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What does it mean to rewrite how we make plastics and chemicals, and how can a new approach help us recapture harmful greenhouse gas that would otherwise contribute to climate change?
These seismic questions propelled Karin Calvinho to start a company to find answers — and she launched the business two years before she completed her Ph.D. at Rutgers University.
Now, more than four years after starting RenewCO₂, Karin is actively contributing to the effort to accelerate our clean energy future. The work she and her team are doing offers hope we can innovate our way out of the climate crisis.
And once you grasp the technology, you'll have the pleasure of connecting the dots directly to renewable energy. It's very synergistic.
RenewCO₂ announced its spin-out from Rutgers University last September, securing exclusive licensing to scale its novel catalyst technology to convert carbon from hard-to-abate sectors into a feedstock for carbon-negative plastic monomers at a fraction of the cost of plastics derived from fossil sources.
Ok — that's a lot for those of us who aren't chemists. But Karin was happy to break it down.
"Traditionally, the chemical companies will take fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal, heat them under pressure — sometimes with hydrogen, sometimes with oxygen — and from a series of processes that require pressure and temperature change, transform those products into a sort of soup. That soup needs to be heated up again to separate the things we need with the purity we need. And the bottom line is that we spend a lot of energy doing that, and both the carbon and heat inputs generate a lot of CO₂," she said.
After decades of such industrial processes, the planet has grown increasingly hot, and we need to scale back our CO₂ emissions. "But we still need all the products that come from those processes," she added.
"The challenge is to make them differently."
She said chemical production accounts for more than 15% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions, "so it's significant, and it's an issue worth working on."
Karin and her co-founder, Anders B. Laursen, are both immigrants — she's from Brazil, and he's from Denmark. They met at Rutgers, which operates one of the leading catalyst laboratories in the US.
"I wanted to direct my learning and my Ph.D. towards making chemicals faster, better, cheaper, and more sustainable, and that's only possible with catalysis, so I decided to go into that area," she said.
Catalysis is a process that makes a chemical reaction happen faster. It works by using a substance called a catalyst that lowers the amount of energy needed for the reaction to occur. The catalyst is not used up in the reaction and can be repeatedly reused to speed up other reactions.
Karin and Anders have extensive experience in catalysis, electrolyzers, electrochemistry, chemicals and materials science. They were named Breakthrough Energy Network fellows in 2022 for their work around converting CO₂ to chemical products to address decarbonization in the plastics, energy, and chemicals sectors.
Karin called the Breakthrough Energy Network "a great example of reducing friction in innovation and helping to educate founders on how to run a company instead of letting them figure it out alone."
RenewCO₂ has repeatedly demonstrated that its novel catalyst can mimic nature's route to reducing CO₂ more efficiently than natural systems by chemically transforming carbon dioxide into chemicals at "unprecedented selectivity and high energy efficiency" in a single step. The low-cost catalyst has also received broad peer-review attention and several awards, including features in The Royal Society of Chemistry's Energy & Environmental Science Journal and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The startup has raised more than $10 million in venture investment and grant funding, including a seed round of over $2 million led by Energy Transition Ventures. RenewCO₂ expects to begin supplying its systems to customers by 2025.
For now, join me to learn more about Karin, the innovations RenewCO₂ is pioneering and, for all you solar warriors out there, how this ties directly to renewables.
NOTEWORTHY QUOTEs:
“Basically, plastic is a polymer. And a polymer is made out of monomers. So before it becomes the material that you see it is generally a smaller molecule, and it needs to be bound together before it becomes the solid that you see around.”
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ABOUT THE HOST OF SUNCAST:
Nico Johnson is the creator and host of SunCast, consistently rated a top solar podcast in the clean energy sector. The content of the show is geared towards listeners looking for insights on where the markets are headed, how to position themselves or their companies, and what today's market leaders do to stay ahead of the pack.
Nico is an Investor, Executive Coach, and 16-year veteran of the solar industry, having led development in the US and Latin America for global companies like Trina Solar and Conergy.
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