Etch, a clean energy firm with technology developed at Johns Hopkins University, has secured $7.5 million in seed funding from New York-based Emerald Development Managers, a successor company of Cohen & Co.
The Baltimore-based firm is commercializing technology developed by Prof. Jonah Erlebacher that eliminates carbon from natural gas to produce clean hydrogen and solid carbon. The startup says its Etch process uses a novel closed-loop chemical reaction cycle, leading to highly efficient thermal and materials management in reactor systems. In 2018, Erlebacher’s team secured a competitive multi-year grant from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E).
“We cannot solve our climate and emissions challenge without cleaning up natural gas,” said Erlebacher, Etch’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “The Etch process is a holistic solution that will allow decarbonized natural gas to be a part of our global energy system.”
Erlebacher is a tenured professor at Johns Hopkins and former chairman of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s Whiting School of Engineering. He holds six patents, and degrees from Harvard and Yale.
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Etch’s co-founder, John N. Fini, is former director of Intellectual Property and Technology Commercialization at John Hopkins University’s School of Engineering and School of Arts & Sciences. He founded the university’s startup incubation program, FastForward. Fini has degrees from George Washington University, and has completed executive programs from Harvard Business School and Wharton School of Business.
Emerald Development founder and chairman Neil Cohen, who earned a bachelors degree in engineering and math from Johns Hopkins, said Etch’s “amazing new technology” dramatically lowers operating and capital costs, compared to any existing or proposed decarbonization approach, and is easily deployable at any scale.
It can be “easily implemented in-line at millions of facilities, delivering clean hydrogen and significant solid carbon that can be used in a multitude of ways,” he added. Cohen previously co-founded American Rock Salt Company, and served as its co-CEO.
