Sarah Lamaison

The chemical building blocks required to make things like shampoo bottles, flooring, and fabric can come with a hefty climate toll. Currently, the chemical industry accounts for about 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Sarah Lamaison, 31, is the cofounder and CEO of Dioxycle, a Paris-based startup working on a new way to make chemicals by using electricity, in a process that would generate less of the planet-warming gasses.

The key is an electrolyzer, a device that uses electricity to kick off chemical reactions. In Dioxycle’s case, the device can transform carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide into ethylene, which can be used in plastic packaging, textiles, and next-generation fuels. 

DIOXYCLE.COM

Typically, ethylene production is quite energy-intensive, requiring heating hydrocarbons and steam to super-high temperatures in a furnace. Dioxycle’s approach could match, or even beat, the cost of conventional ethylene production, Lamaison says, by substituting cheap, clean electricity for heat derived from fossil fuels. 

Getting there will require more ingenuity, though. Since the cost of electricity currently makes up over half the expected final cost of the company’s products, further reducing the energy needed in the process is a major priority. The electrolyzers can also be ramped up and down, to take advantage of cheap energy when it’s available, like on sunny afternoons in places where solar power is plentiful.

Lamaison and her cofounder both left Stanford to start Dioxycle in 2021, and the team spent the first few years developing the electrolyzer and scaling it up, going from a device roughly the size of a postage stamp to a commercial-scale version, which is about the size of a car. Now, the team is working on a demonstration with a partner, expected in the next two years, which will require building more commercial-scale units.

While the company has come a long way in terms of research progress and scale, Lamaison is a realist when it comes to the work still ahead: “It’s going to be a hard journey, but we have to take it.”