Person • Founder • Climate Tech
Ryan DuChanois
He makes hydrogen peroxide out of air and water. The chemical industry is built on the opposite idea.
The scientist who stopped writing about the future. Ryan DuChanois, Houston.
He makes hydrogen peroxide out of air and water. The chemical industry is built on the opposite idea.
Somewhere in Houston there is a box that breathes in air and water and exhales a chemical worth shipping by the tanker.
The chemical you reach for to clean a cut - hydrogen peroxide - is normally born in a giant plant, fed carbon-heavy inputs, then trucked hundreds of miles to wherever it is needed. Ryan DuChanois looked at that arrangement and decided it was backwards. Solidec, the company he co-founded and runs, builds modular reactors that produce the chemical on the spot using nothing but air, water, and electricity.
No centralized plant. No long-haul logistics. No carbon-heavy feedstock. The pitch fits on a napkin, which is exactly why it is hard to forget.
Capturing yesterday's emissions and generating tomorrow's fuels.
Three ingredients in. One clean molecule out.
The same platform can produce hydrogen peroxide, formic acid, acetic acid, and ethylene - with no post-processing steps required. The reactor traces back to Professor Haotian Wang's lab at Rice University, where DuChanois did his postdoctoral training before the company spun out in 2024.
Most people with a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, a Yale PhD, and thousands of citations stay in the academy. The incentives all point that way: more papers, more grants, more refinement of the idea. DuChanois did the opposite. He took the membrane science he had spent years publishing and pointed it at a factory instead of a journal.
His academic specialty was deceptively narrow - membranes that let one molecule through while blocking nearly identical ones, the kind of selectivity that desalination and metal recovery depend on. That obsession with separating molecules at the smallest scale is the intellectual seed of Solidec: a reactor that coaxes specific chemicals out of air and water and lets nothing else through.
Before Houston there was Cambridge, where he studied sustainability as a Gates Scholar, and before that the NSF fellowship that funds the country's promising young researchers. The throughline is not a job title. It is a refusal to let good science sit unbuilt.
"Traditionally, hydrogen peroxide is produced in centralized, energy-intensive facilities using carbon-intensive inputs, then transported long distances, resulting in a significant carbon footprint. Solidec's modular reactor produces clean chemicals like hydrogen peroxide on-site, in fewer steps, and with less energy - slashing emissions, supply-chain risk, and cost."
The only commercial producer of separated light and heavy rare earth oxides outside China agreed to pilot Solidec's autonomous, on-site generators. A startup's reactor, inside one of the most strategically watched supply chains on Earth.
The pre-seed drew Plug and Play Ventures, Ecosphere Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Safar Partners, Echo River Capital, and Semilla Climate Capital. Oversubscribed, which is investor-speak for "we wanted more in."
A lab demo and a deployable product are separated by a brutal stretch of engineering.
In a single year the Solidec team pushed the reactor's production capacity up 750 times from where it started. That number is the whole game in hardware climate tech - the graveyard is full of elegant lab results that never survived the jump to something a customer could actually run.
DuChanois talks less like a chemist and more like an operator now: pilot deployments, customer-specific applications, supply-chain risk, unit cost. The science is settled enough. The question that consumes him is whether the box can be made, shipped, and trusted at the scale the climate math demands.