Solidec

Solidec makes chemicals out of air and electricity, starting with hydrogen peroxide generated on site at the concentration a customer needs. Hydrogen peroxide is how a great deal of the world's water gets treated, and it is corrosive, explosive, and manufactured in a few large plants, so every user is buying a hazard, storing it, and paying to have it trucked in. Delivery alone can be a third or more of what it costs, and remote sites pay the worst of it.

Making it where it is used removes the tanker, the storage tank, the handling liability, and most of the carbon, which drops by roughly a factor of ten today and heads toward zero as the grid cleans up. The technology came out of six years at Rice and a paper in Science, under an exclusive license. Distributed chemical production inverts an assumption a century old: that molecules should be made in one enormous place and shipped everywhere else.