News

June 15, 2023

Lectrolyst joins a consortium to produce food proteins from carbon dioxide

Through the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundationand alongside Lectrolyst co-founder Prof. Feng Jiao's academic team at Washington University in St. Louiswe are excited to announce our participation in a new consortium seeking to transform waste carbon emissions into a sustainable source of proteins for human food. Through a combination of chemical engineering and biotechnology advances, the goal is to dramatically reduce agricultural land use for a growing world population while simultaneously harnessing the carbon emissions that increasingly threaten global food supplies through climate change.

One of the critical keys to this consortium's success is the kind of technology we're building here at Lectrolyst: CO2 electrochemical conversion to acetate. The acetate we make in that process can be fed to bioreactor systems that use it as a feedstock instead of more complex sugars, effectively skipping a step in the food production process. The end result is a sustainable alternative to animal proteins made using a tiny fraction of the land area normally used for agriculture.

This international consortium consists of teams led by Novozymes A/S, Topsoe A/S, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation CO2 Research Center (CORC) at Aarhus University. 

September 13, 2022

Lectrolyst honored with a 2022 Blue Hen 17&43 Award

Lectrolyst has received a 2022 Blue Hen 17&43 Award for our company's growth and promise for further success in the future. The awards were established to recognize both established and up-and-coming businesses with led by Blue Hens across the nation. We feel truly honored to be selected alongside other promising companies.

July 29, 2021

Lectrolyst featured in Technical.ly Delaware

Recently, Dr. Hutchings sat down with Holly Quinn at Technical.ly Delaware to discuss the origins of Lectrolyst, ways we can transform ways carbon emissions into useful products, and our vision for the future of chemical production. Click here to read the full article.

July 1, 2020

Lectrolyst is now supported through a $500k SBIR award sponsored by the ARPA-E SEED program

We are excited to announce new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) support from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), which will fund development of our carbon monoxide electroreduction technology through their Supporting Entrepreneurial Energy Discoveries (SEED) program. Together with Susteon, we will be demonstrating the long-term stability and scalability required to use this technology at scale for the production of ethylene and acetic acid over the course of this Phase I/II combined grant.

Since this new funding expands our current operations, we’ve moved our primary laboratory to the Delaware Innovation Space and look forward to growing alongside the other client companies in the chemical technology sector. Stay tuned for further public announcements as we continue to push the boundaries of electrochemical synthesis.

May 14, 2020

Interview with Dr. Hutchings featured by DESCA

The Delaware Sustainable Chemistry Alliance (DESCA), a local organization devoted to promoting ChemTech in the Delaware area, recently sat down with Dr. Hutchings for an interview about his entrepreneurial journey to date and his future plans for Lectrolyst. In addition to reiterating our overall plans to commercialize carbon monoxide electroreduction as a cornerstone of a new chemical production paradigm, he also hinted at an upcoming announcement of support for our ongoing projects. Stay tuned for more details!

December 9, 2019

New perspective in Nature Catalysis: "Carbon monoxide electroreduction as an emerging platform for carbon utilization"

In our new perspective available now in Nature Catalysis, we make the case for dividing carbon dioxide electroreduction into separate processes to make higher-value products more effectively. The key is carbon monoxide electroreduction to improve selectivity towards those more complex products. We highlight recent advances that have moved this process from a bench-top curiosity to a promising method for commercial production. That promise is quantified through both techno-economic analysis and a cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment, showing both economic viability and sustainability for a new future of chemical production without fossil fuels.