The technology allegedly stolen involves high-speed battery assembly lines that use a proprietary technology owned by Tesla. Photo courtesy of Tesla

Two men are accused of starting a business in China using battery manufacturing technology pilfered from Tesla and trying to sell the proprietary information, federal prosecutors in New York said Tuesday.

Klaus Pflugbeil, 58, a Canadian citizen who lives in Ningbo, China, was arrested Tuesday morning on Long Island, where he thought he was going to meet with businessmen to negotiate a sale price for the information, federal authorities said. Instead, the businessmen were undercover federal agents.

The other man named in the criminal complaint is Yilong Shao, 47, also of Ningbo. He remains at large. They are charged with conspiracy to transmit trade secrets, which carries up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

A lawyer for Pflugbeil did not immediately return phone and email messages seeking comment Tuesday night. Tesla also did not immediately return an email message.

The technology at issue involves high-speed battery assembly lines that use a proprietary technology owned by Tesla, maker of electric vehicles.

The two men worked at a Canadian company that developed the technology and was bought in 2019 by “a U.S.-based leading manufacturer of battery-powered electric vehicles and battery energy systems,” authorities said in the complaint. Tesla then was sole owner of the technology.

Prosecutors did not name either company. But in 2019, Tesla purchased Hibar Systems, a battery manufacturing company in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The deal was first reported by Electric Autonomy Canada.

"The defendants set up a company in China, blatantly stole trade secrets from an American company that are important to manufacturing electric vehicles, and which cost many millions of dollars in research and development, and sold products developed with the stolen trade secrets,” Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement with officials with the Justice Department and FBI.

In mid-2020, Pflugbeil and Shao opened their business in China and expanded it to locations in Canada, Germany and Brazil, prosecutors said. The business makes the same battery assembly lines that Tesla uses with its proprietary information, and it markets itself as an alternative source for the assembly lines, authorities said.

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Gold H2 harvests clean hydrogen from depleted California reservoirs in first field trial

breakthrough trial

Houston climatech company Gold H2 completed its first field trial that demonstrates subsurface bio-stimulated hydrogen production, which leverages microbiology and existing infrastructure to produce clean hydrogen.

Gold H2 is a spinoff of another Houston biotech company, Cemvita.

“When we compare our tech to the rest of the stack, I think we blow the competition out of the water," Prabhdeep Singh Sekhon, CEO of Gold H2 Sekhon previously told Energy Capital.

The project represented the first-of-its-kind application of Gold H2’s proprietary biotechnology, which generates hydrogen from depleted oil reservoirs, eliminating the need for new drilling, electrolysis or energy-intensive surface facilities. The Woodlands-based ChampionX LLC served as the oilfield services provider, and the trial was conducted in an oilfield in California’s San Joaquin Basin.

According to the company, Gold H2’s technology could yield up to 250 billion kilograms of low-carbon hydrogen, which is estimated to provide enough clean power to Los Angeles for over 50 years and avoid roughly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

“This field trial is tangible proof. We’ve taken a climate liability and turned it into a scalable, low-cost hydrogen solution,” Sekhon said in a news release. “It’s a new blueprint for decarbonization, built for speed, affordability, and global impact.”

Highlights of the trial include:

  • First-ever demonstration of biologically stimulated hydrogen generation at commercial field scale with unprecedented results of 40 percent H2 in the gas stream.
  • Demonstrated how end-of-life oilfield liabilities can be repurposed into hydrogen-producing assets.
  • The trial achieved 400,000 ppm of hydrogen in produced gases, which, according to the company,y is an “unprecedented concentration for a huff-and-puff style operation and a strong indicator of just how robust the process can perform under real-world conditions.”
  • The field trial marked readiness for commercial deployment with targeted hydrogen production costs below $0.50/kg.

“This breakthrough isn’t just a step forward, it’s a leap toward climate impact at scale,” Jillian Evanko, CEO and president at Chart Industries Inc., Gold H2 investor and advisor, added in the release. “By turning depleted oil fields into clean hydrogen generators, Gold H2 has provided a roadmap to produce low-cost, low-carbon energy using the very infrastructure that powered the last century. This changes the game for how the world can decarbonize heavy industry, power grids, and economies, faster and more affordably than we ever thought possible.”

Rice University spinout lands $500K NSF grant to boost chip sustainability

cooler computing

HEXAspec, a spinout from Rice University's Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was recently awarded a $500,000 National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant.

The team says it will use the funding to continue enhancing semiconductor chips’ thermal conductivity to boost computing power. According to a release from Rice, HEXAspec has developed breakthrough inorganic fillers that allow graphic processing units (GPUs) to use less water and electricity and generate less heat.

The technology has major implications for the future of computing with AI sustainably.

“With the huge scale of investment in new computing infrastructure, the problem of managing the heat produced by these GPUs and semiconductors has grown exponentially. We’re excited to use this award to further our material to meet the needs of existing and emerging industry partners and unlock a new era of computing,” HEXAspec co-founder Tianshu Zhai said in the release.

HEXAspec was founded by Zhai and Chen-Yang Lin, who both participated in the Rice Innovation Fellows program. A third co-founder, Jing Zhang, also worked as a postdoctoral researcher and a research scientist at Rice, according to HEXAspec's website.

The HEXASpec team won the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge in 2024. More recently, it also won this year's Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition during CERAWeek in the TEX-E student track, taking home $25,000.

"The grant from the NSF is a game-changer, accelerating the path to market for this transformative technology," Kyle Judah, executive director of Lilie, added in the release.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.