Ten climatetech startups were named most-promising at this annual Rice Alliance Energy Tech Venture Forum. Photo courtesy Rice Alliance.

Investors at the Rice Alliance Energy Tech Venture Forum have named the 10 most-promising startups among the group of 100 clean tech companies participating in the event.

The 22nd annual event was held yesterday, Sept. 18, at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business and was part of the second Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week.

The most-promising startups will receive $7,000 in in-kind legal services from Baker Botts.

The 10 most-promising companies included:

  • Houston-based Xplorobot, which has developed laser gas imaging technology for the first handheld methane detection device approved by the EPA as an alternative test method
  • Seattle-based Badwater Alchemy, a desalination company that uses nano materials to purify saline water at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods
  • San Francisco-based Ammobia, which is developing a clean ammonia production process
  • Illinois-based Celadyne Technologies, which is building hydrogen for industrial decarbonization with durable and efficient fuel cells and electrolyzers
  • Massachusetts-based MacroCycle Technologies, which converts plastic waste in the form of bottles, food trays and polyester textiles into virgin-grade mPET resin
  • Yorkshire, England-based AtoMe, a global developer of zero-carbon fertiliser products
  • Colorado-based Advanced Thermovoltaic Systems (ATS) Energy, a renewable energy semiconductor manufacturing company
  • North Carolina-based Lukera Energy, which is converting waste methane into high-value fuel
  • Midland, Texas-based AI Driller, a company that uses AI and machine learning to enable remote operations and provide historical drilling data for survey management, anti-collision monitoring and iob reporting
  • New York-based Fast Metals Inc., which has developed a chemical process to extract valuable metals from complex toxic mine tailings that is capable of producing iron, aluminum, scandium, titanium and other rare earth elements using industrial waste and waste CO2 as inputs

Arculus Solutions won the People's Choice Award. The New Jersey-based company retrofits natural gas pipelines for safe hydrogen transportation. It also won Track A: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, Buildings, Water, & Other Energy Solutions at the Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition during CERAWeek earlier this year.

The 100 energy technology ventures selected to participate in the forum were named earlier this year. See the full list here.

Halliburton Labs has named its latest cohort. Photo courtesy of Halliburton

Halliburton names 5 clean energy startups to latest incubator cohort

clean team

Halliburton Labs has named five companies to its latest cohort, including one from Texas.

All of the companies are working to help accelerate the future of the energy industry in different ways. The incubator aims to advance the companies’ commercialization with support from Halliburton's network, facilities and financing opportunities.

The five new members include:

  • 360 Energy, an Austin-based in-field computing company with technology that is able to capture flared or stranded gas and monetize it through modular data centers
  • Cella, a New York-based mineral storage company that provides end-to-end services, from resource assessment to proprietary injection technology, and monitoring techniques to provide geologic carbon storage solutions
  • Espiku, an engineering services company based in Bend, Oregon, that finds solutions that advance water and minerals recovery from brines and industrial-produced water streams
  • Mitico, based in Los Angeles, that offers technology services to capture carbon dioxide by using its patent-pending granulated metal carbonate sorption technology (GMC) that captures more than 95% of the CO2 emitted from post-combustion point sources
  • NuCube, a Pasadena, California-based company with a nuclear fission reactor under development

“We welcome these innovative energy startups,” Dale Winger, managing director of Halliburton Labs, said in a news release. “We are eager to help these participant companies use their time and capital efficiently to progress new solutions that meet industry requirements for cost, reliability, and sustainability.”

Halliburton Labs also announced that it will host the Finalists Pitch Day on March 26, 2025, in Denver for energy and decarbonization industry innovators, startups and investors ahead of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Industry Growth Forum. The pitch event will precede registration and the opening reception of the NREL forum. Find more information here.

Adena Power, an Ohio-based clean energy startup, was the latest to join Halliburton Labs prior to the new cohort. The company used three patented materials to produce a sodium-based battery that delivers clean, safe and long-lasting energy storage.

The incubator also named San Francisco-based venture capital investor Pulakesh Mukherjee, partner at Imperative Ventures, which specializes in hard tech decarbonization startups, to its advisory board last spring.

Read more about the incubator's 2023 cohort here.

Adena Power uses three patented materials to produce a sodium-based battery that delivers clean, safe, long-lasting energy storage. Photo via adenapower.com

Sodium-based battery startup joins Halliburton Labs

new cohort co.

An Ohio-based clean energy startup has joined Houston-based Halliburton Labs, an incubator for early-stage energy tech companies.

Adena Power uses three patented materials to produce a sodium-based battery that delivers clean, safe, long-lasting energy storage. The startup is trying to capitalize on the 100 terawatt-hour potential for energy storage in the U.S. grid.

“With Halliburton Labs’ support and operational expertise, Adena Power looks to accelerate scaling and take advantage of the high-growth market opportunity,” Nathan Cooley, co-founder and CEO of Adena Power, says in a news release.

Adena, founded in 2022, supplies energy storage batteries for the commercial, industrial, and utility sectors. The startup has collected funding from four investors, according to PitchBook: OhioXcelerate, Third Derivative, BRITE Energy Innovators, and For ClimateTech.

Adena’s addition to Halliburton Labs comes during a momentous year for the company. For example:

  • Adena won the People’s Choice Award at the National Renewable Energy Labs Industry Growth Forum.
  • Adena earned the MAKE IT (Manufacture of Advanced Key Energy Infrastructure Technologies) Prize from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“Our team is ready to collaborate with Adena to help them accelerate their growth to meet the demand for behind-the-meter storage solutions,” says Dale Winger, managing director of Halliburton Labs.

Halliburton Labs is a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton, a provider of products and services for the energy industry. The incubator will have pitches at the inaugural Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week next month.

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Solar tracking manufacturer opens second Houston facility

now open

PV Hardware USA, a provider of solar tracking and foundation solutions, has announced the opening of its second U.S. manufacturing facility in Houston, which is expected to create more than 100 jobs locally and strengthen domestic production capacity for solar energy facilities.

“Opening our second U.S. manufacturing facility represents an exciting step forward in our growth journey and demonstrates our commitment to the U.S. market,” Rodolfo Bitar, VP of Business Development for PVH USA, said in a news release.

The 95,000-square-foot facility began operations in July and aims to increase production while reducing lead times for customers. The new state-of-the-art building joins the company’s first $30 million U.S. manufacturing facility, which opened in Houston in May 2024 as one of America’s largest solar tracker manufacturing facilities.

Established in 2008 in San Francisco, PVH USA has launched a series of innovative advancements that help solar facilities withstand extreme weather events, generate more energy during overcast weather and expand the types of terrain suitable for solar installations. Its proprietary pre-assembly process can reduce installation times by 40 percent, which helps expand solar power capacity to meet increasing demand for electricity, according to the company. Currently, PVH USA has over 32 gigawatts of solar trackers supplied worldwide, and it operates from advanced manufacturing facilities in Spain, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Its existing Houston facility manufactures solar structures and custom-built solar tracking systems for new solar generation projects.

“By expanding our presence in Houston, we are not only investing in local economic development but also ensuring we can better serve our customers with faster turnaround times and the highest quality products that are 100% domestically made,” Bitar added in the release.

Rice University team finds economical way to recycle data center heat into power

waste not

As data centers expand, their energy demands rise as well. Researchers at Rice University have discovered a way to capture low-temperature waste heat from data centers and convert it back into usable power.

The team has introduced a novel solar thermal-boosted organic Rankine cycle (ORC)—a power system that uses a safe working fluid to make electricity from heat. The design incorporates low-cost rooftop flat-plate solar collectors, which warm the data center’s coolant stream before it enters the ORC. The findings, published in Solar Energy, show that the additional “solar bump” helps surpass the technical roadblocks with data center waste, which has typically been too cool to generate power on its own.

The research was supported by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy.

“There’s an invisible river of warm air flowing out of data centers,” Laura Schaefer, the Burton J. and Ann M. McMurtry Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Rice and co-author of the paper, said in a news release. “Our question was: Can we nudge that heat to a slightly higher temperature with sunlight and convert a lot more of it into electricity? The answer is yes, and it’s economically compelling.”

Traditionally, electric heat pumps have been used to raise temperatures before recovery, but the benefits were limited because the pumps consumed significant extra power.

Kashif Liaqat, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Rice, and Schaefer achieved a "temperature lift” by using solar energy to create thermoeconomic models. They modeled affordable, low-profile rooftop solar collectors that fed into an ORC and tied into a liquid-cooling loop. The collectors were validated against industry tools and tested at some of America’s largest data center hubs in Ashburn, Virginia, and Los Angeles, which provided varying climate challenges.

The system recovered 60 percent to 80 percent more electricity annually from the same waste heat, with a 60 percent boost in Ashburn and an 80 percent boost in Los Angeles, according to Rice. It also achieved over 8 percent higher ORC efficiency during peak hours, and an increase in annual average efficiency. The approach also lowered the cost of electricity from the recovered power by 5.5 percent in Ashburn and by 16.5 percent in Los Angeles.

“What the industry considers a weakness becomes a strength once you add solar,” Liaqat said in a news release. “That’s great news for modern data centers.”

Next up, the team will look to pilot its hybrid system in operational sites and explore thermal storage, which the researchers hope could bank solar heat during the day to assist with energy recovery efforts at night.

Greentown and EnergyTech Nexus announce ecosystem partnership

green team

Two of Houston’s leading energy transition organizations are joining forces.

Climatetech incubator Greentown Labs and founder community EnergyTech Nexus announced a "strategic ecosystem partnership," aimed at accelerating growth for clean energy startups. EnergyTech Nexus will move into Greentown Labs and plans to open an investor lounge on-site.

“Greentown Labs is the nexus for the energy transition, where startups can gather, collaborate and grow. Positioning our own extended community within the hallowed walls of Greentown will further foster the creation of authentic connections between founders and reduce friction to critical resources, bringing the village together will only accelerate the flywheel on innovation here in Houston, Texas,” Jason Ethier, EnergyTech Nexus founding partner, said in a news release.

Additionally, EnergyTech Nexus will launch Cephyron IRM, an AI-driven investor platform that will help founders of early-stage technologies connect with sources of capital. Greentown members will be granted early access to the platform.

According to the organizations, the ecosystem partnership represents years of collaboration. Ethier, whose startup Dynamo Micropower was one of the first to join Greentown's Cambridge, Massachusetts, incubator, previously served on Greentown's board of directors and in other leadership positions. He and Juliana Garaizar, a fellow founding partner of EnergyTech Nexus, were also instrumental in bringing Greentown Labs to Houston. Garaizar has also held numerous leadership roles at Greentown Houston.

“This partnership has been a long time coming—our organizations are kindred spirits that need to be working together to enhance the entrepreneurial support systems available to climate innovators in Houston,” Lawson Gow, Greentown’s Head of Houston, added in the release. “Capital is a top priority for climate and energy founders, and this team-up will directly address this challenge.”