Sun Catalytix Gets $1M More from Polaris, Exclusive License to Solar Fuel Tech from MIT

Ryan McBride11/23/09Comments (3)

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bright but uncertain.”

Metcalfe, a leader of the clean technology practice at Waltham-based Polaris, didn’t seem afraid to tell me that Sun Catalytix doesn’t have a definite plan for how it plans to bring its technology to market. The startup, which now has five employees, has been focused on building systems that can demonstrate how well the technology works with different types of water and with larger volumes of water than Nocera used in his lab at MIT. (Separate experiments have successfully demonstrated the technology using water from the Charles River and Boston Harbor, Metcalfe says, but yet another experiment that tested antifreeze as an alternative to water for using the system in freezing weather didn’t quite work.) Nocera has been a proponent of so-called “personalized energy,” with individuals using systems that incorporate technologies like his water-splitting catalyst to meet their own energy needs.

Sun Catalytix is developing several different catalysts to perform a water-splitting reaction. Nocera’s research, published last year in Science, showed that a catalyst could be used to separate oxygen from water, leaving hydrogen molecules that could be used to make hydrogen fuel. The catalyst used in that published research consisted of a metal electrode placed in water containing cobalt and phosphate. Metcalfe says that a key feature of Nocera’s catalyst is that it is self-repairing, meaning that it can repeat the water-splitting reaction over and over again.

The company is still assembling an executive team to lead its nascent operation. Amir Nashat, a general partner at Polaris, serves as founding CEO of the startup on an interim basis and shares some of the company-building duties with Metcalfe, Metcalfe says. The chairman of the company is Arthur Goldstein, the retired chairman and CEO of water purification and desalinization giant Ionics, which General Electric scooped up for $1.1 billion in 2005. The plan at Sun Catalytix is to recruit a more permanent CEO to lead the company in and also close a Series A round of venture capital that includes multiple backers. (For now, Metcalfe says, Polaris is the sole venture investor supporting the company.)

Metcalfe says that he expects the new chief executive to complete a business plan for the company. It’s likely that the company will seek corporate partnerships that would help it to integrate its technology with solar panels, wind turbines, and/or fuel cells, he says. The startup’s technology would use power from these systems to make fuels, so that people who rely on solar panels for electricity could have power when the sun isn’t shining, for example. Gaseous and liquid fuels generally pack much more energy density than batteries, which are the standard for of energy storage used with wind turbines and solar panels.