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What is your field of study?
I'm a theoretical chemist and biophysicist. I specialize in using quantum mechanical methods to study the relationship between structure and function of biomolecules and synthetic molecules. Several of my projects focus on trying to find efficient ways to capture carbon and carbon dioxide. We found a separation approach, using enzymes that looks very promising for being a low-cost approach. Sandia encouraged me to start a company to try to facilitate the transfer of that technology to a commercial application that people could use and get the benefit from our research. My job on that project was to design the holes in the membrane that promote the selectivity of carbon dioxide over nitrogen and the rapid transport of carbon dioxide across the membrane.
We are on the verge of having a working prototype for people to see and for companies to test. The next step would be to find a partner that helps us scale it up so that it could be useful in a commercial setting. Currently, we are targeting emissions from industrial processes (such as power plants fired with coal or natural gas and cement manufacturing.)
Is there a grand challenge that your field study could potentially solve?
A grand challenge would be developing a low-cost approach for carbon capture that is also highly selective for CO2 over nitrogen.
CO2 and nitrogen have a lot of similarities. They're similar in size and are small molecules so it’s difficult to be selective. Many of the current solutions are good with the permeation rates of CO2 across their membranes but not so good at selectivity.
Our method is highly selective, which means the CO2 that comes across is pure and it could be used right away in some applications, like manufacturing chemicals, to grow plants in greenhouses or to carbonate beverages. That's how pure it is and that means that we don't have to work as hard to get the CO2 separated because we don’t to have to pass it across the membrane many times to get the appropriate purity. That’s a grand challenge, and we have unique capability on the selectivity side.
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