At Hydropunk Industries, we make and sell caustic soda (NaOH) in underserved geographies.

Caustic soda is a critical chemical used in alumina refining, wastewater treatment, aluminum anodization, the paper & soap industry, etc.

But where is caustic soda produced in the USA?

Caustic soda production is mostly dominated by the Gulf Coast.

States in the West like California lack a local caustic soda supply to support their industrial operations, and they import caustic soda from Texas and Louisiana. This means the transportation costs to California are brutal.

How do we fix this? By building caustic soda plants in California.

But Californian grid-electricity prices are insanely high. Any costs saved by producing locally and slashing transportation costs are offset by the high electricity prices. So how do we solve this dichotomy?

Off-grid solar.

Solar has been getting 15+% cheaper each year. And California is a very sunny state. Building on solar means you relax and bypass the constraint of needing to depend on grid electricity.

With cheap solar, it’s now possible to build off-grid, local caustic soda plants in underserved geographies and create resilient supply chains.

Our mission: Make cheap, local caustic soda starting with California.

Progress: The existing tech stack to produce caustic soda is incompatible with sun’s day/night cycle. To address this, at Hydropunk, we’ve made key advances in the ion-exchange membrane manufacturing process and electrochemical stack design.

Our team: Rakshith, founder, is behind the technical progress Hydropunk has made. He comes from a software engineering background and brings interdisciplinary engineering approaches to the chemical industry. He studied CSE at IIT Kharagpur.

Send me an email at rakshith@hydropunkindustries.com if you want to chat.