Orlando-linked company to merge with hydrogen fuel developer
Patrick Orlando, the financier who helped take former U.S. president Donald Trump's media venture public, agreed to merge one of his blank-check companies with hydrogen fuel developer eCombustible Energy LLC.
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In a regulatory filing Wednesday, the investors in Miami-based eCombustible received $805 million of stock, according to a report by the Orlando s Benessere Capital Acquisition Corp.
The statement said that the hydrogen firm's backers could receive as many as 59 million additional Bennessere shares depending on the stock price performance over the next two and a half years. The combined company, to be called eCombustible Energy Corp., is expected to trade on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ECEC ticker.
Orlando operates several SPACs, including Digital World Acquisition Corp., which agreed in October to merge with Trump's nascent media venture in a deal valued at as much as 1.7 billion. Another blank-check company, led by Orlando-Wuhan, China-based Yunhong International Co., is liquidating after failing to find an acquisition target.
Shares of Benessere Capital Acquisition went up as much as 40% Wednesday after the deal was announced. They were up 9.4% to $11.13 at 11: 09 a.m. in New York.
According to Wednesday s statement, ECombustible has been developing a hydrogen-based alternative fuel that can be used in thermal industrial applications. It said that the technology of the company has been validated through independent assessments by third-party engineering firms and other experts, without naming them or elaborating further.
Jorge Arevalo, a former real estate investor and hotelier, founded the company about a decade ago. Arevalo says that a realization of the power required to support property developments and a study by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir on clean energy inspired him to start ECombustible, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In January, Benessere Capital Acquisition, which is sponsored by ARC Global Investments LLC, raised $115 million in an initial public offering. At the time, the SPAC said it would focus on dealmaking with technology-focused middle-market and emerging-growth companies in North, Central and South America.
There is a surge in interest in hydrogen, with many governments and businesses betting on it as the clean molecule of the future. It won't be easy to build a hydrogen economy, as the multitude of companies in the space need to prove their technologies can be commercialized and work on the large scale needed for success.
Hydrogen is a promise of decarbonizing industries that can't easily run on electricity, serving as both a fuel and a way to store energy. When fed in a fuel cell or burned in a turbine, hydrogen can generate electricity without greenhouse gas emissions.
With no carbon emitted, nearly all of the hydrogen produced today comes from natural gas, but it can also be stripped from water using renewable power. The first generation of green hydrogen plants is due to come online in the next few years. It could potentially power cement and steel factories, cargo ships, and airplanes.
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