As petrochemical plants and other emitters look to reduce emissions, they are finding that absorbing and storing all the carbon dioxide they produce isn’t cheap. First they have to capture it, a process that consumes a lot of energy and requires specialized equipment. Then they have to transport and store it, which can be complicated depending on where the plant is located.
“When it comes to a petrochemical plant, a lot of them want to capture and sequester carbon,” said Marissa Beatty, founder and CEO of Billing laboratories. “They haven’t figured out how they’re going to take massive amounts of this material off-site and store it underground.”
Beatty proposes an alternative: reusing waste carbon dioxide at the site by turning it into a building block used to make countless chemical compounds. “We want to take advantage of that as much as possible,” he told britcommerce.
Turnover Labs was born from Beatty’s doctoral research to improve the durability of electrolyzers, which use electricity to facilitate a variety of chemical reactions. While finishing her PhD, she began looking for opportunities to bring the work with her to her next project.
“It was something I really wasn’t willing to give up. “I took it to a few different places to see if other electrolyzer startups might want it,” he said. They didn’t do it. “Some of my friends were also creating startups and I thought, should we do this?”
She addressed the idea further during a fellowship with Activate, a nonprofit that supports early-stage deep tech companies. “I spent a year interviewing people from all over. I had a million different ideas about how to bring my technology to market,” Beatty said. “I really wanted to follow the industrial path. And I just came again and again to the CO2.”
Electrolyzers have the potential to transform carbon dioxide into a variety of different chemicals, but often it’s the other gases that come with it that mess things up. Filter them to obtain pure CO2 It’s expensive. Beatty, however, thought his technology could improve the way electrolyzers behave in the presence of compounds that would normally degrade the catalysts that help reactions, causing them to break down and float away.
If catalytic converters were cheap, it wouldn’t be a big deal: they could simply be replaced. But they are usually expensive metals like platinum or silver. Turnover Labs ensures that catalysts adhere more tightly to an electrode, where chemical reactions take place in an electrolyzer. That, plus other specialized chemicals and software, allows the company to transform carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which is used as an ingredient in a variety of petrochemical reactions, ignoring other gases in the waste stream.
The startup recently raised a $1.4 million pre-seed round led by GC Ventures and Pace Ventures with participation from Collaborative Fund, Gigascale Capital, Impact Science Ventures, and Sandy Spring Climate Partners. Beatty said the funding will help hire a few more people as the company simulates and tests what will happen when its electrolyzer technology encounters the kind of gas streams that come out of real-world petrochemical plants.
“We’re working with some partners right now to basically break down our electrolyzer a little bit,” he said. “See what breaks, see what doesn’t break, and then basically iterate until we have something really, really, really strong.”