meet and greet

Houston energy transition founders pitch to entrepreneur turned politician

Andrew Yang offers entrepreneurial advice to startups at Greentown Houston. Photo by Quy Tran

It’s not every day that an entrepreneur gets grilled on their go-to-market-plans by a former presidential candidate, but for a few nascent businesses, that’s just what happened last Friday at Greentown Labs Houston.

Grilled is perhaps too strong a term, as Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur turned politician, conversed convivially with a half-dozen growing businesses in the thriving Innovation Corridor seated in midtown Houston. Yang listened carefully to each company’s elevator pitch, interrupting only to exclaim, “that’s so cool!” and “congratulations, man!” like an awestruck coed before asking thoughtful questions about the journey ahead for each entrepreneur.

Lara Cottingham, vice president of strategy, policy, and climate impact at Greentown Labs Houston, set the tone for the tour with an overview of Greentown Labs and the entrepreneurial efforts in energy transition it supports.

“[Greentown Labs was] founded 12 years ago. We’ve supported about 550 startups. Our startups have created over 24,000 jobs – and that’s just in Boston and Texas,” says Cottingham. “We don’t really know how to fully measure everywhere, but they are operating globally.

“Our startups have raised about $4 billion dollars. Half of that was last year,” Cottingham continues. “When we talk about now being the time to be in climatetech, now is the time.”

The tour begins with WIP International Services, a start up solving the problem of thirst and water scarcity by extracting moisture from humid environments and converting it into usable water.

pouring water into tall glassesWIP International Services aims to make drinking water more readily available in humid locations. Image via Shutterstock.

“We can produce a purely distilled product, or a mineralized, pH balanced product for potable water,” explains Tracy L. Jackson, CEO of WIP International Services LLC.

The small group tagging along with Yang cheers the idea of creating clean water to drink while lowering the humidity of their homes, and effectively, their demand on energy for air-conditioning in a city that is now well into three-digit summer temperatures with average outdoor humidity above 70 percent.

Jackson almost stumbled into her startup by accident 8 years ago. She was visiting a site in Louisiana working on algae solutions, where she encountered an earlier (and much larger and noisier) model of the unit that stood in front of her now, no bigger than a standard water cooler. Inspired by scenes she witnessed in Africa during her tenure with an oilfield services company, Jackson knew this was a solution too good to keep quiet.

“Because I had been in Africa – I worked in an oil and gas services company – I had seen people standing in line for water from a water well in a village. And I thought, ‘this would be perfect for that situation,’” Jackson tells the tour group. “We now have developing relationships in Africa as well as Mexico on large scale projects for atmospheric water generation.”

At the next stop, Reid Carrazzone, president and CEO of Top Grain Technologies, softly explains how he and Zack Cordero, chief scientific officer, address the challenges of long-lead times and harsh environments impeding the ability to get hydrogen-fired turbines 100 percent hydrogen-fired.

close up of 3D printer making metal objectTop Grain Technologies resolves how to make 3D printed metals more heat resistant. Image via Shutterstock.

“We are commercializing a heat treatment invented at MIT that will enable 3D-printed metal materials to serve in combustion turbine engines,” Carrazzone tells Yang. “Traditionally, 3D-printed metals are not well-suited to serving the environments of high temperature/high stress that you’d find in jet engines and natural gas settings.

“These [3D-printed] materials, certain classes of them, can be uniquely hydrogen-compatible, as well as have temperature capabilities in excess of the existing materials today,” Carrazzone says. “They will need our heat treatment to bridge that final gap in properties.”

Yang lights up with at the prospect that the duo may have come up with a truly unique solution, even suggesting the company may be in a name-your-own-price situation. The Top Grain Technologies team accepts the compliment with humility, insisting it’s more about solving the simple problems one step at a time.

Companies that Yang met along the Greentown Labs workshop floor represent just a fraction of the innovation proliferating across Houston in recent years, each with a different focus on energy sustainability and the circular economy. Maybe one day Yang, Jackson, and Carrazzone will look back on this interaction and think, “I knew them when…” Only time, and continued tending to the entrepreneurial spirit, will tell.

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A View From HETI

No critical minerals, no modern economy. Getty images

If you’re reading this on a phone, driving an EV, flying in a plane, or relying on the power grid to keep your lights on, you’re benefiting from critical minerals. These are the building blocks of modern life. Things like copper, lithium, nickel, rare earth elements, and titanium, they’re found in everything from smartphones to solar panels to F-35 fighter jets.

In short: no critical minerals, no modern economy.

These minerals aren’t just useful, they’re essential. And in the U.S., we don’t produce enough of them. Worse, we’re heavily dependent on countries that don’t always have our best interests at heart. That’s a serious vulnerability, and we’ve done far too little to fix it.

Where We Use Them and Why We’re Behind

Let’s start with where these minerals show up in daily American life:

  • Electric vehicles need lithium, cobalt, and nickel for batteries.
  • Wind turbines and solar panels rely on rare earths and specialty metals.
  • Defense systems require titanium, beryllium, and rare earths.
  • Basic infrastructure like power lines and buildings depend on copper and aluminum.

You’d think that something so central to the economy, and to national security, would be treated as a top priority. But we’ve let production and processing capabilities fall behind at home, and now we’re playing catch-up.

The Reality Check: We’re Not in Control

Right now, the U.S. is deeply reliant on foreign sources for critical minerals, especially China. And it’s not just about mining. China dominates processing and refining too, which means they control critical links in the supply chain.

Gabriel Collins and Michelle Michot Foss from the Baker Institute lay all this out in a recent report that every policymaker should read. Their argument is blunt: if we don’t get a handle on this, we’re in trouble, both economically and militarily.

China has already imposed export controls on key rare earth elements like dysprosium and terbium which are critical for magnets, batteries, and defense technologies, in direct response to new U.S. tariffs. This kind of tit-for-tat escalation exposes just how much leverage we’ve handed over. If this continues, American manufacturers could face serious material shortages, higher costs, and stalled projects.

We’ve seen this movie before, in the pandemic, when supply chains broke and countries scrambled for basics like PPE and semiconductors. We should’ve learned our lesson.

We Do Have a Stockpile, But We Need a Strategy

Unlike during the Cold War, the U.S. no longer maintains comprehensive strategic reserves across the board, but we do have stockpiles managed by the Defense Logistics Agency. The real issue isn’t absence, it’s strategy: what to stockpile, how much, and under what assumptions.

Collins and Michot Foss argue for a more robust and better-targeted approach. That could mean aiming for 12 to 18 months worth of demand for both civilian and defense applications. Achieving that will require:

  • Smarter government purchasing and long-term contracts
  • Strategic deals with allies (e.g., swapping titanium for artillery shells with Ukraine)
  • Financing mechanisms to help companies hold critical inventory for emergency use

It’s not cheap, but it’s cheaper than scrambling mid-crisis when supplies are suddenly cut off.

The Case for Advanced Materials: Substitutes That Work Today

One powerful but often overlooked solution is advanced materials, which can reduce our dependence on vulnerable mineral supply chains altogether.

Take carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers, a cutting-edge material invented at Rice University. CNTs are lighter, stronger, and more conductive than copper. And unlike some future tech, this isn’t hypothetical: we could substitute CNTs for copper wire harnesses in electrical systems today.

As Michot Foss explained on the Energy Forum podcast:

“You can substitute copper and steel and aluminum with carbon nanotube fibers and help offset some of those trade-offs and get performance enhancements as well… If you take carbon nanotube fibers and you put those into a wire harness… you're going to be reducing the weight of that wire harness versus a metal wire harness like we already use. And you're going to be getting the same benefit in terms of electrical conductivity, but more strength to allow the vehicle, the application, the aircraft, to perform better.”

By accelerating R&D and deployment of CNTs and similar substitutes, we can reduce pressure on strained mineral supply chains, lower emissions, and open the door to more secure and sustainable manufacturing.

We Have Tools. We Need to Use Them.

The report offers a long list of solutions. Some are familiar, like tax incentives, public-private partnerships, and fast-tracked permits. Others draw on historical precedent, like “preclusive purchasing,” a WWII tactic where the U.S. bought up materials just so enemies couldn’t.

We also need to get creative:

  • Repurpose existing industrial sites into mineral hubs
  • Speed up R&D for substitutes and recycling
  • Buy out risky foreign-owned assets in friendlier countries

Permitting remains one of the biggest hurdles. In the U.S., it can take 7 to 10 years to approve a new critical minerals project, a timeline that doesn’t match the urgency of our strategic needs. As Collins said on the Energy Forum podcast:

“Time kills deals... That’s why it’s more attractive generally to do these projects elsewhere.”

That’s the reality we’re up against. Long approval windows discourage investment and drive developers to friendlier jurisdictions abroad. One encouraging step is the use of the Defense Production Act to fast-track permitting under national security grounds. That kind of shift, treating permitting as a strategic imperative, must become the norm, not the exception.

It’s Time to Redefine Sustainability

Sustainability has traditionally focused on cutting carbon emissions. That’s still crucial, but we need a broader definition. Today, energy and materials security are just as important.

Countries are now weighing cost and reliability alongside emissions goals. We're also seeing renewed attention to recycling, biodiversity, and supply chain resilience.

Net-zero by 2050 is still a target. But reality is forcing a more nuanced discussion:

  • What level of warming is politically and economically sustainable?
  • What tradeoffs are we willing to make to ensure energy access and affordability?

The bottom line: we can’t build a clean energy future without secure access to materials. Recycling helps, but it’s not enough. We'll need new mines, new tech, and a more flexible definition of sustainability.

My Take: We’re Running Out of Time

This isn’t just a policy debate. It’s a test of whether we’ve learned anything from the past few years of disruption. We’re not facing an open war, but the risks are real and growing.

We need to treat critical minerals like what they are: a strategic necessity. That means rebuilding stockpiles, reshoring processing, tightening alliances, and accelerating permitting across the board.

It won’t be easy. But if we wait until a real crisis hits, it’ll be too late.

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Scott Nyquist is a senior advisor at McKinsey & Company and vice chairman, Houston Energy Transition Initiative of the Greater Houston Partnership. The views expressed herein are Nyquist's own and not those of McKinsey & Company or of the Greater Houston Partnership. This article originally appeared on LinkedIn on April 11, 2025.


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