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Two Canadian entrepreneurs stymied by start-up obstacles have created a nonprofit incubator to help emerging green technology companies facing similar challenges.
On April 20, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded and released millions of liters of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The explosion killed 11 crew members on the drilling platform, and the resulting spill devastated the gulf’s saltwater and shoreline habitats for fish, birds, sea turtles, and marine mammals.
At the time, Morgan Lehtinen was a 15-year-old high school student in Newmarket, Ontario, 1,200 miles (almost 2,000 km) away. The shocking TV images of the far-off disaster’s damage appalled her — but they also motivated her to do something to prevent or reverse the consequences of humanity’s maltreatment of the environment. She figured science was the answer.
By 2020, Morgan was working on a Ph.D. in polymer chemistry and material science at Queen’s University in Kingston and had founded Micellotech, a company developing a new filtration technology to separate the constituents of industrial effluents for reuse or safe disposal.
Despite support from the limited chemical engineering community at the university and in the city, Morgan couldn’t grow her business. She needed millions of dollars and physical space to build the infrastructure that would allow her to prove that her invention was commercially viable. Both were in short supply in Kingston.
Meanwhile, Kingston native Sebastian Alamillo-Falkenberg, a student at the University of Waterloo, was in a similar situation. He’d developed a novel grid-scale battery technology that used saltwater to store energy. He, too, wanted to commercialize his invention but was encountering the same early-business hurdles that had thwarted Morgan.
RXN HUB is an ‘enabler,' a place where up to 16 chemtech companies at a time will be able to scale their clean technologies while receiving critical support services from the organization’s technology development team and its 100-plus partners around the world, including Deloitte, KPM, and GreenCentre Canada.
After returning to Kingston to work for Kingston Process Metallurgy (KPM), Sebastian launched KPM Accelerate, a company program that provided technical validation for new chemistry-related inventions. In October 2020, the program welcomed a new client: Morgan, whose business struggles immediately resonated with Sebastian.
After comparing notes on their respective frustrations, the pair decided to change course — and they did it in a big way. Within three years, they said goodbye to their businesses, sold off their respective intellectual property, and helped launch RXN HUB, a Kingston-based nonprofit that supports midstage companies developing chemical technologies that help reduce air, water, and soil pollution. The organization offers the technical services, physical space, and business resources Morgan and Sebastian wish they’d had when they were trying to get their own companies off the ground.
RXN — pronounced “reaction” — HUB took years to get where it is today. In 2016, the City of Kingston, Kingston Process Metallurgy, GreenCentre Canada, and a handful of other partners began exploring the idea of establishing a place in the city where promising sustainable tech companies could grow. The COVID-19 pandemic put those discussions on hold, but they picked up again in 2021 and moved forward quickly. Sixteen founding partners, including KPM Accerelate — came together to make RXN HUB operational, with the City of Kingston directly contributing $3 million. Sebastian led that effort and was tapped by the city to lead the project as the founding executive director. Morgan was recruited in January 2023 as director of commercialization to design RXN HUB’s labs and help Sebastian clear government due diligence processes.
The HUB’s home is a former Alcan rolled-aluminum plant in central Kingston, which the Canadian HVAC giant Modern Niagara purchased in 2020 and retrofitted to near-net-zero standards — a $70-million undertaking. The 220,000-square-foot plant includes offices, labs, a machine shop, and several cavernous workrooms, including “piloting spaces” and a large manufacturing bay. The workspaces are all specialized enough to accommodate the equipment (giant vats, pipelines for liquids and gases, furnaces, and other technical infrastructure) that fledgling companies will need to test and fine-tune their products so they’re ready for commercial-scale deployment to the marketplace. Even better, there’s ample vacant industrial land on the property where companies that take off can build even larger chemtech manufacturing facilities.
Potential tenants include a firm working on a novel type of carbon capture and sequestration technology, a company developing a way to incorporate graphite into batteries, and an outfit using pyrolysis — high-temperature combustion in the absence of oxygen — to convert biowaste into fertilizers.
Morgan calls RXN HUB an “enabler,” a place where up to 16 chemtech companies at a time will be able to scale their clean technologies while receiving critical support services from the organization’s technology development team and its 100-plus partners around the world, including Deloitte, KPM, and GreenCentre Canada.
“We have lab space, piloting space, and manufacturing space where you can take a technology and get it from 10 liters to 100 liters to 1,000 liters to 10,000 liters of production and beyond,” says Morgan, who’s now RXN HUB’s executive director. “We’ll help manage the boring stuff so the company can focus on doing their science and selling their eventual product.”
Construction at RXN HUB’s gigantic manufacturing spaces is nearing completion, and Morgan and Sebastian are negotiating with several potential tenants. They predict these companies will not only breathe new economic life into Kingston by creating up to 400 new jobs within five years, but also attract international investment that will establish the city as a place where sustainable chemtech can flourish.
They can’t yet name names, but Sebastian, who is now RXN HUB’s director of strategic development, says the potential tenants include a firm working on a novel type of carbon capture and sequestration technology, a company developing a way to incorporate graphite into batteries, and an outfit using pyrolysis — high-temperature combustion in the absence of oxygen — to convert biowaste into fertilizers. Other tenants may include a firm that recycles rare-earth elements from existing products for reuse in batteries and wind turbines and a biomanufacturing company using microbes to make sustainable dyes for cosmetics.
“After trying and failing to scale my own startup in 2018, I know how hard it is on founders and their teams to bring tech to market without the right resources available,” says Sebastian. “This organization and its facility are the things I wish I’d had. To me, this represents the centralization of the best resources from the Canadian startup ecosystem, delivered through a system designed by founders, for founders.”
