When people talk about climate change, they usually focus on behavior change, clean electricity, driving electric cars and using wind and solar power. But Compact Membrane Systems (CMS) CEO Erica Nemser focuses on carbon capture — reducing emissions from the production of things that we want and need: steel for buildings; plastic production for cars, buildings, and medical equipment; and cement for roads.

A pioneer in separations technology, New Castle-based CMS has launched a long-awaited pilot demonstration of its proprietary Optiperm membrane technology at Braskem’s Marcus Hook petrochemicals facility, laying the groundwork for broader application of its low-cost carbon-capture technology.

“I tell people I work in the planet-friendly, sustainable chemistry space,” Nemser says. “It’s really difficult to move production of the things we depend on every day to clean electricity, so we’re capturing the CO2 (carbon dioxide) produced from those processes before it leaves the smokestack. We’re concentrating that CO2 so that it can be used or sequestered underground, leading to more products and fewer emissions.”

“I don’t think anyone really wants a solution where we have to say no to steel and cement and some of the things that enable us to live the kind of lives we live and develop the medicines and the healthcare and other materials that we use,” she says.

That’s her pitch to the layman, but when Nemser talks to prospective investors or users of her carbon-capturing membranes, they understand the benefits for hard-to-abate industries but want to know what makes CMS special.

The company’s Optiperm technology uses membranes to separate the gases used to create plastics (olefins) from fuels (paraffins). Industry journals have described CMS’s efforts to develop membranes with commercial applications as a process improvement that could “change the world [and] reap great global benefits” through heightened energy efficiency.

Nemser says CMS is a leader in offering membrane technologies for carbon capture.

“There’s an existing commercial technology for carbon capture now; it’s just expensive and difficult to use in a range of applications,” she says. “Many new developments are still [in the lab] and face many technology risks. We’re far, far ahead of those. We believe Optiperm offers benefits from a cost and ease-of-use standpoint and can address the needs of customers that want a carbon capture system — steam methane reformers, plants making blue hydrogen, and steel plants and cement plants.

“At the end of the day, keeping the cost low is important because the CO2 is essentially an emission stream that nobody wants, so they want to do it as inexpensively as possible. We can make applications of all sizes under their operating conditions. Others in our business can’t say that.”

Nemser says CMS has two customers — manufacturing plants…and the planet. Optiperm will help manufacturers meet goals tied to the Paris accords (and others) to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and reduce their CO2 footprint over different timelines ranging from 2025 to 2050. Other prospective partners already have underground carbon-capture facilities and need partners like CMS to serve those customers at a more reasonable price.

As for the planet, she says “every molecule of CO2 that we take out of a smokestack and avoid going into the environment is a net gain.”

The Optiperm project with Braskem is the largest demonstration yet of its membrane doing a separation. A scaled-down version of the commercial system that CMS can deliver today, it’s a 500-day project that is already generating data that has the CMS team excited about hitting all its goals.

“We’ll get a lot of data over the next 18 months or so, but we believe we’ll be able to prove what our technology can offer well before that,” Nemser says. “This is not a science project confined to a lab. It’s a significant technology validation and proof point for investors and partners. We’ll be showing them this technology works at a commercial scale and will remove megatons of carbon from the environment.”

The primary metric that determines success is the cost of capture on a per-ton basis.

“The world expects us to be able to capture at least 90% of the CO2 that’s being emitted in a stream and get it to a 95% concentration. We can do that, and we use those as our benchmarks for performance,” she says.

The next step is putting more demonstrations into the field. Nemser remains tight-lipped about timing and locations beyond saying Optiperm can be quickly deployed anywhere.

“We’re looking at a range of different applications in different industries, with the common denominator being that they all have flue gas streams,” she says. “Think of it like the furnace system in your house with a flue that releases the CO2 nitrogen mix out into the atmosphere.”

Carbon Capture Technology in Delaware

Nemser says Delaware is an excellent place for scientific research and development.

“We’re doing cutting-edge work in climate technology,” she says. “Delaware’s history in chemicals has created a baseline and core competency. We’ve seen the evolution to clean chemicals, and now we’re seeing chemicals as energy, hydrogen fuels, solar power, electrolysis, and a variety of other chemical-based technologies. Delaware has a lot to contribute to the future of chemistry being the future of energy and clean energy, and the talent here is second to none in developing this.”

When Nemser joined the company her father Stuart founded in 1993 after leaving DuPont, she started moving it from a domestic science-driven R&D lab to a global commercial organization that constantly generates new intellectual property.

“I thought [our future] would be in petrochemicals and then broadly in industry and carbon capture but probably 10 years later than we’re seeing now,” she says. “In many ways, we see an acceleration in the interest in carbon capture.”

Her father, Nemser says, “thinks it’s amazing that membranes are having their day in the sun. Dad’s vision was always that technologists needed to find a way to stop separations from being one of the largest energy hogs on the planet as they produce the products that we want and prevent them from creating the emissions profile that they now have.”

Nemser says that modular systems like the CMS membrane can be used in both large plants like you see dotting the American landscape as well as new greenfield applications, and even small installations as the world moves towards more decentralized processes and plants.

Nemser says she’s proud of what CMS has accomplished but concedes she always says, ‘let’s do it faster.’ I’m always looking ahead, not behind, at the next mountain to climb.”

“It’s one thing to prove it out in a chemical plant, but the whole point is how do we expand these use cases so that we’re really talking about the next generation of deployments in carbon capture,” she says.

Nemser says Braskem is only the launching point, adding it makes sense that a Delaware company is at the brink of innovation like this.

“The future of chemicals is energy and a clean planet,” she says. “It’s not where we were. It’s where we’re going.”

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The growing need for stricter environmental compliance around the world – and a desire for a more progressive workplace culture – provided the perfect foundation for the creation of Newark, Delaware-based Aqua Science LLC.

The basis of Aqua Science’s business lies in water and soil toxicity testing using bioluminescent reagents that the company manufactures and sells, along with sales of their proprietary luminometer for use alongside its reagent products.

But owner and chief executive officer Iwona Evans notes that her background isn’t in science – environmental or otherwise. It’s in finance, with her undergraduate business degree from Goldey-Beacom College, her MBA from the University of Delaware and a second master’s from Goldey-Beacom in business and management. She was, however, putting those degrees to work for biotech companies and saw, in February 2020, an opportunity to start her own venture with a few fellow employees following along.

“It’s been really sort of unexpected with my finance background,” she said. “I had to learn a lot about science, but it’s been great.”

Aqua Science’s products use a bioluminescent bacteria native to the Pacific Ocean that, during the production process, are freeze-dried to allow for storage and transportation. By reconstituting the bacteria, customers essentially bring it back to life. The healthier the environment, the more light the bacteria give off. The luminometer measures the level of light emitted, gauging the level of toxicity by how much the light output diminishes.

Among the changes Evans and her team have made to the process were to create more stable bacteria, which was a significant improvement, particularly considering the pandemic’s effects on international shipping, she said.

“Shipping suddenly took a lot longer, and the product has to be frozen and shipped in a cooler, so the transit time cannot be too long,” she said. “Our scientists did some additional work, and we were able to make it more stable so the bacteria would survive a longer transit time.”

The new venture bore some similarity to what Evans’ team had been doing at their previous employer. “We saw really great opportunities in the market,” she said, “and we felt they were unfulfilled, that there were changes that could be made.”

Those changes happened fast, and after some initial research and development, the Aqua Science team had a product to market six months after starting the business and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Because of the scientists we have here and their knowledge, our customers told us that really this is the best thing they’ve seen in 20 years,” Evans said. “We have the highest quality of bacteria reagents in the world now.”

In designing their new luminometer, the Aqua Science team’s goal was to take widely used but outdated technology and update it for the 21st century. “We thought we could use the cutting-edge technology that’s available right now to make this process easier and better and at the same time keep our environment – our water and soil – safer,” she said. Evans noted that her engineer husband, who doesn’t work for the company or in a related field, contributed to the design of “an incredibly simple and fully custom user interface” for the device. “It’s something I know he’s proud of, and we’re excited that we got his input.”

From its Newark headquarters, Aqua Science operates internationally. The company provides much of its product and technology to markets in Europe and Mexico, where environmental regulations are tighter than those in the U.S. and water and soil toxicity standards much more stringent.

“We see this technology as a great screening tool that could be used here in the U.S., and we really hope with our new luminometer coming out we’ll be able to reach customers in the U.S. who can use it to do a quick field test and be able to say, ‘Yes, there’s a problem,’ or ‘No, we’re good,’” Evans said. “For us, the passion is really the clean water and soil, so we would like to grow our R&D department and come up with new solutions to the problems not only here in Delaware but that people around the world are facing.”

Delaware Integral to Aqua Science’s Success

Delaware’s strong business foundation has been integral in Aqua Science’s success, she said, not just by providing a home base and a reservoir of talent, but also through direct support like grants and through organizations like Delaware Prosperity Partnership. The company won a Delaware Division of Small Business EDGE Grant in 2021, which Evans said was a crucial turning point in the company’s success.

“It really sort of brought the team together. Everybody was working on it, and we were all excited when we won,” she said. “It was a huge help, especially for a startup company during a pandemic.”

Additionally, the Small Business Development Center helped the firm get a grant for marketing and write a grant proposal for its PFAS project. In view of the environmental challenges being faced globally related to perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in soil and water, especially in the United States, Aqua Science will be developing a new technology to monitor these “forever chemicals.” PFAS are found in a wide array of manufactured chemicals used in the creation of nonstick coatings, stain-resistant carpets and firefighting foam, among many others, and are detrimental to human health.

Other help came from Export Delaware, which provided assistance working with trade missions to promote Aqua Science’s products globally. As she’s built the company, Evans has benefitted from an almost entirely female team, a marked departure from her other workplaces.

“It’s very important and refreshing at the same time because in my previous career it was exactly the room full of men and I was the only woman, and it wasn’t always the greatest experience,” she said. “This is different, and I like it. I think it’s a different way of thinking.”

Currently, the Aqua Science team of six includes Evans, a native of Poland, and two women who are first-generation immigrants from India and Colombia. This also adds strength to the company, she said.

“To me it’s such a valuable thing having a diverse workforce,” she said. “It’s that the ideas are coming from different perspectives, it’s the different ways we look at problems. It’s really beneficial to the business.”

The team’s structure also allows Aqua Science to break free from old-fashioned corporate practices less suited for both a 21st century and pandemic-era workplace, she said.

“We spend a lot of time at work, and we all have families, we have lives. And one thing I will always tell employees is family comes first,” Evans said. “If something’s going on at home, let me know, take some time, we’ll figure it out. Take care of whatever you need to take care of. And this is something that my employees have expressed many times, that it’s so nice to come to work not having to worry if something happens.”

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