The chemical and petrochemical industries account for about 40 percent of industrial carbon emissions in the United States, due to factors including fossil-fuel feedstocks, incredibly energy-intensive chemical separations, and transportation-related emissions.
Solidec is ready to change all that by drawing molecular “building blocks” from ambient air with an electrolyzer that eliminates the need for chemical separations all together.
“We make chemicals from air,” says its CEO and Co-founder Ryan DuChanois. “It’s available everywhere, it’s free, and we’re no longer reliant on costly feedstocks that are fossil-derived. We envision a world where chemicals are not made from fossil fuels.”
The Greentown startup’s patent-pending electrolyzer runs on just air, water, and renewable electricity. Its ability to sidestep chemical separations is a game-changer for decarbonizing the chemicals industry, as these separations are responsible for up to 15 percent of global energy consumption. Solidec’s process can create pure, high-concentration chemicals from the get-go that are ready to use when they emerge from the electrolyzer.
By replacing fossil-fuel feedstocks with air, Solidec cuts even more emissions—and costs. Since air is plentiful everywhere, companies can use Solidec’s tech to produce chemicals on-site, thereby curbing transportation-related emissions.
The startup’s initial market is hydrogen peroxide, which can be used for disinfection, bleaching, water treatment, odor control, and much more. Currently, Solidec sells hydrogen-peroxide generators with maintenance contracts, but in the future its team plans to sell molecules as well. Down the line, Solidec can further reduce emissions by leveraging its technology to capture and convert carbon dioxide for the production of carbon-based chemicals and fuels.
DuChanois praises Solidec’s team—consisting of four full-time employees and one part-time employee—for the startup’s growth to date. Solidec has raised about $1M in non-dilutive funding and is currently raising a $2M pre-seed round; interested investors can get in touch here.
Besides closing its first equity funding, the Solidec team’s focus areas for the coming year include conducting on-site demonstrations with prospective customers, building an integrated minimum viable product, and scaling its production capacity by 100x.
DuChanois hails from Arkansas, and his love of nature propelled him through degrees in environmental and civil engineering, all the way to a postdoc in chemical engineering at Rice University. During his postdoc DuChanois pivoted from research to entrepreneurship out of a desire to make immediate, real-world impact to curb climate change. He and his co-founders—Yang Xia and Haotian Wang—spun Solidec out of Rice in June 2024, a few months after becoming members of Greentown Houston and winning the TEX-E Prize.
“Being part of a community of like-minded people who are doing similar things and have similar missions,” is a key value of Greentown, DuChanois says. “We use the lab, we have desk space here, it’s a place we call home.”