Investing in Tech That's Worth the Wait

But consider this: every day, US companies tease apart chemicals in billions of reactions to make food and beverages, drugs, and fuel. In fact, this process is so common in industrial settings that it uses as much energy as all US cars and trucks combined. "It represents 12 percent of all US energy consumption," says Shreya Dave, cofounder of the year-old startup Via Separations. That's largely because separation technology relies largely on a wasteful and time-consuming procedure that's hardly changed in 100 years: using heat to boil and condense chemicals into a pure form. Filtering liquids with a membrane is more efficient, but it's difficult to find one stable enough to avoid reacting with the chemicals it's supposed to filter, or fine enough to filter nanoparticles.