The engineer on a mission to save the planet by converting waste heat into electricity

When he was 13 years old, Jon Fenton received a piece of advice that would set him on a quest to change the world.

It was from an elderly neighbour, a former RAF squadron leader, with whom he shared a love of engineering.

The story goes that one day he sat Fenton down with a drink and a piece of battenberg cake and told him he needed to create a more efficient car engine.

“He said: ‘Look Jon, engines are only 20 per cent efficient, leaving 80 per cent of the energy created going to waste,’” recalls Fenton.

The teenager was curious and took up the challenge. He spent the next few years in his bedroom on the outskirts of Bradford sketching out potential designs for a simple rotary continuous compression machine. But there was one piece of the puzzle he couldn’t solve: how to guide his spherical rotor.

At 16, he put the project on the back burner and turned to a career in mechanical engineering, starting as an apprentice at a textile machine manufacturer. By his mid-twenties he was heading his own design team before later moving into operations roles, latterly for Valvetek in Elland.

The 53-year-old says he never set out with aspirations to start his own company but on September 18, 2015, almost 40 years after the conversation with his neighbour, he says he had ‘that lightbulb moment’.

“I was taking a shower, considering the waterflow in the showerhead, when suddenly the missing piece of the jigsaw came to me,” he says. “It was a very definite Eureka moment. I went downstairs, sketched it out and that was it.”

Fenton was so worried that someone might steal his design that he didn’t show it to anyone, even initial investors, until it had received its first patent.

The technology is currently protected by patents in 20 of the world’s largest manufacturing economies.

What he designed on that day is the same product his company, FeTu, is on the verge of bringing to a global market: a two-stage turbine (heat engine) designed to substantially reduce industrial CO2 emissions by recovering waste heat into electricity.

He worked around the clock, employed in his day job to support his family and working evenings and weekends to prove his technology and get the new business off the ground. In 2017, he opened his first office in Elland where he was the sole member of staff.

While initially he invented the device as a car engine, Fenton soon realised the potential of his creation was far greater than he could have ever imagined.

As well as cars, the device could power marine and aerospace. But his greatest ambition is to enable green power generation from uneconomic sources such as low grade industrial waste heat.

“Eighty per cent of a compressor’s 10-year cost is the energy it consumes,” says Fenton. “We have demonstrated an ability to significantly reduce energy and the costs for asset owners and the environment.”

FeTu’s technology has been developed with funding from government and private investors and support from Innovate UK and British universities including Bath, Brunel, City of London, Glasgow and Huddersfield.

The compressor variant of the FeTu device is currently being piloted by a Yorkshire-based parts manufacturer and, separately, with an original equipment manufacturer in the compressor sector.

The business is also attracting interest from growing numbers of large industrial businesses keen to make substantial energy savings.

“Since Christmas there has been an influx of businesses wanting to make better use of the energy they already have and save on their energy costs,” Fenton says.

He adds: “Only recently we have realised our potential to enable air as a working fluid for refrigeration and heat generation. This aligns well with the government’s ambition to phase our natural gas as a heat source by 2024.”

According to Fenton, thermodynamic analysis predicts that FeTu has the capacity to recover over 30 per cent of low-grade waste heat, with a one-year return on investment.

“Current alternatives offer a three-to-five per cent efficiency and a 10-15-year return on investment, so we are fundamentally different,” he says.

The idea is to licence the technology to leading manufacturers who are well established in markets which FeTu believes it could transform.

The company has increased its workforce from four to eight over the past 12 months, with plans to recruit a further three people by the end of the year.

The business will also double its floorspace this month, creating an in-house workshop and test lab at its premises in Elland.

Fenton says: “FeTu’s technology has the potential to significantly disrupt how heat and power are connected, enabling a new dawn of efficiency in power generation, propulsion, fluid power, heating and cooling applications.

“We are on the brink of transforming the £34bn global compressor market with technology that reduces energy consumption by 25 per cent. In reality this is a tiny part of our potential.”

The biggest challenge for the company, Fenton says, is time. “The environmental need is critical and now,” he says.

“We believe we have genuine answers to support a cleaner, greener environment for everyone. We have proved it works and now we have to develop it to the nth degree before people will adopt it.”

By the end of this year, all the trials will have completed and, Fenton hopes, the technology will be commercialised.

“I feel the pain of fellow innovators, social and family life goes on ice, whilst every waking hour is committed to the cause,” says Fenton who lives with his partner and step-daughter, plus his own son and daughter. “Every single day brings excitement and a string of new realisations.”

He adds: “We have the answers and I feel the personal pressure to get them out there in time.”

CURRICULUM VITAE

Title: Founder and chief executive of FeTu

Date of birth: March 3, 1967

Education: Wyke Manor School, Bradford

First job: Engineer apprentice

Favourite holiday destination: Madeira

Favourite film: The Godfather

Favourite song: Who wants to live forever, by Queen

Last book read: Disciplined entrepreneurship, by Bill Aulet.

Car driven: Volvo Polestar

Most proud of: My family - my children, my grandad and Jim, the neighbour I had the pleasure of knowing.