When Vig Sherrill, an electrical engineer and serial entrepreneur in eastern Tennessee, went looking for a technology for his sixth startup company, he found one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s annual technology innovation showcase: a process that had the potential to slash the cost of manufacturing graphene by orders of magnitude. He hired the inventor of the process, Ivan Vlassiouk, from the lab and formed a company, General Graphene, which is now producing graphene sheets at “well below” $100/m2—compared with $10 000/m2 using other, more established manufacturing processes. General Graphene just completed a major round of fundraising and is working toward commercial-scale production in 2022.
Chicago-based LanzaTech, which produces ethanol through fermentation of industrial gases and other carbon-rich wastes and residues, turned to chemists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Together they developed a catalytic process to upgrade the ethanol to a jet biofuel, a 50-50 mix with...
