By Jason Deign

Who says Big oil does not like solar? Try telling that to GlassPoint, which recently closed a USD$53 million series C funding round with investors including the oil and gas supermajor Royal Dutch Shell.

Before we get too excited, though, a word of warning: this is still about oil and gas.
The reason for the interest, which is shared by GlassPoint’s other major Series C investor, the Oman State General Reserve Fund (SGRF), is that GlassPoint seems to have hit a sweet spot for the petrochemical industry, with an application called enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

EOR is an energy-intensive process that usually gobbles up a fair proportion of the product that can be extracted from an oil field.

How the Enhanced Oil Recovery process works

Picture credits: GlassPoint. 

In places such as Oman, where GlassPoint has a 7MW plant, GlassPoint’s specialised CSP technology can be used to power the process instead, meaning up to three times more product can be taken to market. That is a big draw for companies such as Shell.

In fact, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant’s Shell Technology Ventures arm had already put money into GlassPoint’s last funding round. That brought in $26 million in 2012 and included cash from RockPort Capital, Nth Power and Series A investor Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital.

The latest round of cash, which represents the first-ever alternative energy investment for SGRF and sees SGRF’s Hisham Al-Sheedi and Shell’s Peter de Wit joining the GlassPoint board, will be used to bolster’s GlassPoint’s growth prospects.

Although GlassPoint’s vice president of business development, John O’Donnell, would not be drawn on details of future projects, it is clear that Oman remains a focus.

Natural gas

“EOR today uses some 23% of the country's natural gas,” O’Donnell states. “The country has repeatedly shown their commitment to triple EOR in just a few years. The solar energy resource in the country of Oman is, for all practical purposes, unlimited.

John O’Donnell, vice president of business development at GlassPoint

Picture credits: GlassPoint. 

“Solar allows gas to be saved in the EOR sector, for oil to be produced, and the gas to be used elsewhere to grow Oman’s economy. It is a giant market opportunity.”

His Excellency Abdulsalam Al Murshidi, executive president of SGRF, clearly agrees. “GlassPoint’s technology can provide a multitude of tangible economic benefits to Oman,” he said in a press statement.

GlassPoint’s Oman plant, which was won as a result of a competitive tender, has been operating since 2012 with “above-expectation success,” says O’Donnell. “It’s proven that our technology is ready for large-scale deployment. We were zero-injury, on time, on budget.”

Actually there is probably a bit more to GlassPoint’s success than just that. The company smartly chose to focus on an application that requires process heat, so other renewable technologies, such as potentially cheaper wind or PV, could not easily be used.

And going one step further, GlassPoint came up with a CSP design that other solar thermal companies would find hard to match, too.

“GlassPoint set out to lower the cost of solar thermal energy with this completely innovative approach to building the concentrating solar collectors,” comments O’Donnell. “We chose to do one thing, to deliver a complete product.”

Environmental conditions

In a nutshell, GlassPoint opted to put its solar field inside a greenhouse. That sounds unimpressive until you consider that modern greenhouses are used in virtually every country in the world and are designed to withstand just about any set of environmental conditions.

Compared to most CSP components, greenhouses are also cheap. And encasing the solar field in one means the collectors no longer have to deal with out-in-the-open weathering factors such as sand blasting, which is a significant problem in the Middle East.

That, in turn, means the collectors can be quite flimsy… and inexpensive. GlassPoint’s collectors weigh about a tenth of traditional models.

While the focus is currently clearly on EOR in Oman, O’Donnell is at pains to point out that GlassPoint is selling itself as a turnkey developer that could meet demand in any place with the right solar irradiation profile. California and Kuwait appear to be major potential markets.

Nor is the company beholden to Shell for future contracts. O’Donnell says: “We are driving aggressively on a number of projects. We have a number of projects that we deep in discussions on. These funds are specifically to allow us to execute.”

While it may not be so easy for other solar thermal developers to copy GlassPoint’s technology concept, what the company’s funding success does underscore is the fact that CSP is still very much valued for industrial applications in general.

For GlassPoint, meanwhile, having backers such as Oman’s biggest sovereign fund and one of the largest oil companies in the world can clearly be no bad thing. Josefin Berg, a solar power analyst at IHS, says: “It means an oil company has an interest in GlassPoint staying alive.”