seeing green

Houston energy tech company launches B2B carbon footprint calculator

Syzygy Plasmonics has released a free online tool that enables users to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions and emission-reduction costs in as little as 60 seconds. Photo via Getty Images

Houston-area energy tech startup Syzygy Plasmonics is helping businesses and other organizations get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions.

Syzygy just released a free online tool at CarbonModel.com that enables users to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions and emission-reduction costs in as little as 60 seconds. It’s a more straightforward way of making those calculations than is offered by Argonne National Laboratory’s Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) model, the startup says.

Syzygy says it created the tool in light of heightened interest surrounding clean hydrogen. The recently passed federal Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits for clean hydrogen projects.

“New and existing hydrogen producers, consumers, and project developers are actively seeking to identify and quantify the impacts that the tax credits will have on project economics and feasibility,” Syzygy says in a news release.

Syzygy co-founder and CEO Trevor Best calls the Inflation Reduction Act “a major tailwind” for energy transition and hydrogen adoption.

“Existing hydrogen producers now have the fiscal support needed to sanction new projects. And companies that had been mulling hydrogen as a new business are incentivized to move more quickly,” Best says. “Both existing and new entrants in the hydrogen market want to know if their hydrogen is clean enough to qualify for [Inflation Reduction Act] tax credits.”

Murtuza Marfani, vice president of finance and corporate development at Syzygy, says tools like GREET are “demanding and complex” when it comes to figuring out tax credits for clean hydrogen projects.

“CarbonModel.com simplifies early-stage analysis,” Marfani says. “We see it contributing to the momentum from the [Inflation Reduction Act] by enabling organizations to quickly assess project viability. It will also help them address any gaps in knowledge before committing to full-project modeling.”

CarbonModel.com currently focuses on hydrogen production, but Syzygy says future versions will provide cost and carbon footprint assessments for ammonia, e-fuels, and other chemicals.

Syzygy has developed reactor technology that uses light from ultra-high-efficiency LEDs to power chemical reactions, eliminating the traditional method of producing hydrogen with heat from burning fuel.

In May, Syzygy said it was relocating its headquarters from 9000 Kirby Dr. in Houston to Pearland. It’s leasing a 44,800-square-foot building in Pearland for its headquarters, R&D operations, and manufacturing facilities. The new facility is at 3250 S. Sam Houston Pkwy.

Founded in 2017, Syzygy has created technology that generates clean hydrogen from various feedstocks. Syzygy’s technology is based on an area of science known as photocatalysis, which uses light from LEDs driven by renewable electricity to conduct chemical reactions. The technology can electrify the production of chemicals such as hydrogen, liquid fuels, and fertilizer.

In 2021, the company — whose technology is based on Rice University research — raised $23 million in series B funding. Syzygy has collected a total of $30 million, according to Crunchbase.

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Building Houston

 
 

San Diego-based rBIO moved to Houston to take advantage of the growing ecosystem of biomanufacturing and synthetic biology. Photo via Getty Images

Cameron Owen had an idea for a synthetic biology application, and he pitched it to a handful of postdoctoral programs. When he received the feedback that he didn't have enough research experience, he decided to launch a startup based in San Diego around his idea. He figured that he'd either get the experience he needed to re-apply, or he'd create a viable company.

After three years of research and development, Owen's path seems to have taken him down the latter of those two options, and he moved his viable company, rBIO, to Houston — a twist he didn't see coming.

“Houston was not on my radar until about a year and a half ago,” Owen says, explaining that he thought of Houston as a leading health care hub, but the coasts still had an edge when it came to what he was doing. “San Diego and the Boston area are the two big biotech and life science hubs.”

But when he visited the Bayou City in December of 2021, he says he saw first hand that something new was happening.

“Companies from California like us and the coastal areas were converging here in Houston and creating this new type of bioeconomy,” he tells InnovationMap.

Owen moved to Houston last year, but rBIO still has an academic partner in Washington University in St. Louis and a clinical research organization it's working with too, so he admits rBIO's local footprint is relatively small — but not for long.

"When we look to want to get into manufacturing, we definitely want to build something here in Houston," he says. "We’re just not to that point as a company."

In terms of the stage rBIO is in now, Owen says the company is coming out of R&D and into clinical studies. He says rBIO has plans to fundraise and is meeting with potential partners that will help his company scale and build out a facility.

With the help of its CRO partner, rBIO has two ongoing clinical projects — with a third coming next month. Owen says right now rBIO is targeting the pharmaceutical industry’s biologics sector — these are drugs our bodies make naturally, like insulin. About 12 percent of the population in the United States has diabetes, which translates to almost 40 million people. The demand for insulin is high, and rBIO has a way to create it — and at 30 percent less cost.

This is just the tip of the iceberg — the world of synthetic biology application is endless.

“Now that we can design and manipulate biology in ways we’ve never been able to before,” Owen says, "we’re really only limited by our own imagination.”

Synthetic biology is a field of science that involves programing biology to create and redesign natural elements. While it sounds like science fiction, Owen compares it to any other type of technology.

“Biology really is a type of software,” he says. “Phones and computers at their core run on 1s and 0s. In biology, it’s kind of the same thing, but instead of two letters, it’s four — A, C, T, and G.”

“The cool thing about biology is the software builds the hardware,” he continues. “You put that code in there and the biology builds in and of itself.”

Owen says the industry of synthetic biology has been rising in popularity for years, but the technology has only recently caught up.

“We’re exploring a brave new world — there’s no doubt about that,” Owen says.

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