American Turbines founder John McElhone on building megawatt-scale natural gas turbines that fit in a pickup truck

of sense. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Yeah, great to have you on Josh.

Have a great rest of your week. Enjoy.

We'll talk to you soon.

Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Our next guest is John Michall. Did I say that correctly? from American

term. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

Uh my name is John Malhone. Um my company is called American Turbines. We build small turbines uh for rapid deploy energy generation.

Okay. Uh how small are we talking? How can I think about this? Help me help me place it in the in the world. How much energy is it generating?

Yeah. So you could probably fit one in the back of your pickup truck. few of them actually.

Um

ours are about one megawatt in size. Our first units

and so you can think about a megawatt could probably power about

just over a thousand homes.

Yeah.

In back of a pickup truck. So they're tiny but you know they pack a big punch. They're quite power dense.

Yeah. And then talk about the the the supply chain and the actual energy source. These run natural gas. What are the inputs to actually getting gen energy?

Just natural gas. That's why we're calling American turbines because United States is very uniquely advantaged compared to the rest of the world. Best place in the world to use natural gas. We have such an amazing supply of it. It's extremely cheap. Um and we have a lot of resource that we haven't tapped yet. Uh so this company just works well in the States. You know, it wouldn't work in Europe. It wouldn't work in Russia or China. Just works here.

Yeah. So what does the team look like? What does the manufacturing look like? Are these like handmade at this point? I mean, it's a young company. Take us through a little bit of the history. I mean,

handmade American turbine.

Uh, I mean, I imagine that it's not fully lights out robotic factory yet, but maybe that's the vision in a few years. But where are you today?

Uh, we're pretty small. We're a small team. There's there's a few of us on board right now. We are hiring, so check out our website if you want to roll. Um, but yeah, we're right now it's just handmade, but that the the goal here is really being able to make something you can mass manufacture. Like that's that's the end goal. Everybody is more so worried about time to power. how quick can you get some energy generation in the ground? And the only way to really achieve that is figuring out automation at scale and how to make a product at scale. That's kind of where we've built at turbines over the years is we've they're all kind of derived from aircraft and you have to kind of be stringent to the standards of the FAA and it has to be able to travel at 600 miles an hour.

We sort of work background from back from these systems and understand how do we make this on the ground. But what we're trying to work out is like the opposite way like just make it for the grind. Make something very simple. It doesn't have to be a fish. It doesn't have to last forever. You don't have to run this at 600 mph, 30,000 ft in the air. Um because the problem that you're really solving is is really just energy generation at scale.

Can you Sorry, Jordy. Please.

Uh what what were you doing before this? How did you how did you kind of end up in in this category? Uh and and what was the backstory on becoming a teal fellow?

Um what did I do before this? I did a company called Crops Safe. We built farm tech software, you know, of all things. It's quite the pivot I must say. Um but uh quite different and kind of how I fell into American Turbines and why I'm doing this now is you know I I finished up that last company and I realized that all my free time I just spent you know mechanic and stuff. All the cars I've worked on or have owned over the years have just been 70s cars and they're very mechanical machines. My dad's a mechanic. Spent a lot of time working with him. Few PL I flew planes pretty young as a kid. So, I'm quite familiar with how the turbine works, how it put together, what people we need to hire to make it happen. Um, so I figured, you know, my next company should be something that is fun and exciting and cool and I can scale and I can work with hardware and I think it's very hard to compete with finders that just, you know, just like this stuff. Like the car behind me, you can see the K truck. That's my car.

And it's got a I want one of those. I want one of those trucks so bad. Every time I see a video of one, I send it to my wife. I'm like, we need one. I love it. Uh, can you get me up to speed on intellectual property in this category? Like I imagine that there's a patent that existed maybe a long time ago on a turbine. Like can you build on the shoulders of giants? Like how do you actually create something that you can own that can't be disassembled and copied or is it sort of a free-for-all?

Yeah. So there there's a bunch of patents. Same with any hardware piece. There's a bunch of patents.

Yeah.

But there things with patents are very specialized. M

the turbine isn't actually very hard. It is hard to make, but it's not very complicated. Our system will probably have less than 40 parts on it. So that's that's quite small. Um so there's not it's not crazy. The product itself at American Turbines isn't

I don't see it the turbine itself is like we're going to have a bunch of IP on this. We're going to spend six years filing pass and we're going to have this like specialized thing we're going to have in a few years. That that sucks. That's what a lot of people are doing with like super critical stuff and a lot of specialized turbines. It's just like you're waiting five years for what? So, our our product I I see in the future is is really just the manufacturing at scale like our factory. Like that's really what Henry Ford was able to do with the Model T. Like

the product wasn't the car. It was kind of the the promise that with the process of manufacturing at scale and these assembly lines, we could create a whole new industry of transportation. And it worked. It worked for him. And we kind of need the same for energy is we need to figure out how to produce at scale. Um, and you can you can only do that in in kind of automated ways that that we're focusing on.

Amazing. Well, congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day