In the year 2013, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere - particularly carbon dioxide - increased at its fastest rate in 30 years. According to the World Meterological Association, concentrations of CO2 have reached new highs - higher, in fact, than they've ever been since humans first evolved. That continued increase of CO2 emissions is, in turn, a major contributor to climate change and ocean acidification.
The problems of carbon dioxide emissions and the resulting climate change are too big to have one solution. They'll require multiple solutions from business, government, and other institutions.
Liquid Light, a New Jersey-based startup, believes it has one of those solutions. The company announced today that it has raised $15 million in series B financing to take their chemical process to an industrial scale. That process? They're turning carbon dioxide emissions from industry into commercially useful chemicals - like the precursors used to create the plastic in your soda bottle.
Most industrial organic chemicals, like those used in plastics, are composed of just three atoms in different combinations: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Liquid Light's process uses CO2 as the base of its chemical synthesis, along with different "co-feedstocks" of other chemicals - which can include the waste products of other industrial processes.
Of course, that chemistry isn't new - plenty of scientists are working on ways to reuse carbon dioxide. What differentiates Liquid Light's product involves both reducing the amount of energy needed for the process by the use of its catalysts and utilizing cheap waste CO2 from industrial processes rather than more expensive sources of chemicals used for industrial organic chemistry such as corn or oil. Those combine to make the process extremely cost-efficient. So far, their methods have been validated in the lab, and a research team at Princeton University confirmed it in a paper published in July.
With the new investment money coming from investors such as Sustainable Conversion Ventures, VantagePoint Capital Partners, BP Ventures, Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, and Osage University Partners, the company hopes to scale up their process to validate results on a larger level, both in terms of the process itself and the plastics that result. If they're successful, that information can be used to produce tons of organic chemicals per day at the plant level.
Although the process can be used to create different organic chemicals, Liquid Light is setting its sights on just one for right now - the production of ethylene glycol. Ethylene glycol is used as the base material for the production of polyester, plastic bottles, and other products. The company estimates that the size of that market is about $87 billion.
If they're successful at scaling up, Liquid Light could become a serious contender in its industry. The company claims that its carbon feedstock cost to make a ton of ethylene glycol could be around 20% of the cost of more traditional methods. If that holds, they could be profitable pretty quickly - while at the same time providing a potential solution to help prevent the worst predicted effects of climate change.
