Hi HN! This is George, Lucas, and Jona from Rise Reforming ( https://www.rise-reforming.com/ ). We’re developing a process to convert gas produced at landfills, farms, and wastewater plants (“biogas”) into higher value chemicals. Our technology is modular, designed to be deployed and operated on-site. Think of us as a chemical project developer; we sit between biogas producers (suppliers) and chemical end users (customers). We pay biogas producers for their gas and we make money from selling our chemicals. We're starting with dimethyl ether (DME) as our beachhead chemical because of its high-margin use case in the cosmetics industry and ultimately targeting methanol – a versatile and widely used industrial chemical. Being in a two sided market allows us to target two large problems. (1) On the chemical side: The multi-trillion dollar U.S. chemical and fuel industries are vulnerable to geopolitical conflicts and climate-driven natural disasters.
The
Iran war has caused global methanol prices to skyrocket – even in
the
U.S., a net exporter of methanol. ( https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/
news
-research/latest-
news
...
the
US). In 2021, Winter Storm Uri wiped out 60% of U.S. organic chemicals production for at least a month ( https://www.dallasfed.org/research/swe/2021/swe2102/swe2102c... ).
The
problem? Centralized production and fossil-fuel dependence.
The
solution isn't unknown; decentralized, fossil-free production could insulate supply chains from
the
se shocks. But distributed green chemical production has yet to become cost-competitive with
the
status quo. Unlocking it requires
the
right feedstock paired with
the
right process and strategy. Also,
the
chemical industry’s reliance on fossil fuels makes it responsible for 5-6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. About 40% of
the
industry’s well-to-gate emissions come from just
the
extraction, processing, and transportation of
the
se fossil fuels ( https://rmi.org/resources/chemistry-in-transition-charting-s... ). (2) Biogas is an ideal feedstock to address Problem 1. It is decentralized, plentiful, and a large part of it is not properly utilized. Biogas is a mixture of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), produced as a result of anaerobic digestion at landfills, farms, and wastewater plants, and can be used as a raw material in chemical manufacturing.
The
U.S. produces around 780 billion cubic feet of biogas a year – if we converted all that biogas into methanol, that’s about $20 billion a year. Currently, about 60% of this biogas is ei
the
r burned for power/heat (low-margin and unreliable) or flared altoge
the
r.
The
rest is used in
the
highly subsidized renewable natural gas (RNG) market ( https://americanbiogascouncil.org/abcs-data-digest-lite-july... ).
The
result: many biogas producers leave substantial revenue on
the
table and experience huge operational headaches. Our modular technology takes in biogas, electricity, and water as inputs. Co-location with biogas producers allows us to tap into
the
ir existing infrastructure and speeds up permitting vs a greenfield project. Our 3 step process is outlined below: Step 1: We clean
the
biogas of contaminants. That means running
the
gas over specialized adsorbents that trap any nasty sulfur-containing and silicon-containing compounds we don’t want in our process. Step 2: We reform that biogas into an intermediate gas called syngas through
the
bi-reforming process, which combines
the
novel dry methane reforming reaction with
the
legacy steam methane reforming reaction. Syngas is a versatile combination of H2 and CO and is
the
building block for many chemicals, allowing us to be a platform company. Step 3: Lastly, we upgrade that syngas into our end chemicals. We do this step using conventional catalysts and operating conditions.
The
modular approach paired with our patent-pending integrated process makes our solution one of
the
cheapest ways of making green chemicals. Where are we today? We’ve completed our proof-of-concept in
the
lab and just broke ground on our pilot plant at a Chicagoland wastewater plant that currently flares all of its biogas. We will convert that wasted biogas into methanol. Estimated commissioning is Q1 2027. We all met at
the
University of Chicago studying Molecular Engineering and started
the
company back in June 2024. Rise Reforming’s first iteration came after attending a talk from an Argonne National Laboratory researcher on low-carbon fuels. In that seminar, we heard about a reaction called “dry reforming” wherein one can react CH4 with CO2, effectively eliminating both pollutants and making useful syngas (CO + H2). We realized that this reaction could enable cheaper decarbonization of chemicals than
the
legacy electrolysis pathway and started to build a technoeconomic analysis. George has a background in energy generation, storage, and carbon capture. He was an early employee at Highland Electric Fleets (now a unicorn) and later worked at Nexamp, GenH, and Mantel Capture – researching various battery chemistries, building a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) modular hydropower system, and helping prove a novel point-source capture prototype. He also conducted battery research at UChicago's Patel Lab and Rowan Group, co-authoring two papers. Lucas led
the
design, procurement, construction, and operation of Rise Reforming’s bench-scale reforming unit with controls that operated successfully for over 1800+ continuous hours. Prior to Rise, he worked at Avangrid (Iberdrola Group) with
the
offshore wind project services team and did transmutation research of spent nuclear fuel at Argonne National Laboratory. Jona also studied Molecular Engineering at
the
University of Chicago. He grew up around
the
marine industry and brings deep knowledge of
the
space to
the
team. While at UChicago, he conducted research in
the
Patel Lab on batteries and sustainable polymer applications and built novel equipment for
the
lab, including a high-throughput cyclic voltammetry battery performance testing device. Our advisory board has 220+ combined years in aerosols, permitting/safety, low-carbon fuels, catalysts, scale-up, automated modular chemical plants, and wastewater treatment. Here’s our launch video if you want to put faces to
the
names: https://youtu.be/Bx_ASPapxlQ?si=PAlqvd1eUhW8kjJm . We’d appreciate any feedback, questions, or advice. Thank you for reading! George, Lucas, and Jona
Hey HN! I wanted to share this OSS project I've been working on. It's called Yap and its a small menu-bar app for macOS that does voice to text for any input. You'll set a hotkey, press it, talk, press it again, and the text gets pasted into whatever field you were in. Everything runs locally and never leaves your computer. Fully OSS and MIT licensed. With macOS 26, Apple recently added two new APIs, SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber, that do streaming on-device speech to text using models the OS ships and manages. So the app ships no model of its own and loads nothing before the first word. A recent benchmark put Apple's model slightly ahead of Whisper Small on accuracy and about 3x faster (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894752 ). On Mac, there's really no need anymore to download models or pay for expensive APIs. A lot of existing dictation tools do one of a few things I wanted to avoid with this OSS project. They either: - cost money (for something that's literally built into the OS) - bundle memory-intensive models (e.g. Whisper or Parakeet) - webapps wrapped in Electron - Intel macs straight up don't work - closed source - use third-party APIs that will have access to all your transcripts It's around 3,000 lines of native Swift in a 4 MB app and idles near 60 MB of memory. Audio comes off AVAudioEngine into SpeechAnalyzer with volatile results turned on for the live preview, history is stored in SwiftData. There's no network code in it at all. Repo and a demo available here: https://github.com/FrigadeHQ/yap Happy to answer questions and would love to hear any feature requests!
NVIDIA and 36 other organizations have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance to develop and share open technologies, techniques, and tools for securing software and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The 37-member group spans cloud, security, enterprise software, and AI companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, and the Linux
Dysphoria, an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet line tracked by CNCERT and XLab, has adopted blockchain-based name services and infected-device relays after a March law-enforcement operation against JackSkid infrastructure. The researchers say the design makes the botnet harder to disrupt. CNCERT, China's national computer emergency response team, and XLab, the threat-intelligence lab of Chinese
Public exploit details released on July 27 show how an unauthenticated request can reach PHP's eval() function inside vBulletin and execute code on an unpatched forum server. The attack requires no account, administrative access, or interaction from another user. SSD Secure Disclosure lists vBulletin 6.2.1 and earlier, and 6.1.6 and earlier, as affected, but does not give a lower version
Monday starts with the usual promise that everything is under control. Then the logs wake up. This week, trusted tools crossed lines, old flaws found new work, exposed systems stayed exposed, and attackers kept hiding inside normal-looking services. Nothing looked strange at first. That helped. That is the mood. Here is the full recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Says Its AI Agent Went Rogue
