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Leonard: The innovation and foresight platform of the VINCI Group, to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing VINCI’s businesses: the digital revolution, the accelerating pace of innovation, and the environmental transition.

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🌊 Can Iron Replace Natural Gas?

How a rechargeable metal fuel could reshape high-temperature industrial heat, and Europe’s energy sovereignty.

We’re joined by Driss Laraqui, CEO and co-founder of Fenix Energy, a deeptech founder turning iron powder into a circular fuel for industrial heat.

The premise sounds almost like science fiction: burn iron powder, capture the iron oxide, recharge it with electricity, and use it again.

But for Driss, this is not a lab experiment.

Fenix is building industrial boilers designed to generate high-temperature heat — up to roughly 900°C, for sectors that remain heavily dependent on natural gas and difficult to electrify.

In this episode, we dive into one of climate tech’s hardest problems: how to decarbonize industrial heat without asking every factory to rely on constant access to cheap electricity and massive grid connections. And we unpack what it really takes to turn a scientific breakthrough into an infrastructure business that customers can actually deploy.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why industrial heat is becoming a geopolitical problem — from gas-price volatility to security of supply

→ Why direct electrification does not solve everything — especially for continuous industrial processes and sites without sufficient grid capacity

→ How iron works as a rechargeable fuel — burning into iron oxide, then regenerating the material with electricity

→ Why mobility changes the storage equation — Fenix can move energy in the form of iron powder instead of keeping storage stationary

→ The economics of heat-as-a-service — and why taking CapEx off the customer’s balance sheet can accelerate adoption

→ Why modularity matters in deeptech — finding the right reactor size, stacking systems, and avoiding endless re-engineering

→ How first customers finance emerging industrial technologies before banks and infrastructure funds are ready

→ Why Driss believes Europe is still one of the best places to build climate deeptech

One idea stayed with me.

Most conversations about industrial decarbonization search for the winning technology.

Driss sees the opposite.

The future energy system will be a mix: direct electrification where it works, biomass where it makes sense, nuclear in some contexts — and new energy carriers like iron for industrial sites that cannot simply plug into more power.

Fenix is betting that iron can become one of those missing bricks.

And perhaps the most interesting part is that the core challenge is no longer purely scientific.

As Driss puts it, the company is increasingly in development, not research.

The question now is execution: engineering the boiler, coordinating suppliers, sourcing cheap electricity, building the regeneration infrastructure, moving powder between sites, financing first-of-a-kind deployments — and making the full system competitive with natural gas.

That is where deeptech becomes a business.

✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.

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