6.22.22-Showcase-Osmoses

FRANCESCO M. BENEDETTI: Hi, everyone. My name is Francesco, and I'm CEO and co-founder at Osmoses. We're a clean tech company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So you can imagine how happy I am to be here around and finally get a sense of how summer feels like.

And what we're doing in Cambridge is transforming molecular separations. And we have MIT ties. We have MIT faculty, alumni, and enthusiasts. And really, all the people here in this room that work in the chemical, petrochemical, and energy industry-- they know what is the cost of un-mixing, separating, and purifying molecules in this industry.

It's 15% of the world's energy, and 16% of carbon emissions that depend on the fact that we still rely on century-old technologies to perform the separations that are essential for this industry. So our mission is very clear. We want to eliminate the energy waste and CO2 emissions with transformative separation technology.

So traditional separations are very effective but, at the same time, very inefficient. And this is because they still require heat to make the separation happen, which means that you literally need to boil off components to deliver value to customers. Membranes created a different approach to solve this problem and deliver on low energy consumption, because they operate as molecular filters, and they get rid of the heat component.

But the problem with traditional membranes is, they're poor separations, which leads to very high operating costs and, eventually, low adoption. So at Osmoses, we fix this problem, and we deliver on exceptional separations to separate gas molecules from one another. Because that's where we found the biggest challenge to meet in the industry, to really address one of the problems that defines the backbone of chemical, petrochemical, and energy industries.

And we do this through commercializing breakthrough science. In particular, we've been developing a family of hydrocarbon ladder polymers that, when manufactured into membranes, they leave behind porosities that resemble the size of gas molecules. And we can amplify the smallest differences that are subangstrom before molecules, delivering, again, unexceptional performance.

So when we talk about this performance, what do we mean? So let's take, for example, methane, an atom before, from that BMW-- mentioned how biogas is important. There's two metrics for membrane-- selectivity, the ability to separate, and throughput, how much gas you can process for a unit of time.

So considering commercial membrane materials, they have very low throughput, which means high capital cost. This has been fixed by state-of-the-art materials developed in academic labs. But really, nobody developed materials that perform at high selectivity and high throughput. And this is really where we come and play a role.

This means energy savings-- 40% to 60% energy reduction-- but also product-- methane recovery. Translating this into impact means producing extra fuel to power 7 billion additional homes in the United States for one year. So our product, initially, is going to be a compact membrane module, which is a key component of membrane skids and membrane systems, as those that you can see.

And because our innovation is just a selective layer, there is a component of this membrane module we can fit into existing infrastructure, which is great for a go-to-market strategy, when you think that 5% to 10% of the market already uses membrane. So it's a great way to get in.

But also, the opportunity is in changing, again, the industry by conquering the other 90%, 95%, long-term. And we have a solution that is a platform technology for a number of energy applications, but we divide them into main buckets. The first one is decarbonizing current and new energy industries. In particular, carbon capture in heavy industries, power generation, and methane upgrading.

But also, we have solutions that enable carbon-free energy platforms-- in particular, with hydrogen. And we can play a role in both hydrogen production and distribution. This is already a $10 billion and growing market. And we can deliver on both sustainability and improved financial performance, which is necessary in 2022 to succeed in this space.

So how can we work together, and why are we excited to be in this room today? So we have very exciting things happening in the next 6 to 12 months, starting from process design and optimization. So we're looking for partners that can run with us advanced process modeling, identifying factors that can drive costs down, optimize for different variables, energy use recovery, purity, and overall refining our value proposition.

This is going to inform product development, which means that then, we need to manufacture this product, and we are focusing on polymer manufacturing, membrane scale-up, and modular assembly. But eventually, the biggest goal is to pilot with industries for us.

And we are operating in all of these fields-- in particular, hydrogen solutions-- think about blue hydrogen. Think about the smart distribution, with ammonia and hydrogen-methane blending, but also methane upgrade, oxygen production, and carbon capture, and helium harvesting.

So please come and talk to me if you operate in any of those industries, and I know there's many of you here. So just to wrap up, we cannot wait any longer to change the backbone of an industry that has been the same for so long, and Osmoses really wants to play a role in this journey. So thank you so much for having us, and looking forward to talking to you later.