By Amanda Drane, Staff writer

Sysygy Plasmonics, a Houston startup with a challenging name, is taking on an even more challenging task.

The company’s core technology uses light rather than combustion to power chemical reactions — an innovation with the potential to change the way chemicals are made and transported.

If it succeeds, and several large players in the energy industry have wagered tens millions of dollars that it can, Syzygy’s technology could be used to drive down cost, energy intensity and emissions in a range of chemical processes, including those needed to make and transport hydrogen, which is gaining traction as a fossil fuel alternative.

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“People thought we were fools,” Syzygy’s chief technology officer, Suman Khatiwada said of his decision, with co-founder and CEO Trevor Best, to quit their jobs at oil field services giant Baker Hughes in 2016 to pursue the venture. “Now as people are looking at it, they’re beginning to give us credit for seeing it before most of the world.”

While it has not launched commercially, Syzygy has raised more than US$100 million in funding from investment firms and big energy companies, and its technology is scheduled to be piloted later this year. Many believe hydrogen is a key energy of the future, but clean hydrogen, which is not produced by burning fossil fuels, is expensive and the energy required to make it, transport it and prepare it for use is significant.

It’s a hurdle to the development of a new hydrogen economy that Syzygy’s technology could help energy companies overcome.

The market is particularly interested in using the technology to convert ammonia into hydrogen, the company said. That’s because as the hydrogen economy evolves, most of the world’s hydrogen is expected to ship internationally as ammonia, a hydrogen derivative, and then be converted to hydrogen after it is imported.

While ammonia trade is nothing new — it is a key component of fertilizer — the chemical process that would be needed to convert, or “crack” ammonia to hydrogen once it arrives overseas is a technology that is less practiced, carbon-intensive and costly.

“They’re looking to lower costs for ammonia importers,” said Joseph Webster, who leads the hydrogen team at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, “which would be important for ammonia exporters.”

The company plans to pilot its electric-powered ammonia reactor later this year in South Korea through a partnership with South Korean chemical company LOTTE and Japanese trading giant Sumitomo Corp. Another field trial to produce hydrogen from ammonia with an unnamed “major energy producer” in the US is also scheduled for late 2023.

The reactors developed by Syzygy are an offshoot of a photocatalytic breakthrough at Rice University in 2016. Rice researchers developed the catalyst that Syzygy built its reactors to work with. Rice holds the original patent on the catalyst technology developed by its researchers; Syzygy licenses that technology and has patents of its own on the company’s core intellectual property: the reactors designed to work with the Rice catalyst.

“Ultimately, we were able to build a fully electrified reactor that does not produce any emissions,” Best said.

In November, the company announced it had raised US$76 million from Carbon Direct Capital, an equity firm focused on carbon management technology, as well as two of the world’s largest oil companies, Aramco and Chevron, to advance its technology.

“We were very attracted to the multiple use cases for the Syzygy reactor and the lifetime-value of each Syzygy customer,” Carbon Direct Capital CEO Jonathan Goldberg said in a statement. “Emissions from hydrogen production total more than 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Syzygy’s photocatalysis technology is a key solution to decarbonize hydrogen production as well as other critical industries.”

In an earlier funding round, Syzygy raised more than US$35 million and received grants from the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.