Dow will occupy nearly two-thirds of office space at Midway's CityCentre Six office tower that's currently being built in the Energy Corridor. Photo courtesy of Midway

Dow Chemical has signed up to be the anchor tenant at the CityCentre Six office tower under construction in Houston’s Memorial City area.

Dow will occupy nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the 308,000 square feet of office space at the 19-story building, or about 200,000 square feet. The company will relocate employees there from its Houston Dow Center offices at Enclave Plaza in the Energy Corridor.

The current lease expires in 2026. Dow has leased the Energy Corridor space for 15 years.

Houston-based real estate investor and developer Midway recently broke ground on the $87.5 million, 320,000-square-foot CityCentre Six tower, which will be adjacent to the headquarters of Marathon Oil.

“Dow’s commitment as the anchor tenant has been a driving force behind the project’s strong momentum and underscores the strong leasing demand for CityCentre office space, which remains 100 percent leased,” says Chris Seckinger, vice president of investment and development at Midway. “Their presence not only confirms the tower’s status as a premier business destination but also reflects the confidence leading enterprises have in our vision for the district.”

Photo courtesy of Midway

The new tower, set to be completed in 2026, is one of the latest additions to the 47-acre CityCentre mixed-use development.

“Our plans for CityCentre’s north site have been in the works for almost a decade, and CityCentre Six is a significant step towards realizing our long-term vision for the development,” Seckinger said in a January 2024 news release.

Midway’s CityCentre Seven, a six-story office building and hotel, is also under construction at the mixed-use development. The Four Points by Sheraton Houston West hotel currently occupies the site.

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Gold H2 harvests clean hydrogen from depleted California reservoirs in first field trial

breakthrough trial

Houston climatech company Gold H2 completed its first field trial that demonstrates subsurface bio-stimulated hydrogen production, which leverages microbiology and existing infrastructure to produce clean hydrogen.

Gold H2 is a spinoff of another Houston biotech company, Cemvita.

“When we compare our tech to the rest of the stack, I think we blow the competition out of the water," Prabhdeep Singh Sekhon, CEO of Gold H2 Sekhon previously told Energy Capital.

The project represented the first-of-its-kind application of Gold H2’s proprietary biotechnology, which generates hydrogen from depleted oil reservoirs, eliminating the need for new drilling, electrolysis or energy-intensive surface facilities. The Woodlands-based ChampionX LLC served as the oilfield services provider, and the trial was conducted in an oilfield in California’s San Joaquin Basin.

According to the company, Gold H2’s technology could yield up to 250 billion kilograms of low-carbon hydrogen, which is estimated to provide enough clean power to Los Angeles for over 50 years and avoid roughly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

“This field trial is tangible proof. We’ve taken a climate liability and turned it into a scalable, low-cost hydrogen solution,” Sekhon said in a news release. “It’s a new blueprint for decarbonization, built for speed, affordability, and global impact.”

Highlights of the trial include:

  • First-ever demonstration of biologically stimulated hydrogen generation at commercial field scale with unprecedented results of 40 percent H2 in the gas stream.
  • Demonstrated how end-of-life oilfield liabilities can be repurposed into hydrogen-producing assets.
  • The trial achieved 400,000 ppm of hydrogen in produced gases, which, according to the company,y is an “unprecedented concentration for a huff-and-puff style operation and a strong indicator of just how robust the process can perform under real-world conditions.”
  • The field trial marked readiness for commercial deployment with targeted hydrogen production costs below $0.50/kg.

“This breakthrough isn’t just a step forward, it’s a leap toward climate impact at scale,” Jillian Evanko, CEO and president at Chart Industries Inc., Gold H2 investor and advisor, added in the release. “By turning depleted oil fields into clean hydrogen generators, Gold H2 has provided a roadmap to produce low-cost, low-carbon energy using the very infrastructure that powered the last century. This changes the game for how the world can decarbonize heavy industry, power grids, and economies, faster and more affordably than we ever thought possible.”

Rice University spinout lands $500K NSF grant to boost chip sustainability

cooler computing

HEXAspec, a spinout from Rice University's Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was recently awarded a $500,000 National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant.

The team says it will use the funding to continue enhancing semiconductor chips’ thermal conductivity to boost computing power. According to a release from Rice, HEXAspec has developed breakthrough inorganic fillers that allow graphic processing units (GPUs) to use less water and electricity and generate less heat.

The technology has major implications for the future of computing with AI sustainably.

“With the huge scale of investment in new computing infrastructure, the problem of managing the heat produced by these GPUs and semiconductors has grown exponentially. We’re excited to use this award to further our material to meet the needs of existing and emerging industry partners and unlock a new era of computing,” HEXAspec co-founder Tianshu Zhai said in the release.

HEXAspec was founded by Zhai and Chen-Yang Lin, who both participated in the Rice Innovation Fellows program. A third co-founder, Jing Zhang, also worked as a postdoctoral researcher and a research scientist at Rice, according to HEXAspec's website.

The HEXASpec team won the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge in 2024. More recently, it also won this year's Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition during CERAWeek in the TEX-E student track, taking home $25,000.

"The grant from the NSF is a game-changer, accelerating the path to market for this transformative technology," Kyle Judah, executive director of Lilie, added in the release.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.