- Emvolon, a technology company launched out of MIT, announced recently it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.
Emvolon — a technology company launched out of MIT that is developing a platform for distributed chemical production from resources that otherwise would be wasted — announced recently that it raised a $1.5 million seed investment led by The Engine. The funding raised will be used for building out the Emvolon team and creating a dedicated laboratory space for development of Emvolon’s platform that converts the wasted natural gas at flare sites into usable chemicals like methanol for use in a broad array of industrial applications or as a fuel.
Flaring is known as a wasteful practice of burning natural gas, produced from oil wells that can not be economically taken to market. And an estimated 150 billion cubic meters per year is flared into the air, equivalent to 275 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Emvolon’s platform can negate 90% of the carbon dioxide emissions that natural gas flares emit every year, and sell valuable products into large global chemicals markets.
Emmanuel Kasseris and Leslie Bromberg, the founders of Emvolon, are pioneering a device built using inexpensive and ubiquitous components from established supply chains for the automotive industry to do such conversion at the site of the flares. And the same device can be used to convert other stranded resources like biomass, which would otherwise rot in fields or forests, or biogas into a variety of useful chemicals. Plus it can also be applied to distributed ammonia manufacturing, providing chemical energy storage for communities without reliable grid connections.
KEY QUOTES:
“This wasted gas is a stranded resource. At Emvolon we are reimagining mass-produced automotive internal combustion engines as miniature chemical processing plants that can efficiently and effectively provide communities the raw materials they need, without building massive refineries and chemical plants. The process enables economically attractive small plants by exchanging economies of mass production for economies of scale.”
— Emmanuel Kasseris, Emvolon’s co-founder and CEO
“Emmanuel and Leslie enable us to imagine a world with a much more efficient utilization of natural resources. Emvolon promises a future with a much smaller carbon footprint for our most difficult to decarbonize sectors while simultaneously enabling cost-effective, on-demand and distributed chemical production.”
— Michael Kearney, Principal of The Engine
