A brand new tackle carbon seize | MIT Information

If there was one factor Cameron Halliday SM ’19, MBA ’22, PhD ’22 was distinctive at throughout the early days of his PhD at MIT, it was producing the identical graph again and again. Unfortunately for Halliday, the graph measured varied supplies’ capability to soak up CO2 at excessive temperatures over time — and it all the time pointed down and to the correct. That meant the supplies misplaced their capability to seize the molecules chargeable for warming our local weather.

At least Halliday wasn’t alone: For a few years, researchers have tried and largely failed to seek out supplies that might reliably soak up CO2 on the super-high temperatures of business furnaces, kilns, and boilers. Halliday’s purpose was to seek out one thing that lasted a bit longer.

Then in 2019, he put a sort of molten salt known as lithium-sodium ortho-borate by his assessments. The salts absorbed greater than 95 p.c of the CO2. And for the primary time, the graph confirmed nearly no degradation over 50 cycles.  The similar was true after 100 cycles. Then 1,000.

“I honestly don’t know if we ever expected to completely solve the problem,” Halliday says. “We just expected to improve the system. It took another two months to figure out why it worked.”

The researchers found the salts behave like a liquid at excessive temperatures, which avoids the brittle cracking chargeable for the degradation of many stable supplies.

“I remember walking home over the Mass Ave bridge at 5 a.m. with all the morning runners going by me,” Halliday recollects. “That was the moment when I realized what this meant. Since then, it’s been about proving it works at larger scales. We’ve just been building the next scaled-up version, proving it still works, building a bigger version, proving that out, until we reach the ultimate goal of deploying this everywhere.”

Today, Halliday is the co-founder and CEO of Mantel, an organization constructing methods to seize carbon dioxide at giant industrial websites of all kinds. Although lots of people assume the carbon seize business is a useless finish, Halliday doesn’t hand over so simply, and he’s obtained a rising corpus of efficiency knowledge to maintain him inspired.

Mantel’s system will be added on to the machines of energy stations and factories making cement, metal, paper and pulp, oil and gasoline, and extra, decreasing their carbon emissions by round 95 p.c. Instead of being launched into the environment, the emitted CO2 is channeled into Mantel’s system, the place the corporate’s salts are sprayed out from one thing that appears like a bathe head. The CO2 diffuses by the molten salts in a response that may be reversed by additional temperature will increase, so the salts boil off pure CO2 that may be transported to be used or saved underground.

A key distinction from different carbon seize strategies which have struggled to be worthwhile is that Mantel makes use of the warmth from its course of to generate steam for purchasers by combining it with water in one other a part of its system. Mantel says delivering steam, which is used to drive many widespread industrial processes, lets its system work with simply 3 p.c of the online power that state-of-the-art carbon seize methods require.

“We’re still consuming energy, but we get most of it back as steam, whereas the incumbent technology only consumes steam,” says Halliday, who co-founded Mantel with Sean Robertson PhD ’22 and Danielle Rapson. “That steam is a useful revenue stream, so we can turn carbon capture from a waste management process into a value creation process for our customer’s core business — whether that’s a power station using steam to make electricity, or oil and gas refineries. It completely changes the economics of carbon capture.”

From science to startup

Halliday’s first publicity to MIT got here in 2016 when he chilly emailed Alan Hatton, MIT’s Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering Practice, asking if he might come to his lab for the summer time and work on analysis into carbon seize.

“He invited me, but he didn’t put me on that project,” Halliday recollects. “At the end of the summer he said, ‘You should consider coming back and doing a PhD.’”

Halliday enrolled in a joint PhD-MBA program the next 12 months.

“I really wanted to work on something that had an impact,” Halliday says. “The dual PhD-MBA program has some deep technical academic elements to it, but you also work with a company for two months, so you use a lot of what you learn in the real world.”

Halliday labored on a number of totally different analysis tasks in Hatton’s lab early on, all three of which finally became corporations. The one which he caught with explored methods to make carbon seize extra power environment friendly by working on the excessive temperatures widespread at emissions-heavy industrial websites.

Halliday bumped into the identical issues as previous researchers with supplies degrading at such excessive circumstances.

“It was the big limiter for the technology,” Halliday recollects.

Then Halliday ran his profitable experiment with molten borate salts in 2019. The MBA portion of his program started quickly after, and Halliday determined to make use of that point to commercialize the expertise. Part of that occurred in Course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures), the place Halliday met his co-founders. As it occurs, alumni of the category have began greater than 150 corporations over time.

“MIT tries to pull these great ideas out of academia and get them into the world so they can be valued and used,” Halliday says. “For the Climate and Energy Ventures class, outside speakers showed us every stage of company-building. The technology roadmap for our system is shoebox-sized, shipping container, one-bedroom house, and then the size of a building. It was really valuable to see other companies and say, ‘That’s what we could look like in three years, or six years.”

From startup to scale up

When Mantel was formally based in 2022 the founders had their shoebox-sized system. After elevating early funding, the crew constructed its delivery container-sized system at The Engine, an MIT-affiliated startup incubator. That system has been operational for nearly two years.

Last 12 months, Mantel introduced a partnership with Kruger Inc. to construct the following model of its system at a manufacturing facility in Quebec, which might be operational subsequent 12 months. The plant will run in a two-year check section earlier than scaling throughout Kruger’s different crops if profitable.

“The Quebec project is proving the capture efficiency and proving the step-change improvement in energy use of our system,” Halliday says. “It’s a derisking of the technology that will unlock a lot more opportunities.”

Halliday says Mantel is in conversations with near 100 industrial companions world wide, together with the house owners of refineries, knowledge facilities, cement and metal crops, and oil and gasoline corporations. Because it’s a standalone addition, Halliday says Mantel’s system doesn’t have to vary a lot for use in several industries.

Mantel doesn’t deal with CO2 conversion or sequestration, however Halliday says seize makes up the majority of the prices within the CO2 worth chain. It additionally generates high-quality CO2 that may be transported in pipelines and utilized in industries together with the meals and beverage business — just like the CO2 that makes your soda bubbly.

“This is the solution our customers are dreaming of,” Halliday says. “It means they don’t have to shut down their billion-dollar asset and reimagine their business to address an issue that they all appreciate is existential. There are questions about the timeline, but most industries recognize this is a problem they’ll have to grapple with eventually. This is a pragmatic solution that’s not trying to reshape the world as we dream of it. It’s looking at the problem at hand today and fixing it.”