The modern world runs on chemicals and fuels that require a huge amount of energy to produce: industrial chemical separation accounts for 10% to 15% of the world’s total energy consumption. That is because most separations today rely on heat to boil off unwanted materials and isolate compounds.

The MIT spin-out Osmoses is making industrial chemical separations more efficient by reducing the need for all that heat. The company, founded by former MIT postdoc Francesco Maria Benedetti; Katherine Mizrahi Rodriguez ’17, PhD ’22; Professor Zachary Smith; and Holden Lai, has developed a polymer technology capable of filtering gases with unprecedented selectivity. 

Osmoses' membrane technology is capable of filtering gases with high levels of selectivity and flux. Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT.

Gases – consisting of some of the smallest molecules in the world – have historically been the hardest to separate. Osmoses says its membranes enable industrial customers to increase production, use less energy, and operate in a smaller footprint than is possible using conventional heat-based separation processes.

Osmoses has already begun working with partners to demonstrate its technology’s performance, including its ability to upgrade biogas, which involves separating CO₂ and methane. The company also has projects in the works to recover hydrogen from large chemical facilities and, in a partnership with the US Department of Energy, to pull helium from underground hydrogen wells.

“Chemical separations really matter, and they are a bottleneck to innovation and progress in an industry where innovation is challenging, yet an existential need,” says Benedetti. “We want to make it easier for our customers to reach their revenue targets, their decarbonisation goals, and expand their markets to move the industry forward.”

Better separations

Benedetti joined Smith’s lab in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering in 2017. He was joined by Mizrahi Rodriguez the following year, and the pair spent the next few years conducting fundamental research into membrane materials for gas separations, collaborating with chemists at MIT and beyond, including Lai as he conducted his PhD at Stanford University with Professor Yan Xia.

“I was fascinated by the projects [Smith] was thinking about,” says Benedetti. “It was high-risk, high-reward, and that’s something I love. I had the opportunity to work with talented chemists, and they were synthesising amazing polymers. The idea was for us chemical engineers at MIT to study those polymers, support chemists in taking next steps, and find an application in the separations world.”

The researchers slowly iterated on the membranes, gradually achieving better performance until, in 2020, a group including Lai, Benedetti, Xia, and Smith broke records for gas separation selectivity with a class of three-dimensional polymers whose structural backbone could be tuned to optimise performance. They filed patents with Stanford and MIT over the next two years, publishing their results in the journal Science in 2022.

“We were facing a decision of what to do with this incredible innovation,” says Benedetti. “By then, we’d published a lot of papers where, as the introduction, we described the huge energy footprint of thermal gas separations and the potential of membranes to solve that. We thought rather than wait for somebody to pick up the paper and do something with it, we wanted to lead the effort to commercialise the technology.”

Benedetti joined forces with Mizrahi Rodriguez, Lai, and industrial advisor Xinjin Zhao PhD ’92 to go through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Program, which challenges researchers to speak to potential customers in industry. The researchers interviewed more than 100 people, which confirmed for them the huge impact their technology could have.

Benedetti received grants from the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, MIT Sandbox, and was a fellow with the MIT Energy Initiative. Osmoses also won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition in 2021, the same year they founded the company.

“I spent a lot of time talking to stakeholders of companies, and it was a window into the challenges the industry is facing,” says Benedetti. “It helped me determine this was a problem they were facing, and showed me the problem was massive. We realised if we could solve the problem, we could change the world.”

Today, Benedetti says more than 90% of energy in the chemicals industry is used to thermally separate gases. One study in Nature found that replacing thermal distillation could reduce annual US energy costs by $4bn and save 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

Made up of a class of molecules with tunable structures called hydrocarbon ladder polymers, Osmoses’ membranes are capable of filtering gas molecules with high levels of selectivity, at scale. The technology reduces the size of separation systems, making it easier to add to existing spaces and lowering upfront costs for customers.

“This technology is a paradigm shift with respect to how most separations are happening in industry today,” says Benedetti. “It doesn’t require any thermal processes, which is the reason why the chemical and petrochemical industries have such high energy consumption. There are huge inefficiencies in how separations are done today because of the traditional systems used.”

From the lab to the world

In the lab, the founders were making single grams of their membrane polymers for experiments. Since then, they have scaled up production dramatically, reducing the cost of the material with an eye towards producing potentially hundreds of kilograms in the future.

The company is currently working toward its first pilot project upgrading biogas at a landfill operated by a large utility in North America. It is also planning a pilot at a dairy farm in North America. Mizrahi Rodriguez says waste gas from landfills and agricultural make up more than 80% of the biogas upgrading market overall and represent a promising alternative source of renewable methane for customers.

“In the near term, our goal is to validate this technology at scale,” says Benedetti, noting Osmoses aims to scale up its pilot projects. “It has been a big accomplishment to secure funded pilots in all of the verticals that will serve as a springboard for our next commercial phase.”

Osmoses’ other two pilot projects focus on recovering valuable gas, including helium with the Department of Energy.

“Helium is a scarce resource that we need for a variety of applications, like MRIs, and our membranes’ high performance can be used to extract small amounts of it from underground wells,” says Mizrahi Rodriguez. “Helium is very important in the semiconductor industry to build chips and graphical processing units that are powering the AI revolution. It’s a strategic resource that the US has a growing interest to produce domestically.”

Benedetti says further down the line, Osmoses’ technology could be used in carbon capture, gas 'sweetening' to remove acid gases from natural gas, to separate oxygen and nitrogen, to reuse refrigerants, and more.

“There will be a progressive expansion of our capabilities and markets to deliver on our mission of redefining the backbone of the chemical, petrochemical, and energy industries,” says Benedetti. “Separations should not be a bottleneck to innovation and progress any more.”