Page 32 - Flathead Beacon // 9.21.16

TRANSACTIONS 33 BUSINESS IS PERSONAL 34 Business
From Glaciers to Greenhouse Gases, New Technology Emerges Kalispell native Kendra Kuhl recognized as top innovator in research to convert carbon dioxide into useful products
GBY TRISTAN SCOTT OF THE BEACON
ROWING UP IN KALISPELL o ered Kendra Kuhl a unique vantage point to study climate
change as she watched the namesake features of nearby Glacier National Park diminished by a warming world.
Her early interest in the natural spaces around her led to a fascination with chemistry, which was further nur- tured by general and organic chemistry classes o ered at Flathead High School. Her talent in the eld provided a spring- board into an ambitious academic tra- jectory, propelling her to the vanguard of scienti c research to convert carbon dioxide captured from smokestacks at coal or gas- red power plants into use- ful chemicals and products.
“I think being close to Glacier, you see climate change happening rsthand, so it was impactful at an early age,” Kuhl said in a telephone interview with the Beacon. “Also, just growing up in Mon- tana you are so connected to nature. It is the main form of entertainment, and through the years, I watched as less snow remained on the ground during winter. It might seem anecdotal, but growing up there and being immersed in nature was a big in uence.”
Kuhl, 34, now resides in Berkeley, California, where she has been working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab- oratory to build a reactor that will cap- ture the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and other industrial processes and make useful chemicals from it.
Kuhl entered the Ph.D. program at Stanford University in 2006 and soon after joined the lab of Prof. Thomas
LEFT Kendra Kuhl at her Opus 12 laboratory in Berkeley, California. RIGHT Kuhl’s reactor uses novel catalytic nano particles, and features inputs for carbon dioxide and outputs for the chemicals. COURTESY PHOTOS
computers more useful, or engineering cooler electronic devices — and regard- less of whether they are heading start- ups, working in big companies, or doing research in academic labs — they all are poised to be leaders in their elds.”
Opus 12’s technology would enable an arti cial carbon cycle that sequesters carbon dioxide in the form of commod- ity chemicals or creates carbon-neutral fuels, leading to an overall decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.
The project was developed through Cyclotron Road, a startup incubator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labo- ratory, from which Kuhl and the team received funding and salary support to build a small prototype reactor, which features an input for carbon dioxide and an output spigot connected to an instru- ment that analyzes the products.
With the startup funding set to expire at the end of the year, Kuhl and her team, along with the prototype reactor, have begun to draw private investors who see massive potential in the still-nascent technology.
The key to the technology is the design of the reactor, Kuhl said, which incorpo- rates a family of catalysts she collabo- rated on with Cave and Flanders during their graduate research at Stanford Uni- versity. Folded into the metal reactor chamber is an electrode that uses a mem- brane coated with the catalysts. They enable the carbon reactions to occur at low temperature and pressure, without requiring large amounts of energy.
Opus 12 isn’t the rst company to work on converting carbon dioxide into widely used chemicals. But its improved cata- lysts and scalable reactor design set the
Jaramillo, where her research laid the groundwork for carbon dioxide conver- sion catalyst discovery by developing new methods for accurate and sensi- tive quantitation of reaction products, including minor products that had not been previously reported.
After graduating in 2013, she con- tinued her research as a postdoctoral fellow at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
In 2014, Kuhl bonded with Eto- sha Cave and Nicholas Flanders over a shared interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the trio teamed up to develop their research on carbon dioxide
utilization into an economically viable process.
Together, they cofounded Opus 12, a startup where Kuhl continues work- ing to ne-tune the simple reactor, for which she was recognized last month by MIT Technology Review as one of its “35 Innovators Under 35.”
According to the prestigious Tech- nology Review: “The people in our 16th annual celebration of young innovators are disrupters and dreamers. They’re inquisitive and persistent, inspired and inspiring. No matter whether they’re pursuing medical breakthroughs, refash- ioning energy technologies, making
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