![]() Cameron set up a basement lab in his house with fish tanks and bubbling apparatus purchased from pet stores. The early stages of a university spinout are tough because academic researchers can’t use their school labs for commercial work, but raising money takes more than just theoretical proof that the technology works. In February 2021, the University of Colorado’s tech-transfer office connected Burnett with the four professors, and the next month they founded the company together. “That’s where I got bitten by the decarbonization bug,” he says. In 2011, he created the now-dormant e-Chromic Technologies based on technology licensed from the Department of Energy’s renewable energy lab for a window technology that reflected infrared radiation back into the atmosphere to reduce the need for air conditioners and cooling. ![]() The final bio-concrete blocks look pretty much like those made with the industry standard, Portland cement.īurnett, 66, a serial entrepreneur, previously founded five companies, four of which were based on tech transfer from a university or a lab. The material can be mixed with the granular material known as aggregate to form bio-based concrete. The result is a slurry that it dries into a powder and combines with proprietary natural binders to create a zero-carbon bio-cement. Prometheus harvests the algae and puts it in a separate tank and, using a proprietary process, stimulates what’s called biomineralization - the formation of minerals into biological structures. ![]() Today, the company grows its algae in narrow 1,350-liter tanks with artificial seawater that’s full of nutrients, bubbled air to provide carbon dioxide and LED lights to mimic sunlight. “We learned quickly that a lot of the challenges we had to address were in the scale-up,” Hubler says. As they delved deeper, the Defense Department asked them to make a little two-by-two cube of the material. At first they worked with ureolytic bacteria, which had been studied for civil engineering applications, but they eventually switched to cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae, which gets its energy from photosynthesis. The researchers began testing bacteria in petri dishes to see what they could come up with. “So if they could use local materials to produce hardened structures to protect troops and high-value military assets, that’s what they wanted to do.” “They knew they couldn’t fly in concrete because it’s too heavy, and they knew they didn’t want to truck it in over large expanses of hostile territory,” Burnett says. They’d received a $2.4 million grant from the Department of Defense’s research arm in 2017 to see if they could use biology to produce protective structures in deserts and other remote environments with difficult terrain. It’s ubiquitous.”įour University of Colorado Boulder academics, Jeff Cameron, Sherri Cook, Mija Hubler and Wil Sruber - all Prometheus cofounders and advisors - stumbled onto the idea while searching for a solution to a different problem. “Everywhere you look, you’re going to see concrete. “This problem is so huge it’s going to take all of us being wildly successful,” Burnett says of his company and its competitors. To bring the cement industry in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change, its annual emissions would need to drop by at least 16% by 2030, even as cement production is slated to increase, according to a 2018 report by the London-based think tank Chatham House. “So if people think it’s just passenger cars and electricity, they’re going to miss what we need to do to get to zero.” “We don’t have a way of doing it that’s clean, that doesn’t cost dramatically more, more than twice the price,” he told NPR’s Marketplace in 2021. Cement is a major producer of greenhouse gasses both because of the chemical reaction that creates it and the fossil fuels required to heat the kilns where it’s produced. Gates, who wrote a book called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, has called out the desperate need to come up with a cleaner and affordable alternative to cement to fight climate change. All three have gained more venture funding than Prometheus, with Brimstone raising $60 million, Biomason $87 million and Terra CO2 $99 million, according to venture-capital database PitchBook. Brimstone Energy is working to commercialize carbon-negative cement and is building a pilot plant near Reno, Nevada with backing from venture firm DCVC. Terra CO2, with a different low-carbon alternative to cement, has raised money from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. That helps explain why Prometheus is one of a number of startups now trying to tackle the hard problem of cement.īiomason, for example, has developed a similar way to grow cement bricks and tiles with bacteria. That’s a big number, but even if Prometheus reaches that goal it’s barely a drop in the bucket for the more than $300 billion global cement industry.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |