Houston chemist earns $12M grant to support innovative soil pollutant removal process

making moves

James Tour of Rice University has received funding to support his energy transition research. Photo via rice.edu

A Rice University chemist James Tour has secured a new $12 million cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center on the team’s work to efficiently remove pollutants from soil.

The four-year agreement will support the team’s ongoing work on removing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from contaminated soil through its rapid electrothermal mineralization (REM) process, according to a statement from Rice.

Traditionally PFAS have been difficult to remove by conventional methods. However, Tour and the team of researchers have been developing this REM process, which heats contaminated soil to 1,000 C in seconds and converts it into nontoxic calcium fluoride efficiently while also preserving essential soil properties.

“This is a substantial improvement over previous methods, which often suffer from high energy and water consumption, limited efficiency and often require the soil to be removed,” Tour said in the statement.

The funding will help Tour and the team scale the innovative REM process to treat large volumes of soil. The team also plans to use the process to perform urban mining of electronic and industrial waste and further develop a “flash-within-flash” heating technology to synthesize materials in bulk, according to Rice.

“This research advances scientific understanding but also provides practical solutions to critical environmental challenges, promising a cleaner, safer world,” Christopher Griggs, a senior research physical scientist at the ERDC, said in the statement.

Also this month, Tour and his research team published a report in Nature Communications detailing another innovative heating technique that can remove purified active materials from lithium-ion battery waste, which can lead to a cleaner production of electric vehicles, according to Rice.

“With the surge in battery use, particularly in EVs, the need for developing sustainable recycling methods is pressing,” Tour said in a statement.

Similar to the REM process, this technique known as flash Joule heating (FJH) heats waste to 2,500 Kelvin within seconds, which allows for efficient purification through magnetic separation.

This research was also supported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as well as the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Rice Academy Fellowship.

Last year, a fellow Rice research team earned a grant related to soil in the energy transition. Mark Torres, an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences; and Evan Ramos, a postdoctoral fellow in the Torres lab; were given a three-year grant from the Department of Energy to investigate the processes that allow soil to store roughly three times as much carbon as organic matter compared to Earth's atmosphere.

By analyzing samples from the East River Watershed, the team aims to understand if "Earth’s natural mechanisms of sequestering carbon to combat climate change," Torres said in a statement.

———

This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

From Your Site Articles

A Texas wind energy project goes online — and more energy transition news. Photo via Getty Images

ExxonMobil breaks ground, new Houston corporate leader, and more trending energy transition news

Editor's note: It's been a busy news week for energy transition in Houston, and some of this week's headlines resonated with EnergyCapital readers on social media and daily newsletter. Trending news included news of renewable energy projects, a new corporate appointment, and more.

Houston companies partner on sustainable plastics alternative

Lummus and Citroniq say their first plant, set for completion in 2027, will produce 400,000 metric tons of green polypropylene each year. Photo via lummustechnology.com

Two Houston companies, Lummus Technology and Citroniq Chemicals, have paired up to build North American plants that produce green polypropylene.

Polypropylene is a thermoplastic used to manufacture items such as plastic packaging, plastic parts, medical supplies, textiles, and fibers. Green polypropylene is made from biomass.

Lummus and Citroniq say their first plant, set for completion in 2027, will produce 400,000 metric tons of green polypropylene each year. The plant will be at an undisclosed location in the Midwest. Read more.

Prominent Houston energy business leader to retire, successor named

Amy Chronis is passing over the local leadership reins at Deloitte to Melinda Yee. Photos courtesy

Amy Chronis, a Houston business leader within the energy industry and beyond, is retiring next summer. Her replacement has been named.

Melinda Yee will be the incoming Houston managing partner at Deloitte, replacing Chronis who held the role along with the title vice chair and US energy and chemicals leader. Chronis will retire in June 2024, and Yee's new role is effective January 2.

“Melinda has been an active and valued member of Deloitte’s Houston leadership team. She brings an impressive depth of both industry and marketplace knowledge to her new role as managing partner,” Chronis says in a news release. “I am confident that she will be a great leader for our Houston professionals and in the local community.” Read more.

Central Texas wind energy facility goes online to power Target Corp.

This new Texas wind farm is now partly powering Target Corp. Photo via swiftcurrentenergy.com

A Texas wind energy project has officially delivered and is actively providing power to its customer, Target Corp.

Boston-based Swift Current Energy, which has an office in Houston, announced this week that its 197 MW Castle Gap Wind project is operational. It has the capacity to create enough pollution-free energy to power more than 50,000 homes annually.

"Castle Gap Wind is a momentous project for Swift Current Energy as we grow our projects under asset management and operations," Eric Lammers, CEO and co-founder of Swift Current Energy, says in a news release. "Castle Gap Wind is one of the earliest projects supported by the Inflation Reduction Act, and we are thankful for our partners at Target, Goldman Sachs, MUFG, CaixaBank and of course the entire Swift Current Energy team who helped make the Project possible." Read more.

ExxonMobil breaks ground on Texas carbon dioxide storage project

The rig stands 225 feet tall and extends 8,000 feet below the subsurface. Photo via exxonmobil.com

ExxonMobil announced this month that it has officially broken ground on a groundbreaking carbon dioxide storage site.

According to a release from the company, a new rig is currently being used to gather information about an underground site in Southeast Texas. The rig stands 225 feet tall, but more importantly extends 8,000 feet below the subsurface to investigate if the site is a safe place to store carbon underground.

“Everyone’s excited about this appraisal well because we’re literally breaking ground on a new chapter of our work to help reduce industrial emissions,” Joe Colletti, who oversees carbon capture and storage development along the Gulf Coast for Exxon, says in a statement. Read more.

New study from Houston research team looks at how the Earth cycles fossil carbon

A Rice University professor studied the Earth's carbon cycle in the Rio Madre de Dios to shed light on current climate conditions. Photo courtesy of Mark Torres/Rice University

Carbon cycles through Earth, its inhabitants, and its atmosphere on a regular basis, but not much research has been done on that process and qualifying it — until now.

In a recent study of a river system extending from the Peruvian Andes to the Amazon floodplains, Rice University’s Mark Torres and collaborators from five institutions proved that that high rates of carbon breakdown persist from mountaintop to floodplain.

“The purpose of this research was to quantify the rate at which Earth naturally releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and find out whether this process varies across different geographic locations,” Torres says. Read more.

A Rice University professor studied the Earth's carbon cycle in the Rio Madre de Dios to shed light on current climate conditions. Photo courtesy of Mark Torres/Rice University

New study from Houston research team looks at how the Earth cycles fossil carbon

analyzing earth

Carbon cycles through Earth, its inhabitants, and its atmosphere on a regular basis, but not much research has been done on that process and qualifying it — until now.

Torres published his findings in a study published in PNAS, explaining how they used rhenium — a silvery-gray, heavy transition metal — as a proxy for carbon. The research into the Earth’s natural, pre-anthropogenic carbon cycle stands to benefit humanity by providing valuable insight to current climate challenges.

“This research used a newly-developed technique pioneered by Robert Hilton and Mathieu Dellinger that relies on a trace element — rhenium — that’s incorporated in fossil organic matter,” Torres says. “As plankton die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, that dead carbon becomes chemically reactive in a way that adds rhenium to it.”

The research was done in the Rio Madre de Dios basin and supported by funding from a European Research Council Starting Grant, the European Union COFUND/Durham Junior Research Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation.

“I’m very excited about this tool,” Torres said. “Rice students have deployed this same method in our lab here, so now we can make this kind of measurement and apply it at other sites. In fact, as part of current research funded by the National Science Foundation, we are applying this technique in Southern California to learn how tectonics and climate influence the breakdown of fossil carbon.”

Torres also received a three-year grant from the Department of Energy to study soil for carbon storage earlier this year.

Two Rice University researchers just received DOE funding for carbon storage research. Photo by Gustavo Raskosky/Rice University

Research team lands DOE grant to investigate carbon storage in soil

planting climate change impact

Two researchers at Rice University are digging into how soil is formed with hopes to better understand carbon storage and potential new methods for combating climate change.

Backed by a three-year grant from the Department of Energy, the research is led by Mark Torres, an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences; and Evan Ramos, a postdoctoral fellow in the Torres lab. Co-investigators include professors and scientists with the Brown University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

According to a release from Rice, the team aims to investigate the processes that allow soil to store roughly three times as much carbon as organic matter compared to Earth's atmosphere.

“Maybe there’s a way to harness Earth’s natural mechanisms of sequestering carbon to combat climate change,” Torres said in a statement. “But to do that, we first have to understand how soils actually work.”

The team will analyze samples collected from different areas of the East River watershed in Colorado. Prior research has shown that rivers have been great resources for investigating chemical reactions that have taken place as soil is formed. Additionally, research supports that "clay plays a role in storing carbon derived from organic sources," according to Rice.

"We want to know when and how clay minerals form because they’re these big, platy, flat minerals with a high surface area that basically shield the organic carbon in the soil," Ramos said in the statement. "We think they protect that organic carbon from breakdown and allow it to grow in abundance.”

Additionally, the researchers plan to create a model that better quantifies the stabilization of organic carbon over time. According to Torres, the model could provide a basis for predicting carbon dioxide changes in Earth's atmosphere.

"We’re trying to understand what keeps carbon in soils, so we can get better at factoring in their role in climate models and render predictions of carbon dioxide changes in the atmosphere more detailed and accurate,” Torres explained in the statement.

The DOE and Rice have partnered on a number of projects related to the energy transition in recent months. Last week, Rice announced that it would host the Carbon Management Community Summit this fall, sponsored by the DOE, and in partnership with the city of Houston and climate change-focused multimedia company Climate Now.

In July the DOE announced $100 million in funding for its SCALEUP program at an event for more than 100 energy innovators at the university.

Rice also recently opened its 250,000-square-foot Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science. The state-of-the-art facility is the new home for four key research areas at Rice: advanced materials, quantum science and computing, urban research and innovation, and the energy transition.

Ad Placement 300x100

Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Houston-based NRG Energy exits renewables group to Texas real estate company

M&A Moves

NRG Energy, headquartered in Houston, has sold its renewable advisory group to Dallas-based commercial real estate services powerhouse CBRE. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

The advisory group, led by Miro Sutton, brokers renewable energy deals, such as community- and utility-scale transactions, and advises clients on handling tax credits for renewable energy projects. The team works primarily with Fortune 500 companies.

Sutton joined CBRE as head of renewables and energy after overseeing the NRG advisory group. The group has arranged deals involving more than 5,000 megawatts of clean power.

“CBRE targeted this specific advisory team because of their unique approach to renewable procurement and expansive coverage of renewable offerings. They have enabled hundreds of projects and thousands of [megawatts] through their innovative contract structures that reduce risk and enhance economics for their customers,” Robert Bernard, CBRE’s chief sustainability officer, told Utility Dive.

In a news release, Bernard says market demand for renewable energy continues to grow rapidly as companies seek to meet their net-zero goals and other energy-related commitments.

“However, integrating renewable energy into a company’s real estate can be a complex process,” Bernard adds. “This acquisition enables CBRE to offer a wide range of energy-related sustainability services to all our clients, both occupiers and investors, and help them simplify the complexity associated with planning, sourcing and managing renewable energy.”

Oxy, other hardtech-focused organizations take up leases in Houston innovation hub

moving in

The Ion in Midtown has some new tenants taking up residence in its 90 percent-leased building.

Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Fathom Fund, and Activate are the latest additions to the Ion, according to a news release from Rice University and the Rice Real Estate Company, which own and operate the 16-acre Ion District where the Ion is located. With the additions, the building has just 10 percent left up for grabs.

“As the Ion continues to attract leading companies and organizations across industries, it’s clear that our vision of creating a dynamic and collaborative environment for innovation is resonating,” Ken Jett, president of the Rice Real Estate Company and vice president of facilities and capital planning at Rice, says in the release. “We are proud to set the standard for how the workplace can evolve to foster the commercialization and growth of transformative technologies that enhance quality of life in our community and beyond.”

Oxy, which was named a corporate partner of the Ion last year, now has nearly 6,500 square feet on the fourth floor where it will be housing its Zero In department that's focused on pioneering low-carbon initiatives. The build out process is slated to be completed by early 2025.

While Oxy represents the corporate side of innovation, the other two additions have their own roles in the innovation arena. Houston-based Fathom Fund, which launched its $100 million fund earlier this year, is targeting deep-tech venture opportunities and is led by Managing Partners Paul Sheng and Eric Bielke.

Founded in Berkeley, California, Activate, which announced its expansion into Houston in 2023, has officially named its local office in the Ion. The hardtech-focused incubator program recently named its inaugural cohort and opened applications for the 2025 program.

Other recent joiners to the Ion includes Kongsberg Digital, Artemis Energy Partners, CES Renewables, and Eleox.

“The partnerships we’ve forged are vital to shaping the Ion into a vibrant ecosystem for startups, where collaborative innovation is not only driving local economic growth but also positioning Houston as a global leader in the energy transition,” Paul Cherukuri, chief innovation officer at Rice University, says. “With our team leading the programming and activation across the Ion district, we are creating companies that harness cutting-edge technology for the benefit of society—advancing solutions that contribute to social good while addressing the most pressing challenges of our time. This powerful network is redefining Houston’s role in the future of energy, technology, and social impact.”

———

This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

Things to know: How Houston can use existing industry amid energy transition, events not to miss, and more

taking notes

Editor's note: Dive headfirst into the new week with three quick things to catch up on in Houston's energy transition.

Events not to miss

Put these Houston-area energy-related events on your calendar.

Connecting the Houston energy tech and climate community, Greentown Houston's Climatetech Summit will take place at its Midtown location on October 22.
The University of Houston is co-hosting the 2024 EGI & University of Houston Joint Technical Conference on October 24.
Ally Energy's GRIT Awards will honor energy leaders and best workplaces on October 30.
Taking place in Downtown Houston November 19 to 20, the Global Clean Hydrogen Summit will provide project developers, buyers, and financiers with the information they need to establish winning strategies for global clean hydrogen markets.

Big deal: Dallas-area business to acquire Houston renewable energy co.

Houston renewables company Proteus Power is getting acquired. Photo via

Houston-based developer of utility-scale renewable energy Proteus Power is being acquired by JBB Advanced Technologies for an undisclosed amount after founder, chairman, and CEO, John B. Billingsley signed a letter of intent to purchase.

"I know the potential of renewable energy, both for our country and for the small landowners and communities we work with," Billingsley says in a news release. "Proteus Power is just the type of company I have known and grown in the past, and we're perfectly positioned to make it a very profitable company for our investors. In the near term, this very substantial business will provide a multi-billion-dollar boost to the Texas economy, from Lubbock to Midland, across West Texas and down to the Gulf Coast."

Proteus Power currently incorporates a total of 15.5 gigawatts of utility-scale renewable energy projects, which include utility-scale solar and battery energy storage systems. Nearly 5 gigawatts of both utility-scale solar and battery energy storage should be developed at an estimated EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) cost of $3.38 billion over the next four years. Continue reading.

Expert voice: Repurposing Houston’s infrastructure for a clean energy future

Houston’s journey towards a clean energy future is a testament to the power of innovation and adaptability. Photo via Getty Images

Houston, often dubbed the “Energy Capital of the World,” is at a pivotal moment in its history. Known for its vast oil and gas reserves, the city is now embracing a new role as a leader in the clean energy transition. This shift is not just about adopting new technologies but also about creatively repurposing existing infrastructure to support sustainable energy solutions.

Houston’s offshore oil wells, many of which are old or abandoned, present a significant opportunity for carbon capture. By repurposing these wells, we can sequester carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change. This approach not only utilizes existing infrastructure but also provides a cost-effective solution for carbon management. According to the Greater Houston Partnership, initiatives like these are crucial as Houston aims to lower its climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. Exxon estimates that just their proposed CCS hub could capture and store 50 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2030 and 100 million metric tons by 2040. Continue reading the article by Tershara Mathews, national offshore wind lead at WSP.

View All Listings

ENERGYCAPITALHTX EMAILS ARE AWESOME