Priyanka Bakaya wants to increase our supply of oil without increased drilling.

Her solution? One word – plastics.

The hydrocarbon-laden material is the target for PK Clean, which has won nearly $50,000 in business plan competitions for the company’s method of converting plastic waste into oil and gas.

The company won Best Energy Team at the Rice Business Plan Competition, dubbed the “Super Bowl” of business plan competitions by Fortune magazine. PK Clean came in third overall for the sprawling competition, which awarded over $1.3 million in cash and investment prizes last month. PK Clean also won the Non-Renewables category of the MIT Clean Energy Prize.

Bakaya, an MIT Sloan MBA 2011 candidate, founded PK Clean, and was later joined by Arjun Gupta, a master’s candidate in the Engineering Systems Division. The company combined a technology invented by the late Australian Percy Kean with business skills learned in the course 15.366 Energy Ventures.

Energy Ventures “is one of the reasons I came to Sloan,” said Bakaya, who sat in on the class prior to attending MIT Sloan, and who has had a lifelong interest in entrepreneurship.

“Growing up in Australia, I would read about the U.S. and the dot-com boom and people my age creating all these transformational companies,” she said, which inspired her to enroll in Stanford as an undergraduate to pursue entrepreneurship.

PK Clean extracts oil and gas from plastics through a catalytic depolymerization process. Around 70 to 80 percent of the output is oil, with around 10 percent gas output. The rest is ash, which can be sold for industrial purposes.

Above: PK Clean's process for converting plastic waste into oil and gas. [Image credit: Courtesy Priyanka Bakaya]

“The key is the catalysts, which allow the reaction to happen at a lower temperature,” Bakaya said. The process recovers 90 percent of the catalysts, so PK Clean sees a high net output of energy from the reaction.

Fresh off PK Clean’s success with Rice and the MIT Clean Energy Prize, Bakaya is gearing up for a summer fellowship at Lightspeed Venture Partners in California. The fellowship provides her and PK Clean with cash, office space and mentoring. Lightspeed takes no equity in any summer fellowship company.

“We will keep our momentum going and get the resources we need,” Bakaya said. She is also looking forward to connecting with the West Coast cleantech community, where PK Clean has yet to make significant inroads.

Above: PK Clean's pilot plant in India. [Photo credit: Courtesy Priyanka Bakaya]

With a pilot plant already in India, PK Clean’s next big goal is to expand to America. Their biggest challenge will be navigating the U.S. regulatory system, from environmental permitting to getting PK Clean’s output approved under fuel standards.

“We want to partner with metal recyclers to shorten the permitting process,” Bakaya said. Metal recyclers have already expressed interest in PK Clean, as well as the U.S. Navy.

Read more about: PK Clean | Rice Business Plan Competition