Yet-Ming Chiang’s research in materials science could appear esoteric, but he has used it to construct a series of corporations in areas equivalent to batteries, green cement and significant minerals that might make an actual difference in mitigating the climate crisis.
From Amy FeldmanForbes Employee
MAssachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Yet-Ming Chiang loves fishing. And it was through fishing that he noticed that the waters in New England were getting warmer within the early Nineteen Nineties. “We used to catch lobsters in Cape Cod,” Chiang said in a phone call from his office, behind which he had a Japanese fish print of a striped bass he had caught. “Now we’re catching dolphinfish. It’s really crazy.”
That insight into the real-world impacts of climate change — tropical and subtropical fish are turning up in waters where they do not belong — has been crucial for Chiang, who has used his research lab to co-found 10 startups. Eight of them give attention to energy and sustainability, including Form Energy, which has raised nearly $1 billion for its iron-air battery products, and Sublime Systems, which received $87 million from the Department of Energy in April to construct a industrial plant to make low-carbon cement.
Given the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, Chiang’s research and his ability to derive practical applications from it give cause for hope and secured him a spot on Forbes‘ first list of Sustainability Leaders. He holds around 110 patents and has written greater than 300 scientific articles in areas equivalent to battery technology and electrochemical production of business materials. Perhaps more importantly, he has used this research to start out corporations which are replacing current carbon-based technologies with commercially scalable green and low-carbon alternatives. To date, his startups have raised greater than $2.5 billion to construct batteries, decarbonize cement, and find greener ways to mine the critical minerals crucial to electrification. He will not be CEO of any of those startups, but he often serves in one other role, for instance as chief science officer at Form Energy and Sublime Systems.
“People worry about whether they can get anything done by 2050 and what if they don’t. Let’s not worry. There is enough to do. I’m an optimist,” Chiang said. “It’s not like we get to 2050 and say, ‘We didn’t get everything done in time, so we’ll give up.'”
Chiang, 66, emigrated together with his family from Taiwan when he was six years old after his father earned an engineering degree from Oklahoma State University. He grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, where his parents ran a store for a time selling Asian food, including homemade spring rolls. He entered MIT as a freshman and never left. He earned a PhD in ceramics in 1985 and have become a lecturer there. By 1990, at age 32, he had a tenured position.
Although Chiang has all the time worked on energy-related research—he was a highschool student throughout the energy crisis of the Seventies, he notes—it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that he began specializing in climate and sustainability. Today, that is all he does. “When students come to me and say they’d like to do research with me, I tell them I only do climate,” says Chiang, whose research group typically consists of 25 people, including graduate students and postdocs.
He founded his first startup, American Superconductor, which makes high-temperature superconducting wires for energy and power applications, in 1987. Considered a superstar in the sphere of battery research, he has since co-founded 4 battery corporations, including Form Energy, which launched in 2017. And more recently, he has founded corporations in areas equivalent to cement and electric aircraft engines. In total, he said, he has worked in five different technology areas which have the potential to decarbonize several gigatons of greenhouse gases per 12 months.
“Yet is one of MIT’s most prolific academic inventors and has been a driving force in the energy materials field for decades,” said Carmichael Roberts, co-founder of Boston-based enterprise capital firm Material Impact, which invests in innovations in materials science. “He is one of the best in the world in his field.”
As the climate crisis becomes increasingly urgent, Yet-Ming Chiang’s ability to spin off his research into corporations offers cause for hope.
His first battery company, A123 Systems, was founded in 2001. That’s when Ric Fulop, a then 26-year-old college dropout, knocked on his door. Fulop, now CEO of Desktop Metal, a 3D printing company co-founded by Chiang, had read Chiang’s article on a brand new technology for fast-charging lithium-ion batteries and recognized the potential to commercialize the innovation.
A123 Systems raised a fortune, including $250 million in federal grants, and when it went public in 2009 with a $380 million IPO, its stock rose 50 percent on its first day of trading, closing at greater than $20 a share. But the loss-making company’s hopes soon fizzled. Supply was an excessive amount of, including cheaper batteries from Asia, and demand was too little as electric automobile sales picked up more slowly than expected. In October 2012, with shares trading at just 25 cents a share, A123 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It emerged the next 12 months under Chinese ownership. Still, Chiang considers the corporate successful since the technology it developed continues to be in use and its former employees at the moment are helping other energy startups equivalent to ONE and Vertiv.
“Yet-Ming has created one of the most productive portfolios of our time,” said Dayna Grayson, co-founder of Construct Capital, who has known Chiang for years. “He has a really deep interest in how impactful things can be.”
With Sublime Systems, founded in 2020, Chiang pivoted from batteries to cement. About a 3rd of all greenhouse gas emissions come from industry, with cement and steel being two of the largest contributors, each accounting for about 8%.
“Electricity will be the cheapest form of energy, so we should try to electrify all processes that use fossil fuels.”
Leah Ellis, Sublime’s co-founder and CEO, went to MIT as a postdoc to work with Chiang. Although she was researching exclusively batteries on the time, after Form Energy spun off, Chiang asked her to look into decarbonizing cement since it had potential impact and investors and government officials were thinking about it. “Yeter’s style of inventor is that he starts with a problem and works backwards to a solution,” Ellis said. “He can go from batteries to cement to cold fusion.”
Sublime Systems has now built a pilot plant and is constructing a industrial facility in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Its electrochemical process replaces the high-temperature furnaces traditionally used to make cement, which cause such large carbon emissions. “Electricity will be the cheapest form of energy, so we should try to electrify all processes that use fossil fuels,” Chiang said.
Chiang recently launched three latest climate corporations. He co-founded Propel Aero, which is developing an engine to satisfy the needs of electrical aircraft and may be used to affect ships and trains. The company recently received $1.1 million from the federal research program ARPA-E. He can also be working on a startup that extracts lithium from hard rock and one other in geological hydrogen, which might be an enormous source of carbon-free energy. “Geological hydrogen is going to go through a big hype cycle, but in some ways it deserves it because there is this tantalizing possibility that it will be a new primary energy source,” Chiang said.
Lately, Chiang has been considering quite a bit about critical minerals – the mines from which they’re extracted and the smelters that heat the ore to high temperatures to extract metals. They are anything but environmentally friendly. “Those smelters are what caused all the acid rain,” he said, laughing. “What could be done without needing a smelter? I had an idea that I will now pass on to one of my new graduate students.”
Decarbonization continues to be in its infancy, especially in areas like industry and mining, and the impact of developing latest technologies might be huge. “Decarbonization means you get permission to reinvent technologies and industries that have been around for 100, in some cases 200 years. How often do you get that opportunity?” Chiang said. “It’s a great time to be on the solutions side of things.”
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