Member Profile: Octet Scientific, Inc.
Company Name: Octet Scientific, Inc.
City: Cleveland, OH (MidTown)
Industry: Energy Storage (Batteries)
What We Do:
We make chemicals that enable safe, cheap, and sustainable Zinc-based batteries to compete with unsafe and unsustainable lithium and lead-based legacy technologies.
What’s a Trend You’re Seeing/Prediction for the Future:
We don’t really recycle lithium-ion batteries. It’s technically possible, but difficult (expensive) and less than 5% are recycled currently in the US. We’re moving to renewable energy and electric vehicles, and that’s great, but soon all the lithium batteries powering these industries will be repurposed, spent, and choking landfills with volatile waste. Particularly for grid-scale energy storage, where huge amounts of battery storage will be required, if we don’t establish an alternative to lithium soon we will be left to clean up a dangerous mess in the decades to come.
A Problem/Challenge We Are Working To Solve:
That one! The problem that lithium-ion batteries are unsustainable. We believe that batteries based on Zinc can answer a lot of these issues because Zinc is plentiful, cheap, safe for the environment and the body, easily recyclable, and can perform at levels to compete with lithium, but it needs help. Zinc batteries suffer from a few classic problems during recharging. It likes to grow in weird shapes and wastes some energy splitting water into hydrogen gas. These two problems are why this ideal energy metal has been the king of non-rechargeable batteries for a century (it’s what in your AA, AAA, C, D, and 9-Volt batteries at home), but it is only starting to break into rechargeable applications. We’re trying to solve these recharging problems by creating chemicals that act as a mediator to prevent those unwanted reactions, helping the Zinc to behave during recharge and become a viable alternative to lithium-ion.
Your Company/Organization's Slogan:
We don’t have an official slogan, but Octet’s mission is “To advance the world’s sustainable energy future through new organic chemical development.”
Why is Ohio is a great place to do business?
Ohio makes things. It gets its hands dirty. It has its eyes on the sky, but its feet firmly planted on the ground. Here in North East Ohio, this is reflected in our support systems like Magnet (our manufacturing themed incubator in Cleveland), BRITE (our energy themed incubator in Warren), and the Innovation Fund at LCCC, through whom the State has given Octet critical financial support. They combine with Ohio’s manufacturing tradition to create an ideal place for a business like ours. So while we’re not the ones raising nine figures in CA to build the batteries of the future, we are the ones quietly making the critical components that will get their technologies over the finish line. I believe that Ohio understands the value in work like ours, and the local ecosystem aligns really well to help us with our goals.