5.10.23-Ecosystem-Osmoses

KATHERINE MIZRAHI RODRIGUEZ: Hello, everyone. My name is Katherine Mizrahi Rodriguez. I'm one of the co-founders at Osmoses, where we develop transformative separation solutions, and we're very much connected to MIT. Our four co-founders have been affiliated with MIT in various different ways.

I did my PhD in the material science department at MIT. Francesco, our CEO, did a visiting stint at MIT and was later a postdoc. Zach, our CSO, is a professor at MIT in the chemical engineering department, and Holden, our CTO, also did a visiting stint at MIT, where really we all connected. And that nucleated what turned into this venture, which we're very excited about. So again, excited to be sharing with you today about what we're doing at Osmoses.

Chemical and petrochemical separations are extremely energy intensive and expensive. They account for 15% of the world's energy and about 16% of carbon emissions because we rely on thermally intensive separation technologies that are a century old, like distillation and amine adsorption.

At Osmoses, our mission is to eliminate the energy waste associated with these processes by developing transformative separation technology. Our innovation is based on a scientific breakthrough. We've developed a new set of polymeric materials that when manufactured into thin films as membranes can very effectively separate gases that are very close in size from each other. This was published in Science Magazine last year, and we've also been backed by various federal and state grants as well as VCs in this area who also believe in the breakthrough.

So because we are a platform technology, we can be used in various applications, but we're actually very eager about starting with hydrogen and biomethane upgrading. These two areas are exciting to us because they're growing markets. They also require distributed solutions, where membranes, which are modular, can really shine most, and we've also identified a very strong value proposition.

On the biomethane side, we can reduce the system complexity by having that modular membrane system and also reduce the capital expenses, and on the hydrogen side, we can use membranes to recover hydrogen, which is highly valuable, from waste streams in chemical and petrochemical processes. And this, using our membranes, we can increase the recovery compared to other separation solutions by over 40%. We also, using recovery through membranes, are about five times less expensive than producing new hydrogen from processes like SMR, which are also very carbon intensive.

Our vision is to expand to other applications, including helium harvesting as well as refrigerant reuse. And how do we plan to implement this vision? It's really by using membrane modules into membrane separation systems. Today, 5% to 10% of the market is already using this system, so we can easily integrate into existing infrastructure. But our vision is to expand beyond that to that 90% to 95% that remains, where our technology with its exceptional separation performance can really untap that 90%, 95% of the market.

And so how do we work about building relationships with corporate stakeholders to get to make that vision a reality? What we're doing right now is doing customer-specific process design where we take in a customer use case from a company or a corporate and run process design simulations that are catered to maximize the performance of our polymers but that are also catered to the use case of the customer. We've done over 25 different customer use cases and have engaged in various different applications, as you can see on the right.

So if there's one thing that I'd like for you to take out of this presentation today, it's to come to us and share your specific use case with detailed feed compositions, pressures, et cetera so that we can evaluate it together and then move towards potentially doing testing together and paving the way towards potential pilots with the most synergistic opportunities.

So how do we plan to do this? Of course, we've been scaling up the membranes and growing the team. We're also moving towards building prototype module and building those strategic partnerships with corporates based on specific use cases. And then later, this can pave the way towards piloting and eventually commercializing our solutions in 2027.

We have a showcase in the other room, so I'd be eager to talk to you about specific use cases on any of these areas so that we can be more granular about the separation need that you have and how we can build a solution towards that. We've engaged with corporate stakeholders, large chemical companies, oil and gas companies, et cetera, and together, I strongly believe we can get to build that path to decarbonize industrial separation. So let's talk. Thank you.

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