This once dreamed-of set of solutions, pursued by petrochemical plants and other emitters as they look to cut emissions, suddenly looks a lot more costly. First, there's the capture itself-an energy-intensive process requiring specialized equipment. Next, there's getting it to where it needs to go and stashing it away-hazards depending on where the plant happens to be.

"When it comes to a petrochemical plant, a lot of them want to do carbon capture and sequestration," said Marissa Beatty, founder and CEO of Turnover Labs. "They haven't figured out how they're going to move massive quantities of this stuff off site and store it underground."

Beatty is proposing an alternative: reuse captured waste carbon dioxide on site by converting it into a building block used to make myriad chemical compounds. "We want to make as much use of that as possible," she told TechCrunch.

Turnover Labs was actually a byproduct of Beatty's dissertation work trying to make electrolyzers last longer; more precisely, electrolyzers are systems that use electricity as the medium to drive a variety of chemical reactions. As she was finishing her PhD, Beatty started looking for opportunities to take the work with her to her next endeavor.

It was something that I wasn't really ready to abandon. I took it around to a bunch of different places to see if other electrolyzer startups might want it, she said. They didn't. "A bunch of my friends were doing startups as well, and I was like, should we do this?"

She built on that idea during a fellowship at Activate, a nonprofit that supports early-stage deep tech companies. "I spent a year just interviewing people all over. I had a million different ideas for how to take my technology, bring it to market," Beatty said. "I really wanted to go the industrial route for it. And I just arrived over and over again at CO2.".

Electrolyzers can convert carbon dioxide into all sorts of different chemicals, but realistically it's the co-gases that really foul things up. Filtering out enough of them to get pure CO2 is an expensive proposition. Beatty figured her technology might change how the electrolyzers behave in the presence of compounds that otherwise degrade the catalysts that help speed along reactions. They tend to break off and float away.

If catalysts were cheap, it wouldn't matter-they'd just be replaced. But they often cost real money, being a platinum or silver metal. Turnover Labs holds the catalysts more tightly to an electrode, where the chemical reactions take place in an electrolyzer. That, along with some other specific chemistry and software, allows it to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, using that to its own advantage as an ingredient in a series of petrochemical reactions, while ignoring everything else in the waste stream.

The startup recently raised a $1.4 million pre-seed round led by GC Ventures and Pace Ventures, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Gigascale Capital, Impact Science Ventures, and Sandy Spring Climate Partners. Beatty said the funding will help hire a few more people as the company simulates and tests what will happen when its electrolyzer technology encounters the sorts of gas streams coming out of real-world petrochemical plants.

We're working with some partners right now to basically just break our electrolyzer a bunch," she said. "See what breaks, see what doesn't break, and then basically iterate until we have something really, really, really strong.".