As petrochemical plants and other emitters look to reduce emissions, they’re finding that sopping up and storing all the carbon dioxide they produce doesn’t come cheap. First they have to capture it, an energy-intensive process that requires specialized equipment. Then they have to transport it and stash it away, which can be tricky depending on where the plant is located.
“When it comes to a petrochemical plant, a lot of them want to do carbon capture and sequestration,” said Marissa Beatty, founder and CEO of Turnover Labs. “They haven’t figured out how they’re going to move massive quantities of this stuff off site and store it underground.”
Beatty is proposing an alternative: reuse the waste carbon dioxide on site by turning it into a building block used to make myriad chemical compounds. “We want to make as much use of that as possible,” she told TechCrunch.
Turnover Labs was born out of Beatty’s doctoral research into improving the durability of electrolyzers, which use electricity to facilitate a range of chemical reactions. As she was finishing her PhD, she started looking for opportunities to take the work with her to her next endeavor.
“It was something that I wasn’t really ready to abandon. I took it around to a bunch of different places to see if other electrolyzer startups might want it,” she said. They didn’t. “A bunch of my friends were doing startups as well, and I was like, should we do this?”
She poked at the idea more during a fellowship with Activate, a nonprofit that supports early-stage deep tech companies. “I spent a year just interviewing people all over. I had a million different ideas for how to take my technology, bring it to market,” Beatty said. “I really wanted to go the industrial route for it. And I just arrived over and over again at CO2.”
Electrolyzers have the potential to transform carbon dioxide into a range of different chemicals, but it’s often the other gases that come along with it that foul things up. Filtering them out to get pure CO2 is expensive. Beatty, though, figured her technology could improve the way electrolyzers behave in the presence of compounds that would normally degrade the catalysts that help the reactions along, causing them to break off and float away.
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If catalysts were cheap, it wouldn’t be a big deal — you could just replace them. But they’re often expensive metals like platinum or silver. Turnover Labs ensures that the catalysts are more tightly adhered to an electrode, where chemical reactions take place in an electrolyzer. That, plus some other specialized chemistry and software, allows the company to transform carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which is used as an ingredient in a range of petrochemical reactions, while 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 sorts of gas streams coming out of real-world petrochemical plants.
“We’re working with some partners right now to essentially just break our electrolyzer a bunch,” she said. “Seeing what breaks, seeing what doesn’t break, and then basically iterating until we have something really, really, really strong.”
Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.
De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.dechant@techcrunch.com.