Why We have to Pay Attention to Membranes ​​​​

New membrane technology may seem like an obscure part of the energy tech ecosystem, but there are surprisingly many processes across energy that depend on membranes. Anything that involves separation of product, like natural gas processing and oil refining, usually has a membrane involved to separate a fluid or gas New membrane technology may seem like an obscure part of the energy tech ecosystem, but there are surprisingly many processes across energy that depend on membranes. Anything that involves separation of product, like natural gas processing and oil refining, usually has a membrane involved to separate a fluid or gas stream into component parts. Biofuel production relies on membranes to remove by-products and yield a higher purity final product. Carbon capture systems often use membranes to separate CO2 from a gas stream in pre and post-combustion and to separate O2 from air in oxy-combustion. Many batteries use membranes as separators between the anode and cathode and similarly, hydrogen fuel cells depend on membranes to function as electrolytes for proton exchange. We recently pointed out the importance of water technology in energy transition. Membranes play a large part in enabling desalination, industrial and municipal wastewater treatment, water reclamation, and water purification. 

So it’s clear that the development of novel membranes is important to both existing energy processes and future energy processes. Compared to alternative systems that use solvents and sorbents, membranes have the advantage of lower capital and operating cost, lower decay rates in performance over time, higher reliability, and great process continuity (vs. bath processing). The right membranes can lead to mass commercialization of many energy technologies. 

But it’s no easy task to create new membranes. Membrane development is very closely tied to new materials technology, as what most membranes try to achieve cannot be achieved with natural materials. Depending on the application, membranes can target varying levels of permeation rates, physical and chemical modification properties, selectivity, resilience under physical conditions, and feed pressure. Commercializing membranes in an industrial system often means balancing cost, capacity to handle the permeating species, fouling risk, lifespan of the membrane, ease of installation and cleaning, and, increasingly, sustainability of the membrane manufacturing and disposal. Given how many different membrane materials can be used, how many structural variations there are in constructing the membrane, and how many different post-formation treatments can be applied to the membrane, membrane development is a very heavily iterative and scientific process. It’s not easy. 

And that’s why, more than ever, energy transition requires investment and support of science-based technologies. There is a short list of investors (less than 200 across all stages and geographies in the venture space, or <1% of all venture capital investors) interested in advanced materials and materials science. These technologies often times rely on the government, incubators/accelerators, family offices, and other types of non-traditional funding to move them through the development cycle…but these capital pools are much smaller than the need, especially when it comes to scale up from lab or pilot to first commercial facility. 

Membranes are just one piece of what is a larger section of the puzzle that gets overlooked. We’ve talked before about the need for funding for asset-heavy technologies. There needs to be greater financial and structural support for technologies like new membranes if we are going to be able to successfully finance energy transition.