With millions of people around the world impacted by increasingly severe natural disasters, and electrical infrastructure struggling to keep pace with rising demand, the push to decarbonize the global economy is picking up speed. Engineers are hard at work developing technologies that can solve climate change challenges, but the path to implementing grid-scale solutions and decarbonizing energy-intensive industries requires more than just technical know-how.
That’s why civil engineer, researcher, and entrepreneur Paul Sizaire built Sesame Sustainability, an industrial decarbonization platform that simplifies the inherent complexity in thousands of factors that must be considered in order to model, derisk, and ultimately move ahead with infrastructure investments in the green energy transition.
By creating a platform that gives industrial giants the tools they need to intuitively understand the business impact, benefits, and costs of pursuing net-zero carbon goals, Sizaire has become a leading contributor to the mission of tackling the world’s most difficult decarbonization challenges.
Going Beyond Engineering To Unlock Decarbonization Insights
Paul Sizaire began his academic career at Imperial College London, where he studied civil engineering. He was fascinated by infrastructure projects like offshore wind turbines and carbon capture systems, and was inspired to help the world achieve emissions targets and prevent the worst effects of climate change during his studies.
But Sizaire soon realized that understanding the engineering behind large-scale infrastructure construction wasn’t enough. To move vital decarbonization projects from theoretical planning to actually being built, factors like supply chain management, accounting for public policy, and measuring the cost of deployment against long-term emissions reductions were equally as important.
Recognizing that he’d need more than technical knowledge alone to solve the climate crisis, Sizaire moved across the Atlantic to enroll in MIT’s Technology & Policy Program, where he joined the SESAME research group under the guidance of MIT professor Dr. Emre Gençer.
At MIT, Sizaire initially focused on hydrogen, one of the few green energy solutions capable of decarbonizing fossil fuel-intensive industries like steel and chemical production. He helped develop models outlining the financial and logistical requirements to scale up widespread hydrogen production while managing emissions, work that would eventually be included in the Harnessing Hydrogen report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy.
SESAME’s research would soon evolve into enterprise software providing insights to real-world energy giants for their biggest decarbonization projects, helping corporate strategists and financial planners guide long-term investments that both make sense for their businesses and help slash emissions.
“After explaining the results of my hydrogen supply chain optimization model to a room full of executives from large energy companies, I was able to understand the challenges that the industry faces, paving the way for developing a product that solves true pains,” says Sizaire. “This software provided tremendous insight into the future of heavy industry, and greatly benefited the industrial members of the MIT Energy Initiative.”
As Sizaire’s MIT education drew to a close, he knew that the SESAME team’s research was providing real value outside of academia, so together with Gençer and fellow MIT student researcher Jim Owens, he co-founded Sesame Sustainability.
Confronting Decarbonization Complexity With User-Friendly Data
Sesame’s software reduces the time and domain-specific expertise required to understand the different decarbonization options available to energy providers, manufacturers, and other carbon-intensive industries, providing robust data modeling and insights for decarbonization efforts for a variety of industrial sectors, including:
- Electrical Grid Resilience: optimizing how intermittent renewable energy sources integrate with fossil fuel electrical generation can reduce costs and emissions without sacrificing reliability.
- Sustainable Aviation Fuel: by evaluating the policy incentives, implementation costs, and emission profiles of different technologies, air travel can be made less carbon-intensive.
- Global Shipping & Transport: modeling the global adoption of fuels like renewable natural gas and hydrogen for use in long-distance trucking and ocean transport can reduce costs and emissions.
The core data modeling of Sesame provides the foundation for planning and optimizing industrial decarbonization, while the streamlined interface makes key insights accessible and actionable for decision-makers throughout industrial organizations.
“We package and abstract away the complexity of these industrial processes and provide our users with a very intuitive interface,” Sizaire explains. “We present results in a digestible format despite the large amount of data. This empowers planning and strategy teams, unifying the analyses around a standardized methodology and vetted results.”
Sizaire played a critical part in bringing a more user-friendly Sesame to life, using self-taught Figma skills to design the initial MVP as it transitioned from an academic context to a platform usable by businesses across a wide spectrum of energy and industrial production.
By designing Sesame to be accessible for non-engineers—corporate strategists, sustainability leads, financial planners, etc.—Paul has helped turn academic-grade insight into something that can guide real investment and infrastructure decisions.
Designing the Future of Industrial Decarbonization
Sizaire is part of the next generation of academic entrepreneurs tackling climate change, combining technical prowess with a keen understanding of what data industrial players actually need in order to move their decarbonization efforts forward. His focus on real-world business impact helped Sesame raise $2.4 million in seed funding from leading VC firms, and they have already landed clients like Chevron and Japan’s largest power generation company, JERA.
With global emissions still on the rise, speeding up decarbonization efforts is becoming more urgent in politics and among industrial leaders that want to remain on the right side of history. As the engineering needs of large-scale emission reduction projects continue to grow in scope and complexity, platforms like Sesame streamline cost-benefit analysis and simplify decision-making in ways that were impossible before.
Entrepreneurs like Paul Sizaire are operating at the intersection of academia, design, and business reality to ensure these intuitive tools are as user-friendly as they are robust, paving the way to faster decarbonization and a sustainable future for the entire world.