Houston lab's breakthrough light-harvesting processes near market readiness

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The new process developed by Rice University researchers makes solar cells that are about 10 times more durable than traditional methods. Photos by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

A groundbreaking Rice University lab has made further strides in its work to make harvesting light energy more efficient and stable.

Presented on the cover of a June issue of Science, a study from Rice engineer Aditya Mohite's lab uncovered a method to synthesize a high-efficiency perovskite solar cell, known as formamidinium lead iodide (FAPbI3), converting them into ultrastable high-quality photovoltaic films, according to a statement from Rice. Photovoltaic films convert sunlight into electricity.

The new process makes solar cells that are about 10 times more durable than traditional methods.

“Right now, we think that this is state of the art in terms of stability,” Mohite said in a statement. “Perovskite solar cells have the potential to revolutionize energy production, but achieving long-duration stability has been a significant challenge.”

The change come from "seasoning" the FAPbI3 with 2D halide perovskites crystals, which the Mohite lab also developed a breakthrough synthesis process for last year

The 2D perovskites helped make the FAPbI3 films more stable. The study showed that films with 2D perovskites deteriorated after two days of generating electricity, while those with 2D perovskites had not started to degrade after 20 days.

“FAPbI3 films templated with 2D crystals were higher quality, showing less internal disorder and exhibiting a stronger response to illumination, which translated as higher efficiency," Isaac Metcalf, a Rice materials science and nanoengineering graduate student and a lead author on the study, said in the statement.

Additionally, researchers say their findings could make developing light-harvesting technologies cheaper, and can also allow light-harvesting panels to be lighter weight and more flexible.

"Perovskites are soluble in solution, so you can take an ink of a perovskite precursor and spread it across a piece of glass, then heat it up and you have the absorber layer for a solar cell,” Metcalf said. “Since you don’t need very high temperatures ⎯ perovskite films can be processed at temperatures below 150 Celsius (302 Fahrenheit) ⎯ in theory that also means perovskite solar panels can be made on plastic or even flexible substrates, which could further reduce costs.”

Mohite adds this has major implications for the energy transition at large.

“If solar electricity doesn’t happen, none of the other processes that rely on green electrons from the grid, such as thermochemical or electrochemical processes for chemical manufacturing, will happen,” Mohite said. “Photovoltaics are absolutely critical.”

The Mohite lab's process for creating 2D perovskites of the ideal thickness and purity was published in Nature Synthesis last fall. At the time, Mohite said the crystals "hold the key to achieving commercially relevant stability for solar cells."

About a year ago, the lab also published its work on developing a scalable photoelectrochemical cell. The research broke records for its solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency rate.

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Woodside Energy has committed $12.5 million to a new partnership with Rice University. Photo via Instagram/WoodsideEnergy

Woodside Energy backs $12.5M clean energy accelerator for new technologies

howdy, partner

A global Australian energy company with its international operations in Houston has backed a new climatetech accelerator in partnership with Rice University.

Woodside Energy, headquartered in Australia with its global operations in Houston following its 2022 acquisition of BHP Group, has committed $12.5 million over the next five years to create the Woodside Rice Decarbonization Accelerator.

"The goal of the accelerator is to fast track the commercialization of innovative decarbonization technologies created in Rice labs," Rice University President Reginald DesRoches says to a crowd at the Ion at the initiative's announcement. "These technologies have the potential to make better batteries, transitistors, and other critical materials for energy technologies. In addition, the accelerator will work on manufacturing these high-value products from captured and converted carbon dioxide and methane."

"The Woodside Rice Decarbonization Accelerator will build on the work that Rice has been doing in advanced materials, energy, energy transition, and climate for many years. More than 20 percent of our faculty do some related work to energy and climate," he continues. "Harnessing their efforts alongside an esteemed partner like Woodside Energy is an exciting step that will undoubtedly have an impact far and wide."

Rice University announced the new climate tech initiative backed by Woodside Energy this week. Photo by Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

Woodside, which has over 800 employees based in Houston, has been a partner at the Ion since last spring. Daniel Kalms, Woodside Energy's CTO and executive vice president, explains that the new initiative falls in line with the three goals of Woodside's climate strategy, which includes keeping up with global energy demand, creating value, and conducting its business sustainably. The company has committed a total of $5 billion to new energy by 2030, Kalms says.

"We know that the world needs energy that is more affordable, sustainable, and secure to support the energy transition — and we want to provide that energy. Energy that is affordable, sustainable, and secure requires innovation and the application of new technology. That's what this is about," he says.

"Of course collaboration will be the key," Kalms continues. "By working with researchers, entrepreneurs, leading experts and parallel industries, we can combine our capability to solve collective challenges and create shared opportunities. That's why we are excited to be partnering with Rice."

The accelerator will be run by Paul Cherukuri, vice president of innovation at Rice University, and Aditya Mohite, associate professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Materials Science and Nanoengineering. Additional Rice professors will be involved as well, Cherukuri says.

"Success for us will not be papers, it will be products," Cherukuri says of what Woodside wants from the partnership. "We picked faculty at Rice in particular who were interested in taking on this charge, and they were all faculty who created companies."

Last fall, Rice announced a grant and venture initiative to accelerate innovation from Rice in the biotech space.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

Rice University engineers and collaborators developed a technology that converts light into electricity. Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Houston research team develops breakthrough process for light-harvesting crystals in DOE-backed project

solar success

A team of Rice researchers have developed a breakthrough synthesis process for developing light-harvesting materials that can be used in solar cells to convert light into electricity.

Detailed in an October study in Nature Synthesis, the new process is able to more closely control the temperature and time of the crystallization process to create 2D halide perovskites with semiconductor layers of “ideal thickness and purity,” according to a release from Rice.

The process, known as kinetically controlled space confinement, was developed by Rice University chemical and biomolecular engineer Aditya Mohite, along with others at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Rennes. The research was backed by the Department of Energy, the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation and a number of other organizations.

“This research breakthrough is critical for the synthesis of 2D perovskites, which hold the key to achieving commercially relevant stability for solar cells and for many other optoelectronic device applications and fundamental light matter interactions,” Mohite said in a statement.

Traditional synthesis methods for creating 2D halide perovskites, which have been shown to offer a high-performance low-cost way to produce solar cells, have generated uneven crystal growth when attempting to reach a higher n value. And uneven crystal growth can result in a less reliable material, while a high n value can result in higher electrical conductivity, among other benefits.

The study shows how the kinetically controlled space confinement method can gradually increase n values in 2D halide perovskites, which will assist in the production of crystals with a certain thickness.

“We designed a way to slow down the crystallization and tune each kinetics parameter gradually to hit the sweet spot for phase-pure synthesis,” Jin Hou, a Ph.D. student at Rice and a lead author on a study, said in a statement.

The process is expected to improve the stability and lower the costs of emerging technologies in optoelectronics, or the study and application of light-emitting or light-detecting devices, and photovoltaics, the conversion of thermal energy into electricity.

"This work pushes the boundaries of higher quantum well 2D perovskites synthesis, making them a viable and stable option for a variety of applications,” Hou added.

Houston universities have been making major strides relating to crystallization processes in recent months.

In September, the University of Houston announced The Welch Foundation awarded its inaugural $5 million Catalyst for Discovery Program Grant to establish the Welch Center for Advanced Bioactive Materials Crystallization. The center will build upon UH professor Jeffrey Rimer's work relating to the use of crystals to help treat malaria and kidney stones.

Over the summer, a team of researchers at UH also published a paper detailing their discovery of how to use molecular crystals to capture large quantities of iodine, one of the most common products of radioactive fission, which is used to create nuclear energy.

Rice University engineers have created a device that absorbs light, converts it into electricity, and then uses the electricity to split water molecules and generate hydrogen. Photo courtesy Gustavo Raskoksy/Rice University

Rice University team breaks records with new sunlight-to-hydrogen device

big win

A team of Rice University engineers have developed a scalable photoelectrochemical cell that converts sunlight into clean hydrogen at a record-setting pace.

The lab led by Aditya Mohite, an associate professor at Rice, published the findings in a study in Nature Communications late last month, in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is backed by the Department of Energy. In it, the team details how they created a device that absorbs light, converts it into electricity, and then uses the electricity to split water molecules and generate hydrogen.

Austin Fehr, a chemical and biomolecular engineering doctoral student at Rice and one of the study’s lead authors, says in a statement that the device "could open up the hydrogen economy and change the way humans make things from fossil fuel to solar fuel."

The device has a high solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency rate of 20.8 percent, which has yet to be reached with this type of technology, according to a release from Rice. In addition to its speed, this device is groundbreaking because it uses low-cost metal-halide perovskite semiconductors to power the reaction.

A photoreactor developed by Rice University’s Mohite research group and collaborators achieved a 20.8 percent solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency. Photo courtesy Gustavo Raskoksy/Rice University

“Using sunlight as an energy source to manufacture chemicals is one of the largest hurdles to a clean energy economy,” Fehr says in the statement. “Our goal is to build economically feasible platforms that can generate solar-derived fuels. Here, we designed a system that absorbs light and completes electrochemical water-splitting chemistry on its surface.”

To create the device the Mohite lab turned their existing solar cell into a reactor to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. However they continued running into issues with the semiconductors being "extremely unstable in water," according to Rice.

After two years of trials and errors, the team uncovered that by adding two layers of barriers to the semiconductors they were able to reach these record-breaking efficiency rates.

The team has also shown uses for their double barrier design with different semiconductors and for different reactions.

“We hope that such systems will serve as a platform for driving a wide range of electrons to fuel-forming reactions using abundant feedstocks with only sunlight as the energy input,” Mohite says in the statement.

The device joins another game-changing product shared in a Rice research study in recent weeks. Last month, a Rice University lab led by Haotian Wang, the William Marsh Rice Trustee Chair and an associate professor at Rice, shared their findings on how their simple plug-and-play device removes carbon dioxide from air capture to induce a water-and-oxygen-based electrochemical reaction.

Rice also recently opened registration for its 20th anniversary of Energy Tech Venture Day. Click here to register for the event on Sept. 21.

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Houston battery recycling company secures $32M in financing

fresh funding

Houston-based Ace Green Recycling has raised $32 million in private investment in public equity (PIPE) financing to support its future plans for growth.

The battery recycling technology company secured the financing with Athena Technology Acquisition Corp. II, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company that Ace previously announced it plans to merge with. Once the merger is completed, Ace will become a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "AGXI."

Ace says the financing will be used to complete the merger and scale the company.

“This investment accelerates our mission to redefine battery recycling at a global scale,” Ace CEO Nischay Chadha said in a news release. “At Ace, we are deploying Greenlead® and LithiumFirst™ as a new standard–fully electrified, Scope 1 emissions-free solutions designed to replace legacy processes and unlock a cleaner supply chain for critical materials. We believe that the future of electrification depends on how efficiently and sustainably we recover these resources, and this milestone brings us meaningfully closer to that future.”

Ace says the funding will also be primarily used to fund capital expenditures related to the development of its planned flagship recycling facility, located outside of Beaumont, Texas. According to a February investor presentation, the facility is expected to launch in 2027. It will recycle lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries.

Ace agreed to a 15-year battery material supply agreement with Miami-based OM Commodities last year, in which OM Commodities would supply Ace with at least 30,000 metric tons of lead scrap to be recycled annually. Switzerland-based Glencore plc agreed to a 15-year offtake agreement to purchase up to 100 percent of ACE’s products from four of its planned lead-acid and lithium-ion battery recycling parks back in 2022.

Ace also reported that the funding will be put toward "supporting the expansion of operations and to fund the purchase of other companies," in the release.

Houston AI startup rolls out platform to reshape oil and gas workflows

AI for energy

Houston-based Collide is looking to solve AI issues in the energy industry from within.

Co-founded by former oil roughneck Collin McLelland, the company has developed AI software for operators and field teams, shaped by firsthand oilfield experience. Its AI-native platform “retrieves and synthesizes data from authoritative sources to deliver accurate, cited, and energy-focused insights to oil and gas professionals,” according to the company.

“Oil and gas has a graveyard full of technology that was technically impressive and operationally useless,” McLelland tells Energy Capital. “The reason is almost always the same: the people who built it didn't understand what they were actually solving for. When you're an outsider, you see workflows and try to automate them. When you're an insider, you understand why those workflows exist—the regulatory constraints, the physical realities, the liability concerns, the trust dynamics between operators and service companies.”

Collide’s large language model, known as RIGGS, performed well in recent benchmarking results when taking a standardized petroleum engineering (SPE) exam, the company reports. The exam assesses understanding from conceptual terminology to complex mathematical problem-solving.

According to Collide, RIGGS achieved a score of 67.5 percent on a 40-question subset of the SPE petroleum engineering exam, outperforming other large language models like Grok 4 (62.5 percent), Claude Sonnet 4.5 (52.5 percent) and GPT 5.1 (4 percent).

RIGGS completed the test in 15 minutes, while Grok took two hours. Collide hopes over the next few months, RIGGS will receive a score between 75 percent to 80 percent accuracy.

The software could potentially help oil and gas companies produce accurate outputs and automate trivial workflows, which can open up valuable time for engineers and teams to work on other pressing matters, according to McLelland.

“Collide exists because we sat in those seats — we were the engineers, the operators, the field guys,” he says. ”RIGGS scoring higher on the PE exam versus the frontier labs isn't a party trick. It's evidence that the model understands petroleum engineering the way a petroleum engineer does, because it was built by people who do.”

RIGGS was trained on Collide’s Spindletop hardware and is supported by a vast library of information, as well as a reasoning engine and validation layer that uses logic to solve problems.

“Longer term, we see RIGGS as the intelligence layer that sits underneath every operator's workflow — not a chatbot you open in a browser, but something embedded in the tools engineers already use,” McLelland says. “The goal is to give every engineer the knowledge and pattern recognition of a 30-year veteran, on demand."

According to McLelland, Collide is already building toward reservoir analysis and production optimization, automated regulatory compliance (Railroad Commission filings, W-10s, G-10s), workover report generation, and engineering decision support in the field for near-term use cases. In March, Collide and Texas-based oil and gas operator Winn Resources announced a collaboration to automate the time-intensive process of filing monthly W-10 and G-10 forms with the Texas Railroad Commission, completing what’s normally a multi-hour task in under 30 minutes. Collide reports that Winn’s infrastructure now automates regulatory filings and provides real-time visibility into data gaps, which has reduced processing time by over 95 percent.

“Before Collide, I'd spend hours manually keying in filings,” Buck Crum, director of operations, said in a news release. “(In March), we had 50 wells to file and I was done in 20 minutes. It does the majority of the heavy lifting while keeping me in control. That human-in-the-loop approach saves meaningful time and gives us greater confidence in our compliance and reporting.”

Collide was originally launched by Houston media organization Digital Wildcatters as “a professional network and digital community for technical discussions and knowledge sharing.” After raising $5 million in seed funding led by Houston’s Mercury Fund last year, the company said it would shift its focus to rolling out its enterprise-level, AI-enabled solution.

Oxy officially announces CEO transition, names successor

new leader

Houston-based Occidental (Oxy) has officially announced its longtime CEO's retirement and her successor.

Oxy shared last week that Vicki Hollub will retire June 1. Reuters first reported Hollub's plan to retire in March, but a firm date had not been set. Hollub will remain on Oxy's board of directors.

Richard Jackson, who currently serves as Oxy's COO, will replace Hollub in the CEO role.

“It has been a privilege to lead Occidental and work alongside such a talented team for more than 40 years," Hollub shared in a news release. "Following the recently completed decade-long transformation of the company, we now have the best portfolio and the best technical expertise in Occidental’s history. With this strong foundation in place, a clear path forward and a leader like Richard, who has the experience and vision to elevate Occidental, now is the right time for this transition. “I look forward to supporting Richard and the Board through my continued role as a director.”

Hollub has held the top leadership position at Oxy since 2016 and has been with the energy giant for more than 40 years. Before being named CEO, she served as COO and senior executive vice president at the company. She led strategic acquisitions of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019 and CrownRock in 2024, and was the first woman selected to lead a major U.S. oil and gas company.

Hollub also played a key role in leading Oxy's future as a "carbon management company."

Jackson has been with Oxy since 2003. He has held numerous leadership positions, including president of U.S. onshore oil and gas, president of low carbon integrated technologies, general manager of the Permian Delaware Basin and enhanced oil recovery oil and gas, vice president of investor relations, and vice president of drilling Americas.

He was instrumental in launching Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, which focuses DAC, carbon sequestration and low-carbon fuels through businesses like 1PointFive, TerraLithium and others, according to the company. He also serves on the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative’s Climate Investment Board and the American Petroleum Institute’s Upstream Committee. He holds a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University.

Jackson was named COO of Oxy in October 2025. In his new role as CEO, he will also join the board of directors, effective June 1.

“I am grateful to be appointed President and CEO of Occidental and excited about the opportunity to execute from the strong position and capabilities that we built under Vicki’s leadership,” Jackson added in the release. “It means a lot to me personally to be a part of our Occidental team. I am committed to delivering value from our significant and high-quality resource base. We have a tremendous opportunity to focus on organic improvement and execution to deliver meaningful value for our employees, shareholders and partners.”

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