Graphene has been called a wonder material for more than 20 years, with potential uses in everything from longer-lasting batteries and corrosion-resistant coatings to lighter aircraft components, stronger concrete, and more durable industrial materials. The harder problem has been making enough high-quality graphene, consistently and economically, to turn that promise into a business.
HydroGraph CEO Kjirstin Breure believes her company has an answer, and she’s helping build much of its next chapter in Texas.
Breure joined HydroGraph as its first employee and COO and soon went back to school for a master’s in materials science after becoming fascinated by graphene. She ultimately became CEO, in 2024.
Now based in Austin, Breure is leading HydroGraph through the transition from promising technology to commercial-scale production and overseeing a redomicile from Toronto to the Lone Star State. We talked recently about what makes its approach to graphene different, why commercialization has taken so long, and what Breure has learned growing into the CEO role. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
I like to start with one of the first decisions we make as young people, where you went to college, what you majored in. What was your grand plan, if you had one?
That was a challenging decision for me, because I wanted to study everything. The first three years I studied biology and planned to be a doctor. By the end of university, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. Now I have a master’s in materials science and engineering. So, basically, I just always loved learning. But I loved the fact that with science, there’s always more to learn. That’s what kept my attention.
How did you get started with HydroGraph, the company you lead now?
After college, I was working with different tech startups in Vancouver. That’s kind of where life led me. It was there that I got an introduction to the founder of HydroGraph and started as COO and the first employee in 2020. After that, I went back to school and did my master’s in materials science, because I became so enamored with graphene.
Graphene’s one of those things we’ve heard about for a long time—a little like we used to always hear about AI. Now AI is really here. Has graphene’s time arrived too?
Graphene was first isolated in 2004, but if you look at the discovery of new materials, like silicon or carbon fiber, it usually takes decades, sometimes 50 or 60 years, until you see the application. I’m not suggesting it’s going to be 50 years for graphene, but commercializing new materials does take longer than people think. And the bigger issue we’ve faced in the past decade, and even now, is that there’s not a lot of high-quality graphene being sold in the market, which is certainly holding back adoption.
Let’s talk about that. The innovation here is the ability to produce high-quality graphene. How did that come about?
Graphene is one atomic layer of carbon atoms. Graphite is billions and billions of those layers stacked together, but the single layer—graphene—doesn’t really exist in the natural world. We create it synthetically. Most companies start with graphite as a feedstock and exfoliate it chemically or mechanically. Imagine graphite is a deck of cards, but the cards are sticky. They’re really stuck together. It’s hard to get one card off the right way without ripping it, or without picking up impurities, because graphite is mined from the ground. What’s being sold is closer to fine graphite powder than to real graphene.
The other dominant method, apart from HydroGraph, is microwave plasma, another synthetic process. But cracking methane is very different from our detonation of acetylene. Near that localized heat source in the microwave plasma process, you do get some graphene, but you also get carbon black and other carbon derivatives. The structure, the morphology, a lot of the traits of those graphenes are just very different, and they tend not to perform as well.
What HydroGraph does is start with acetylene, C2H2, plus O2, oxygen. We pump those gases into a steel chamber and ignite them with a spark from an electrode. It’s the temperature, the high-purity gases, and the geometry of our design that give us a completely different graphene, one we believe is genuine, because we’re forcing those carbon molecules into a suspended state that isn’t natural.
You went from COO to CEO quickly. When did you first consider that running a company might be something you’d enjoy?
On some level it’s always been appealing. Many of us grow up thinking, “What if I become a CEO?” At that point, I just really loved the technology and thought I could add a lot of value. And you can ask for any title you want when you’re employee number one—so take that COO title with a grain of salt. But I helped grow the company, moved to president when we listed on the CSE [Canadian Securities Exchange], and was very pleased to finally take the CEO role just over two years ago.
I became a balance between business and science. If you had to summarize what I’ve done well, it’s that I bridged the two.
I love science and technology, and I always loved communicating it. Even in more internal roles as COO or president, I was the one making public appearances and doing conferences, connecting with investors. I was the public face, because I understood the science well. And building the company turned out to be just as satisfying as the science itself. So I became a balance between business and science. If you had to summarize what I’ve done well, it’s that I bridged the two.
How much of your time is spent outwardly focused? You’re publicly traded on the Canadian exchange, you have investors, and there’s still fundraising involved. What’s the split between external and internal?
Depending on the week, it’s about half and half. Lots of interviews, connecting with shareholders, planning our redomicile, and moving toward a larger national exchange listing. And there’s a lot of work internally on scaling up production and continued research. It’s all very satisfying, but it is challenging to manage as a public-facing CEO.
Tell us about the redomicile. That’s become popular these days.
We’ve been very lucky to build a strong reputation. We work with an innovation hub called the GEIC [Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre] in Manchester, where graphene was discovered, and it was at that innovation center that we were introduced to the US Army and Navy. Word about HydroGraph, and about graphene more generally, has got the attention of the federal government in the US, and we’re confident we’ll have some federal support. But it was made abundantly clear to us by the military that we must become a US company for that to happen.
We’re thrilled to have that interest, but it’s challenging to straddle two countries. We were only a Canadian company because the founder was Canadian, and I am too, but we were always a US operating company. When you’re pursuing government grants and scaling and growing, it’s hard to do both. Becoming US-based was a natural progression.
And why Texas?
Apart from my love of Texas, it’s the perfect place for us. Austin is a fantastic engineering talent pool, and it’s very diverse. There’s access to aerospace, defense, and automotive industries, and it’s driving distance to a huge amount of acetylene, our primary feedstock. Texas has the hydrocarbons and the talent pool that come with a core part of our industry. You could say we’re oil and gas adjacent in that sense. But then with materials, having our hub and corporate headquarters in Austin, I find that a perfect balance.
What have you learned about working with a highly technical workforce? You’re out in the public markets telling the world what you’re going to deliver, and you’ve got these mad scientists in the back trying to deliver it. How do you balance that?
Every small company struggles with scaling from a heavy research basis to commercialization. I think we’ve done it pretty successfully. The UK team is focused on commercial research applications, while the US team is always going to be looking at new graphenes, new ways of producing, new ways of processing what we produce. It is sometimes challenging with the pure scientists to move them away from “Let’s look at that because it’s interesting,” and toward “Let’s look at this because there’s a new revenue opportunity,” or because there’s some other rationale for where we put our attention.
What do you have to accomplish in the next 12 months to reach an inflection point toward commercialization?
We’re expecting our first commercial contracts this year, with the biggest ramp-up next year. We also expect to issue an update on our relationship with the federal government, or more accurately with the military. And then the obvious one is completing the redomicile and the move to a larger exchange listing. It goes without saying, we’re also opening the production facility we’re about to break ground on in Bellville [about an hour west of Houston], in combination with Western Gas. That’s a lot of milestones. This is a huge year for HydroGraph.
Are you relocating personally?
I’m already in Austin. I’ve been here just over two years, since two months after I took the CEO role. I knew this is what I wanted. The Bellville team will be smaller. That’s pure production, a large warehouse filled with our reactors. But the Austin team is growing rapidly. We’ll probably double our workforce here over the next 12 months.
I’m from Alberta, which is the Texas of Canada, so I’m very used to oil and cowboy country. . . . What I’ve loved is how business-friendly it is.
Since we’re a Texas-based publication, what have you liked and disliked about Austin? Some people love it. Some people go back where they came from.
I’m from Alberta, which is the Texas of Canada, so I’m very used to oil and cowboy country. I do struggle with the heat as a Canadian. That’s a slight negative. But what I’ve loved is how business-friendly it is. It’s so easy to work here and move quickly, and I greatly appreciate that. On a personal level, I find Texans so friendly and so open. Coming from Canada, that was huge. I’ve lived in a lot of different places. This is probably the best experience I’ve had.
I’m curious about the hot topic of the day, or really the past few years, which is AI. Has that infiltrated your job technically, or how you lead?
We all use AI daily, whether it’s for Excel models or helping draft documents. That’s pretty standard across most industries. The challenge, and where I’d like to go with materials, is having AI predict material interactions at a fundamental level, the way we do with drug discovery. We’re not quite there, because graphene is such a novel material. We’re still often surprised by the results we get in the lab. But as we grow our data sets, which is critical to getting a result that makes sense, I think we’ll be there within the next decade. Today, if we try that with AI models, a lot of the results aren’t completely accurate. It’s a very interesting space, and I’m excited to see where it goes.
You talked about learning. What have you done to learn the CEO role?
Always learning. Reading a lot of books, learning from those around me. I feel very privileged to be here, and I have a fantastic team and a fantastic board. As a leader, the balance is being confident about what you want for your strategy but open enough to know what you don’t know and where to lean on your team or your board. I try not to have an ego in this role, and that’s important, especially at a scientific company. We’re not very hierarchical. It’s really about doing the right thing for the team and the business. It shouldn’t be about satisfying your ego.