NJIT Alum's Company Dazzles Earth, Converts CO2 to Diamonds
By Deric Raymond and Perla Alay
Cut, color, clarity and carat are the four Cs of the diamond industry. Aether, a new company producing lab-grown diamonds, is pushing to add one more — carbon origin.
As the demand for sustainable and ethically sourced products continues to rise, the market for lab-grown diamonds has also grown. While Aether is one of several companies producing lab-grown diamonds, they are the leader in sustainability. Aether is the first carbon negative diamond company, a deeply personal goal for Aether’s chief technology officer and NJIT alumnus Anthony Ippolito.
Ippolito wanted to change the world as an undergraduate student studying chemical engineering, though it wasn’t his first stint at a college education. Enrolling at NJIT at 36, it was his second go around at academia after first pursuing a career in IT.
“I really wanted to get involved in the climate fight — that's what brought me back to study chemical engineering,” Ippolito said.
Building a Foundation
He dove into the books and fondly remembers the professors who helped him shape his new worldview — Dr. Barat, Dr. Bilgili and others. And while these professors have provided the engineering contrivance to pull diamonds from thin air, Ippolito reveres the clubs and groups he joined that formed long-lasting connections, both personally and professionally. Chief among these was the NJIT chapter of the American Institute for Chemical Engineers (AIChE). He would become president of the chapter.
These connections would one day become the foundation of Aether. But first, Ippolito was looking to jump into high-impact work right after school. He accepted a job at Axens North America as a process engineer. He was drawn in by the multinational chemical company because of their work in alternative technologies, like converting waste and vegetable oils into more environmentally-friendly biodiesel.
While at Axens, he began work on a device that converts carbon monoxide and dioxide into methane — methanation. Methane is used everywhere: heating fuel as the main component in natural gas, making tires for your car, as a prominent source of hydrogen, in plastics and so on. Developing a process where humans can extract it from the air, and not the ground, provides benefits to both the environmental and social ecosystems.
Methane is also the primary ingredient to make a lab-grown diamond.
A change in the political and corporate atmospheres had taken Ippolito’s professional ambitions slightly adrift, and he found himself again searching for purpose. The relationships he built at NJIT were about to provide some clarity.
“Is This a Crazy Idea?”
While Ippolito was serving as president of NJIT’s AIChE chapter, Jim Shearman was his vice president and the two would maintain their friendship beyond college. In catching up from time to time, Ippolito mentioned this new methanation process. Jim would play professional matchmaker as his brother, Ryan Shearman, was a serial entrepreneur and inventor.
Ryan is now the CEO of Aether, and while it seems that he struck gold with Aether, it was Ippolito who provided the technical expertise, and it was all thanks to his prodigious relationship-building at NJIT. Ryan had formed the idea of Aether on the premise of creating a diamond from air and was laying the groundwork to develop a company with sustainability at the forefront, but he wasn’t exactly sure of the science.
“Ryan had asked Jim ‘Is this a crazy idea, could this work?’ and Jim said ‘I have the perfect person for you,’” recalled Ippolito. While he began as only part time at the startup, Ippolito would soon be grinding 18-hour days with the company leading their technical processes.
Raining Carbon
Methane is a hydrocarbon: a molecule consisting of hydrogen and carbon atoms. In the case of methane, it’s one carbon and four hydrogen atoms (CH4). Diamonds are carbon atoms arranged in a highly ordered form — a crystal structure with symmetrical patterns that repeat along all three dimensions.
While other forms of solid carbon exist — graphene and coal, for instance — it is the intense heat and pressure that naturally form a diamond from carbon. Aether is able to grow a diamond through a different type of process.
The technology to grow diamonds without intense pressure was initially developed in the 1980s via a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactor. A diamond seed — a single diamond slice about as thick as a strand of hair — is placed in the reactor. It acts as the blank on which a diamond grows. The reactor, which operates in a near-vacuum, takes hydrogen and superheats it with microwaves creating a plasma lightning field in the reactor.
It more or less worked the first try.
A methane stream is introduced into the reactor and begins to react with the plasma. The hydrogen atoms in the methane disassociate, and the remaining carbon is left to rain down on the seed, growing the diamond micrometers at a time. However, there is no instruction manual to operate the reactor, nor is there a blueprint to create a diamond. Ippolito relied heavily on his earlier professional experience, and the material sciences learned studying chemical engineering, to forge forward.
It took a little over a year from when Ippolito came on board to when Aether produced its first diamond.
“It more or less worked the first try,” said Ippolito. “It was more like, ‘We got something that looked like a diamond.’ We didn’t get a certified, on-color, perfect diamond. But the fact that it even looked like a diamond was amazing.”
Modifying the alchemy here and there are trade secrets in the diamond industry, which is exactly where Aether finds themselves now — on 47th Street and Fifth Avenue, Manhattan’s Diamond District. Though Aether has scaled up since creating its first diamond, they are still very much a boutique distributor, and the move to the Diamond District wasn’t a confident declaration, but rather one of pragmatism. Setting themselves up in the diamond district allows for easy access to jewelry resources beyond creating the diamond. Aether needed experienced professionals that set gemstones, create waxes and molds, form casts and so on.
And though other lab-grown diamond companies exist, Aether’s value proposition of sustainability and responsibility is greater than just the quality of their diamond.
Love Your Planet (And Its People)
Compared to lab-grown diamonds, mined diamonds — and any other mined mineral resource — can cause irreversible damage to the environment.
According to Aether, on average, for every one carat that is mined from the ground, up to 250 tons of earth are removed, 127 gallons of freshwater are used, billions of gallons of water are contaminated with acid mine runoff, 143 pounds of air pollution are emitted and countless gallons of fossil fuels are consumed. Growing diamonds in a lab alleviates many of these issues, in addition to reported human rights abuses associated with mined diamonds.
Aether takes sustainability a step further. While most lab-grown diamond companies are realizing the environmental gains made from not displacing tons of earth, Aether’s carbon neutral supply chain and methane fuel generation is actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Aether estimates that its diamond production avoids putting out nearly 20 metric tons of CO2 per carat it produces.
Aether’s methanation process sources the CO2 from direct air capture (DAC), and the company was designed from the ground up to be carbon negative. Every step in their supply chain is routinely scrutinized to identify process improvements, new technology advancements and opportunities to further reduce their carbon footprint. Their dedication to sustainability and social responsibility sets them apart and demonstrates their commitment to creating not just a beautiful and durable product, but a positive change in the world.
Aether is the first carbon negative diamond company
Ippolito has reason to be excited and passionate about the prospects of Aether growing and making a difference — the company just completed an $18 million Series A funding round led by global problem-solving organization, Helena.
And as he sits in NJIT’s Highlander Pub recollecting stories and recognizing professors on his walk through campus, his advice to students is simple, timeless and universal: build a strong network that aligns with your goals, connects you with others, advocates for you, provides mentorship and ultimately supports you.
“Start your network now. Thursday night drinking is Thursday night drinking but it’s also networking,” he laughed. “It really needs to start now and you need to keep up with those people — that’s what it’s about." In the immortal words of Dr. Angelo Perna, “You don't have to know everything, you just have to know who to call.”
