Day 2: KEYNOTE: Future-Proofing Our World: Nanotech’s Innovations in Climate Resilience for Homes, Vehicles, and Beyond
“The fact that the fire’s not near you, it doesn’t mean that energy is not going to affect you.” —Hani Taan
“What we’re trying to shore up is to not only protect assets but to keep the fire from getting worse.” —Carrie Horazeck
2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
The world is getting hotter, with cities facing the devastating impacts of the urban heat island effect. However, innovative solutions are emerging to combat this challenge. Nanotech Materials has developed a game-changing particle technology that provides passive heat mitigation and extreme wildfire resistance, offering hope for a more resilient future.
Joining the discussion are Hani Taan, the CTO and founder of Nanotech Materials, and Carrie Horazeck, the Chief Commercial Officer. Tune in to learn more about how Nanotech Materials is working to future-proof our world with financial returns— from cool roof products that dramatically reduce HVAC costs to wildfire-shielding coatings that safeguard critical infrastructure, and more.
Highlights:
- 00:35 The Little Particles That Does
- 04:38 Emissivity and Heat Mitigation
- 09:57 Protecting Infrastructures
- 14:23 Sustainability with a Financial Return
- 17:40 Q&A Segment
Twitter:
From cool roofs to fire-shielding coatings, @NanoTechIncHTX is tackling climate challenges head-on. Join the discussion with Hani Taan (Co-Founder and CTO) and Carrie Horazeck (CCO) as they share how nanotech can help combat urban heat and wildfires. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #HeatMitigation #WildfireResistance #NanotechMaterials #CoolRoofs #ClimateAdaptation #SustainableBuilding #EmergencyPreparedness #InnovativeCoatings #UrbanHeatIsland #WildlandUrbanInterface
Quotes:
02:34 “We’re building houses in increasingly fire-prone areas. So immediate action is needed across the entire heat mitigation spectrum, whether we’re talking about passive heat mitigation to protect people from heat stroke all the way up to extreme wildfire resistance.” —Carrie Horazeck
05:52 “You want to create materials that can withstand the environments — rain, hail, wind, scratch.” —Hani Taan
09:45 “The fact that the fire’s not near you, it doesn’t mean that energy is not going to affect you.” —Hani Taan
12:29 “What we’re trying to shore up is to not only protect assets but to keep the fire from getting worse.” —Carrie Horazeck
Carrie Horazeck, Chief Commercial Officer, NanoTech Materials
Ruth Carrie Horazeck is the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Nanotech, Inc., where she spearheads commercial strategy and market growth for breakthrough materials aimed at building resiliency into energy infrastructure. With over a decade of experience, Ruth has held significant roles, including President of Commercial Operations at Parasanti and Senior Consultant at Kantar Consulting. She holds an MBA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Bachelor’s degree in International Comparative Studies from Duke University. Ruth is known for her dedication, innovative approach, and ability to drive growth in the tech and energy sectors.
Hani Taan, Chief Technology Officer, NanoTech Materials
Hani Taan is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of NanoTech, Inc., where he leads the development and commercialization of advanced materials. With a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara and a Master’s degree in International Business Management from FGV, Hani has a robust educational foundation. His career includes leadership roles such as Director of Business Development at National Oilwell Varco and General Manager at Frontline Safety. Recently, he announced his participation in the 2024 Wildfire Leadership Summit, showcasing NanoTech’s innovations in climate resilience.
Connect with NanoTech Materials:
- Website: https://nanotechmaterials.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NanoTechIncHTX
- X: https://x.com/NanoTechIncHTX
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nanotechmaterials/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nanotechhtx/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NanoTechMaterialsInc
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nanotechmaterialsinc
Transcription:
Carrie Horazeck: My name is Carrie. I’m the Chief Commercial Officer for NanoTech Materials. I’m joined by my fantastic CTO and Founder of the company, Hani Taan,and we’re going to take you through a little bit of what we’re doing today. Okay, so we had originally entitled our presentation Future Proofing Our World after we went through the fantastic book yesterday about The Little Dozer. Thank you to the team that put that together. We came up with a much better title, which is The Little Particle That Does. So today, we’d like to spend some time telling you about our Particle That Does. So the world is getting hotter. We’ve heard some incredible stories over the last day, and we will again tomorrow about some of the impacts of a hotter world. We are based out of Houston, Texas, where for four months out of the year, you literally have to walk in underground tunnels around through the city that are air conditioned, because walking on the surface level can give you heat stroke. If you’ve never been to Houston, Texas, this is a real thing. When you come and visit us, please explore a very exciting tunnel system. Otherwise you’ll wonder where everybody is on the surface level during the summertime.
So the world is getting hotter. We really do see that as an impact of the urban heat island effect. Cities tend to break up land. They tend to magnify heat indices. That’s Houston right there. It’s number four on the list of cities most impacted by the urban heat island effect. Please note that these are not all the ones that are in the South. They are the ones that are also up north, which really shows you the impact of concrete and excessive concrete on urban heat islands. As of today, there are currently 63 million people today under heat advisory in the United States as a result of urban heat island effect. WUI, that is not a new term to anybody in this room. So heat mitigation in a very acute context leads to a longer, more prolonged and more intense wildfire season. One of the things that we do know about the WUI is that the intensity and prolongedness of that wildfire season is not slowing down development. I live in Austin, which is now very, very securely inside of the WUI index, and it is exploding like crazy. Population control is not going down at all because we’re building houses in increasingly fire prone areas. So we feel at NanoTech that immediate action is needed across the entire heat mitigation spectrum, whether we’re talking about passive heat mitigation, to protect people from heat stroke, that type of thing, all the way up to extreme wildfire resistance.
Hani Taan: One of the issues with WUI which addresses it’s almost a philosophy, how to prevent fire and you can look into it as much or as little as you want, but it is effective if you implement the whole process, and it addresses some of the material changes, and I’m talking about construction material changes you have to do. The problem with that is extremely costly. So to implement a fire resilient, you know, environment, it is extremely costly, and it typically only works for the people that have the money to do it, that have the right incentives. And to hit all those points in the WUI standard is extremely difficult. And I’ve listed some of the issues there. And, you know, I don’t want to repeat the issues, because I don’t want to it’s sensitive in this audience. I don’t want to get into that. But more importantly, I want to talk about what we can do to help. We address our coatings and our material science is on the existing infrastructure. So what happens to the infrastructure that cannot meet WUI standards? How do you protect it? And that’s where we come in.
Carrie Horazeck: So we are NanoTech Materials. We are seeking to become the global name for heat mitigation in the built environment, logistics sector and beyond. How do we do that? This is our core innovation. I promise. This is not covid. I was overruled by our marketing department. This is our particle, our core innovation. It is the insulative ceramic particle. It’s got two very distinctive thermal properties. We’re going to play a fun video for you. Can our people in the back. Hit the video for us. No? Okay, no worries. Well, we’ll just talk through it. Hani, you want to take us through our hair. Particle picture, a a flame encompassing this bottle, and you will notice that it does not melt.
Hani Taan: So forgive me, I’m an engineer, and I spend a lot of time with technical terms. So for the geeks in the audience, they’ll probably know what this is. For most of us, I want to talk about emissivity. And emissivity is a concept where things absorb energy and they can release it. So if you take a metal spoon, for example, you leave it out in the sun. It’ll heat up, but if you hover your hand around it, you’ll feel the heat coming out of it. So that’s called emissivity. So absorption of energy and releasing of energy to the environment. Other is low thermal conductivity. So that’s a big word or big concept. It basically just states how easily or hard it is for heat to go through, you know, a piece of metal or a piece of wood or whatever it is. So how fast or slowly heat will transfer. A particle has a very high emissivity, so it absorbs a lot of energy, and it will release it back to the ambient, and has a very low thermal conductivity, which doesn’t allow heat to go through it.
Carrie Horazeck: For our non scientists in the room, that means we are really good at pushing heat away, and we are really good at stopping heat from penetrating.
Hani Taan: All right, that’s another very loaded slide. If we want to get into the details we can, but I think basically at its essence is you want to create materials that can withstand the environments. And I’m talking about rain, hail, wind, people scratching it right, because things that live in labs were great in labs, but we build for the for the environment. And this basically shows that we have the mechanical properties to withstand high insulin, you know, fluxes, meaning there’s a fire, our materials will be able to handle it.
Carrie Horazeck: That’s ultimately our roadmap as a company. We want to be able to address heat mitigation across the entire heat mitigation spectrum. Our particle is literally just a particle, which means that you can incorporate it into a variety of different carriers, into resins, into epoxies. We’ve incorporated it into cement, and depending on the loading, we ultimately end up with a no reportable VOCs, ie completely non toxic coating that we can bring to the space, which will mitigate heat. When we load it lightly, we end up with a cool roof product, which we’re going to talk about here in a few minutes. And when we load it heavily, we end up with our wildfire mitigation system. So we’ll go ahead and jump to the next slide. This is our nanotech wildfire shield coat, which Hani is going to take you through.
Hani Taan: So when you think about coatings that are fire protective, there is a big dominant technology, and firemen will will probably be very familiar with. It’s called intermezzine paintings, right? Basically what it is, it’s a reactive chemistry. It takes energy to activate it, so heat will make it grow. It basically just kind of looks like a sponge that’s moving, and in doing so, it’s very toxic because of the chemistry that’s in it. So the fumes that are off gas from the process of that, they’re very toxic. And, you know, planting a fire with that material around makes it very difficult. It is effective from protecting substrates, but it is, you know, very toxic to humans when it’s applied, and also when it off gasses during fire. We don’t have an activation energy. Basically, we can protect acids without the need to have energy that activates it, and which allows us to have a water based technology. So in the application process of our coating, it makes it very benign for the applicators. It makes a benign if it’s built on the floor, and when it’s off gassing, there’s heat applied to it, then that basically has low VOC Volatile Organic Compounds that we’ve passed some military test things and for enclosed environments. So you can easily go through this room, for example, if it was coated with our product, and the fumes will not stop you from running away.
Carrie Horazeck: So our fantastic panel here yesterday that talked about toxicity for firefighters from 9/11. It is 9/11 again today. This is exactly what the issue was. This is an intimate paint. When that intumescent paint has a reactivation energy, it releases chemicals into the air, which contributes to the toxicity of the smoke, which is breathed in by populations, especially firefighters that are fighting the flame. One of our ultimate goals with our coating was to be able to have something that would provide fire resistance to the level of an intimate paint, but would do so without reactivation energy, so no chemicals will actually go into the smoke as it protects from the fire.
Hani Taan: And on your right, it should have been a video of a box coated or a cardboard box coated with a coating, and it doesn’t work. But I think we have some pretty cool pictures. Let me show this first. This is actually a fence coated with our product, and we try to set it on fire, and from your left to right, it’s a thermal imaging camera, basically, it shows the temperature of the surface of the coating versus the fire. So the fire was 1200 plus degrees, like coating itself was at least 400 that talks about emissivity, right, the ability of our coating to reflect energy out, rather than inwards. And in the middle picture, you can see that the fence was actually at 70 degrees of ambient temperature. And that’s very important, because if you’re crossing through a fence, that’s not meaning heat you can pass through it. Because the fact that the fire’s not near you, it doesn’t mean that energy is not, it’s going to affect you. So that’s what our coating does. It actually restrains the heat through the coating and through the materials, and it doesn’t allow to burn it.
Carrie Horazeck: So when you think about a practical application, especially when it comes to spending a lot of time talking about mobile housing and some of these kind of emergency situations. We talk with a lot of organizations working internationally for refugee housing, and they talk that one of the biggest issues in refugee encampments is fires. They spread very, very quickly through fires. And so it’s always important to have an escape corridor. That is what this coating can do. It can go on to an existing structure, provide that corridor that you can actually put your hand against it. It will maintain ambience, so not only allowing you time to escape, but also completely not hot at all to the people that are going through the corridor.
Hani Taan: Back to the activation energy. So if you coated this fence with an intermessant coating, what would happen is the energy needed for that coating to activate, it’s much higher than the wood can take. So the actual substrate, the wood planks, would have burned before the coating could work. And in our coating, that doesn’t happen. So it will protect from really low temperatures up to really high temperatures. And this is actually Caltrans. So we’re working with Caltrans. This is a containment wall for a road. On your left, you can see the pigmentation of our coating, typically is white, but we pigmented Brown for Caltrans, and those are timber lagging so the whole road containment is built with timber laggings, and we’re coating that is structured to prevent it from wildfires. It was an extensive testing period with them. We went through a lot of tests with their material department. Even you know, UC Berkeley was involved in the process, and so they’re being very proactive at protecting their infrastructure, especially with, you know, combustible interiors like timber lagging. we want to take that into a bigger picture with, I think there you go.
Carrie Horazeck: Exactly. With the other 11 fire prone states as well. And you know, we tried to take a different approach to our fire product. We said, you know, a lot of coatings are focused on the building envelope enclosure. How do we ultimately contain the fire from getting outside of the building. We wanted to take a different approach and say, okay, wildfire has started. It is coming at you. How do you protect your infrastructure and keep it from adding to the flame, right? So that that was kind of a little bit of a different approach. It was certainly something that California Department of Transportation felt very heavily. Because you all may notice as you drive around the state, these wooden roadways are all up and down the state. This particular project we had the privilege of doing in Sequoia National Park, which was a very, very big deal for us, to be able to give back to the sustainability movement there. Utility poles is another huge market for us. Wooden fences, anything that is outdoor, open air, wooden, unprotected infrastructure, which adds to the flame, if it is engulfed by a fire, that’s ultimately what we’re trying to shore up to not only protect assets, but to keep the fire from getting worse.
On the other end, I did want to take a couple of minutes and talk about roofs. If anybody has a roofer in the family, we’d love to talk to them. On the other end, we have our cool roof product. So when we think about climate mitigation, our fireproofing line is really on the climate adaptation side. Our primary goal with our cool roof product was to think about, how do we help with retrofitting, building resiliency in a way that we can use less HVAC, and therefore dramatically curb scope to CO2 emissions, which of course lead to a warming planet, which of course lead to more HVAC, which creates a larger and larger problem for our planet. So that was what we sought to do with our cool roof product. So our cool roof product basically works on those same exact same three principles, reflectivity. We make it very white, which means it will reflect rays off of the visible light spectrum. Our emissivity allows us to emit UV and infrared rays off of the non visible light spectrum, and then our ultra low thermal conductivity ultimately acts as Space Shuttle paint, which means that heat cannot get through into the building itself.
So what does that mean in practice? So this is a big box store that we’re currently working with right now that I can’t say their name, but they’re based in Arkansas, and they love everyday low prices. They have a classic problem. First and foremost, they’re cost leaders in the industry, so nothing gets approved in terms of operating expenditure with these guys unless it, first and foremost, cuts costs. They just made a very, very large announcement that they’re going to be net zero by 2040, and they are the largest REIT in the world. So they’re not gonna get there with vehicles, right? The only way they’re gonna get there is to dramatically curb their carbon emissions in their buildings.
So what is a poor sustainability officer to do when they have a target like that, that they have to hit without raising costs at all? One thing that we do know about building environment green products as they tend to have a green premium, right? You tend to have to pay extra to go green. This is a pilot project that we did for them in Gilmer, Texas. It’s a 180,000 square foot metal, trapezoidal panel super center. We went out there on a 90 degree day and walked the roof, and we shot a thermal gun at the roof surface, and we were showing about 149 degrees on the roof surface. We went inside the building and shot the thermal gun up at the ceiling, and we were still showing 112 degrees on the ceiling. So what we explained to our client is, okay, that insulation in your roof that’s taking you from 149 down to 112. You’ve got. Thermostat here set at 72 that has to go from 112 to 72 before it hits the top of the head of your customer. That’s where your energy bill is coming from from this building. That’s where your scope two, CO2 footprint is coming from, from this building. So we repair the roof. Went on with our coating at one millimeter thickness. We came back 24 hours later, and we were showing 73.4 degrees on the ceiling surface, down from 112. That was a dramatic step change for that client, because it meant their HVAC went from always being on to only having to turn on occasionally. Now we were not allowed to touch this data. They had smart metering in the building. They went away and looked at it for six months and came back with a 49% reduction in their HVAC bill. A 49% reduction so somebody there is getting promoted, we hope, and that’s going to be to be good, but this provides an opportunity for companies like this to then look across their entire portfolio and say, Okay, how do we shore up the resiliency of our buildings dramatically reduce our costs, while simultaneously taking a big leap forward to reducing our scope to CO2 footprint, or as you’d like to call it, sustainability with a financial return.
Hani Taan: That amounts to less water usage, amounts to less energy usage, amounts to infrastructure around the buildings in the community that you don’t have to have. So when you talk about building pressure, I mean, a lot of the infrastructure is built around energy hogs, like stores. So with this type of approach, you can reduce the amount of money that can go to other things than, you know, energy hogs, so we’re taking that approach.
Carrie Horazeck: Yeah, absolutely. So if you do live in a community where a large percentage of your water is going to industry, this is a way to really help shore that up and make sure that you can reduce that impact. So just to kind of be in summary, we are NanoTech Materials. Our entire goal is heat mitigation across the entire energy spectrum from passive solar radiation on roofs all the way to extreme wildfire resistance and refractory. We do have a vehicular version of our roofing product, which can actually increase fuel mileage per gallon by 33% and dramatically cut down on HVAC. We’d love to talk to you guys. We are nationwide as of right now, we’re based in Houston, Texas. We’re very excited about the work, and we just really appreciate you guys having us here today to be a part of the conversation.
Hani Taan: Thank you.
Carrie Horazeck: Okay. The question was, how long does it last? Great question. Hani, you want to take that one?
Hani Taan: It will last 10, 15, 20 years depends on the environment, but it’s meant to be a prolonged duration for the coatings. The roof coating, obviously will last a lot longer if not subject to fires. The fireproof coating will last you easily 10, 15, years.
Amanda West: Hi, it’s Amanda from IBHS. Does it put weight on the roof
Carrie Horazeck: Great question. So, Hani, do you want to speak to the weight question?
Hani Taan: Minimal weight, our coatings have, I mean, I’m going about memory here, but a few pounds per square foot, so, I mean, not even that. It’s very light in terms of thickness, you know, maybe a quarter of an inch for a lot of fireproofing, maybe less, depending on if you’re just wanting flame spread. But we haven’t encountered any issues with weight problems.
Speaker 1: Are there any special considerations? Say that you have painted a roof and it was destroyed in a tornado? Is there any consideration for debris disposal?
Hani Taan: So the technology is water based and non reactive chemistry. That’s a long term to say it’s pretty benign. So as you dispose, you know, light latex paint or acrylic paints, it’s the same way you would dispose our product, so it’s pretty clean.
Carrie Horazeck: What we’ve actually innovated is the particle, which is completely inorganic, completely inorganic. So the only organic components you’re going to find is in the carrier, the resin or the epoxy that we’re using. We use commercial grade carriers that have been on the market for over 20 years passed, all of the ICC, etc, coats for safety.
Speaker 2: Are you doing any work with public education school districts?
Carrie Horazeck: Are we doing any work with public education school districts? Yes, we love ISDS, and we would love to do more of them. So yes, yes, please.
Hani Taan: We actually like to propose to students to on the engineering side or science, to interact with our coding as we apply it, so they understand how science can actually help not just diminish the well being of people.
Carrie Horazeck: Thank you everybody. We really appreciate it. We’re right there at the table
