creation
Startups Molten Industries and Parallel Carbon are working on processes to create hydrogen. Molten plans to use methane gas, a fossil fuel, to make the hydrogen, while Parallel Carbon will use electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Hydrogen can be used as a clean-burning fuel, primarily for industrial purposes.
The challenge is where that hydrogen comes from.
Because Molten makes hydrogen out of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, there will be planet-warming emissions, Patton said. “They get to say, ‘Oh, the hydrogen burns clean, it just releases water.’ Which, technically, that’s true, and that’s because you’ve already released all the CO₂ from it earlier in the process.”
Parallel Carbon, on the other hand, aims to create hydrogen from water, and to make it truly “green hydrogen” by using only renewable power to do so. Using industrial green hydrogen instead of methane-derived hydrogen is a “highly recommended” solution from Project Drawdown, noting that “making green hydrogen generates no direct greenhouse gases,” and its greatest hurdle to deployment is cost.
The problem is that Parallel Carbon doesn’t anticipate deploying scalable technology until 2040. In the meantime, it is agreeing to sell carbon-removal certificates to companies like Zurich Insurance Group, allowing the insurer to claim progress towards its net-zero goal while remaining the world’s #1 insurer of coal. Parallel Carbon’s partners include Shell and Aramco—Saudi Arabia’s state-owned petroleum company—which is also a key investor.
Hydrogen is not a fuel used by everyday consumers. In fact, about 90% of hydrogen produced in the U.S. today is used for oil refineries and ammonia production. It’s a critical feedstock for the single largest ammonia producer in the world, CF Industries, located in Ascension Parish, where it is also the largest point-source polluter in the nation and a prime target of Cancer Alley environmental justice organizers.
An expansion that will quadruple ammonia production there, the RiverPlex MegaPark, will include a $7.5 billion project that will displace residents of Modeste, and produce hydrogen and ammonia using carbon capture.
Carbon Capture and Storage
Startups Banyu Carbon, Encore CO2, Mantel Capture, and Vaulted are all looking at different ways to capture and store carbon dioxide: Banyu by removing CO₂ from the sea, Encore by turning CO₂ into different products, Mantel by using a compound called borate, and Vaulted by storing carbon in biomass—meaning they take organic waste and bury it deep underground.
Banyu’s approach appears to involve a process known as ocean electrochemistry, which could hold promise, Swanson said. Though its effectiveness is still unclear, Project Drawdown has classified that technology as one to watch, noting the attempts “appear plausible, but their costs, environmental impacts, and effectiveness require further research.”
Mantel uses borate technology, which Patton was unfamiliar with, but she saw red flags in Mantel’s supporters, which include Shell, BP, and the U.S. Army.
And Vaulted’s approach to biomass is difficult to scale, she said. So far, Vaulted, who make organic waste into “bioslurry” and inject it up to 5,000 feet underground with a technology developed by fracking, claims to have used its method to sequester 32,000 tons of carbon—less than what the world emits in 30 seconds.
A key gap remains: if these companies do succeed in capturing carbon dioxide, what will be done with it next?
Banyu, for example, says its captured CO₂ can be “used by industry,” Patton notes. More than 80% of captured carbon today is used for enhanced oil recovery, to extract more oil from mature wells.
“Some of the startups are not looking to store the carbon underground, but reuse it as feedstock for other processes or to make chemicals—creating more emissions,” Swanson said.
Encore has so far turned its CO₂ into ethanol—another greenhouse gas.
Jain framed the issue differently. “Our focus is really thinking about, what is the core value you can achieve from a commodity like carbon or CO₂?”
Reduction of corrosion in pipelines
Startup Arculus Solutions is developing technology to reduce corrosion in pipelines.
Both Swanson and Patton voiced skepticism of Arculus, which claims to be developing technology to convert gas pipelines to ones that will transport CO₂, to support the carbon capture industry. But thus far, its only product on offering serves to improve oil and gas pipelines, advertising “up to 30% improvement in gas transmission efficiency” and high flow rates.
Ultimately, Swanson said, there’s nothing wrong with entrepreneurs looking to develop new green tech. “I just think the thing that is a problem with approaches like this is that they’re sucking attention away from the solutions that we already know work,” like solar and wind.
She believes that’s because “there is a human tendency, particularly in our society, to look for silver bullet technological fixes—instead of doing the things that we know actually work, but that will force us to change the way we do things.”
Founded by an Israeli weapons developer
One of the startups, RepAir Carbon, may face critique for an entirely different reason: it was founded by Israeli venture capitalist Yehuda Borenstein, who worked for decades for Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, which has been accused by international bodies of complicity in genocide and war crimes.
In 2015, as head of Elbit’s energy system unit, Borenstein told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the company “had looked into developing energy weapons, like high power lasers” and “from there we looked to branch out with other applications that have potential for financial growth.”
Borenstein has also made controversial statements on social media. He has shared posts disputing reportage about the starvation of children in Gaza and calling AP News “Hamas propaganda.”
Asked about Borenstein’s involvement in Elbit weapons, Newlab shared a statement reading that “our engagement with companies such as RepAir has been focused on the technology the startup is developing…prior employment history outside the context of the company and technology being evaluated is not the basis for those engagements.”
Borenstein, who has begun several startups to bring down the price of removing carbon from the air, has framed carbon management as necessary because the continued burning of fossil fuels is a given. “We’re facing 40 to 50 gigatons of emissions annually,” Borenstein wrote in a column for Innovation & Tech Today. “The oil companies aren’t going to stop using oil and gas, no chance of that. So without effective carbon capture at a massive scale, those emissions will continue.”
Public funds used to support startup incubator
Funding for Newlab drew in part from a $50 million Economic Development Administration “H2theFuture” grant that GNO, Inc secured in order to “transition the regional hydrogen energy sector.”
Newlab was allocated $1 million of those funds, with another $2.5 million from the state, per Matt Wolfe, chief marketing officer for GNO, Inc, which helped select startups. The Louisiana Economic Development state agency also contributed $7 million to the Newlab project, per LED’s communications director Emma Wagner. The agency did not have a role in selecting the startups.
The H2theFuture grant has also provided funding for programs to test “green hydrogen-related products,” per Wolfe, along with industry workforce-development trainings, and a project at LSU studying CO₂ wells that is supported by Halliburton, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron.
The grant is also supporting some companies doing local work in renewables, such as EV battery manufacturing and First Solar’s solar panel manufacturer.
Newlab has also supported startups working on battery innovation, electric transportation, and grid resilience, though none seem to be in the pipeline for New Orleans at this time, Jain told The Lens.
Asked about GNO, Inc. funding contested carbon-capture technology, Wolfe wrote that “Looking at the global energy landscape, Louisiana stands to benefit by helping develop, refine, and deploy an all-of-the-above energy strategy.”
Pouring these investments into the expansion of renewable energy like wind and solar would make more sense than trying to invent new, market-friendly technology, Patton stressed.
Swanson agreed. The world needs to deploy wind and solar rather than waiting for miracle technology to offset fossil-fuel emissions, she says: “The most important thing that we should be doing for climate change is reducing emissions. That’s just a no-brainer. That’s where 99% of our focus needs to be.”
