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As petrochemical and other plants look to reduce emissions, they are finding that absorbing and storing all the carbon dioxide they produce is not cheap. They first have to capture them, which is an energy-intensive process that requires specialized equipment. They then have to move it and hide it away, which can be difficult 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 Petty, founder and CEO of the company. Duran Labs. “They haven’t figured out how to move huge amounts of this stuff off-site and store it underground.”
Beatty suggests an alternative: reuse waste carbon dioxide on 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,” she told TechCrunch.
Turnover Labs grew out of Beatty’s doctoral research on improving the robustness of electrolyzers, which use electricity to facilitate a range of chemical reactions. As she was nearing the completion of her doctorate, she began looking for opportunities to take the work with her into her next endeavor.
“It was something I wasn’t really ready to give up,” she said. “I took it to a bunch of different places to see if other electrolysis startups might want it,” she said. “They didn’t.” “There was a group of my friends who were creating Startups too, and I thought, should we do this?”
I touched on the idea further during a fellowship with Activate, a nonprofit organization that supports early-stage deep tech companies. “I spent a year just interviewing people all over the place. I had a million different ideas about how to use my technology and bring it to market,” Beatty said. “I really wanted to go the industrial route for it. And I just reached over and over again to the CO2“.
Electrolyzers have the ability to convert carbon dioxide into a range of different chemicals, but it’s often the other gases that come with it that cause the unpleasant stuff. Filter it to get pure carbon dioxide2 Expensive. However, Betty believed that her technique could improve the way electrolyzers behaved in the presence of compounds that would normally decompose the catalysts that aid the reactions along them, causing them to separate and float away.
If the triggers are cheap, it won’t be a big deal: you can just replace them. But they are often expensive metals like platinum or silver. Turnover Labs ensures that the catalysts adhere more tightly to the electrode, where chemical reactions take place in the electrolyser. This, combined with some other specialized chemistry and software, allows the company to convert 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 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 people as the company simulates and tests what will happen when its electrolyser technology encounters the types of gas streams coming out of petrochemical plants in the real world.
“We are working with some partners right now to break out a large batch of our electrolyzer,” she said. “Seeing what breaks, seeing what doesn’t break, and then basically iterating until we get something really, really, really strong.”
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