Rice University professors Aditya Mohite and Haotian Wang presented their research and entrepreneurial work at CERAWeek, an annual energy conference in Houston, to industry peers and leaders from around the world the week of March 10.
Mohite, faculty director of Rice Engineering Initiative for Energy Transition and Sustainability (REINVENTS) and the William M. Rice Trustee Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, hosted a presentation focused on The Plasma Foundry, a customized accelerator at Rice driving scalable industrial decarbonization and the production of nationally relevant materials. It specializes in converting carbon dioxide, methane and other hydrocarbons into value-added products, advancing metal refining and rare earth recovery and enabling PFAS degradation through plasma technologies.
Mohite is part of the Rice team that is working with Woodside Energy on a ground-breaking, five-year technology collaboration aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing lower carbon solutions.
Mohite is also the co-founder and chief science officer of DirectH2, a hydrogen technology company spun out of his research lab whose innovation to integrate renewable energy with hydrogen production was announced last week.
Wang, REINVENTS faculty expert, Dean Fellow for Sustainability and associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, gave an in-depth, technical explanation of next-generation electrolyzers and electrolysis for sustainable chemical manufacturing. Conventional electrolyzers — devices that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen — are primarily optimized for efficient molecular conversions such as water electrolysis.
However, the potential of associated ion transports within these systems during electrolysis remains underutilized for critical industrial applications, Wang said. The technology aims to reduce energy consumption and costs with potential applications in direct air capture and renewable energy integration. With the help of his students, the “CAT” Group, Wang is working on electrochemically reducing CO₂ gas into a variety of products.
Wang is also the co-founder of Solidec, a climate-tech company spun out of his research lab that currently lives in the Rice Nexus at the Ion, Houston’s innovation hub powered by Rice. Nexus is the bridge between the university’s world-class research and investment and industry partners that can help bring tech from the lab to the market.
Both Mohite and Wang are part of REINVENTS, which lives in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing and was launched in 2023 to target critical areas of energy research and build partnerships across academia, industry and government. REINVENTS partners with companies to develop energy solutions from lab to startup to industry adoption, leveraging Rice faculty expertise and potential joint government funding and national lab collaboration. With the REINVENTS accelerator model, companies can invest in a customized partnership with a Rice research team to deliver targeted scalable solutions.
“We believe our accelerator is the perfect model to solve some of these problems,” Mohite said. “You have industries, corporations and government funding. Then you have the power of academia. All of this combined in a meaningful way, with scale in mind, positions us well to solve some of these hard problems.”