Scientists, world leaders, and corporations have spent billions trying to harness carbon-dioxide output in order to combat climate change. So far, they’ve figured out how to capture it, but not what to do with it.

Todd Brix (MBA 1997) reckoned there must be some way to convert carbon dioxide into a valuable product. “Nature, through photosynthesis, has figured out how to convert carbon dioxide and water into all types of things, from wood and fibers to fruits and grains,” he observes. Surely humans could use this natural process—one that’s worked for 3.5 billion years—and improve upon it, to help solve this environmental conundrum.

A chemical engineer, Brix had spent his career at Chevron in research and technology and then at Microsoft in IoT and automation. Then, in 2017, he turned his attention toward creating a renewable platform chemical (a substance used as a building block for other chemicals) from carbon dioxide. His goal was to demonstrate—through research, discovery, and good business—a new way forward in reducing CO₂ emissions.

The first step was to lay out the photosynthesis process in black and white on a whiteboard. Brix then began to think about what type of product could combine electricity and carbon dioxide and also be worth more than what it cost to make. After four months of weighing alternatives, he settled on formic acid: a commodity chemical and energy-rich electrofuel, or carbon-neutral synthetic fuel. Soon after, he launched OCO Corporation (named for the chemical formula of carbon dioxide) with his father and fellow green chemical engineer, Terry Brix, and began to design a processing device that works a lot like a fuel cell, but in reverse.

When a fuel cell is fed hydrogen and oxygen, it produces electricity. OCO’s device, known as an electrolyzer, combines electricity and CO₂, and splits water to make formic acid, which can be stored like a conventional hydrocarbon liquid (think gasoline). OCO can then manufacture and sell that formic acid to customers who use it either as a chemical to make hundreds of products—from cleaning products and bactericides to tires and textiles—or for storing intermittent renewable energy until it is ready to be used. OCO’s current electrolyzer design is about the size of a mini-fridge, but the team is working to create a larger version with more power, before launching into mass production.

With two recent grants worth $2.8 million from the US Department of Energy’s Renewable Energy and Fossil Energy offices, OCO and its R&D partners have built a pilot plant just outside Columbus, Ohio, to show that this new technology works and is cost-effective to boot. The success of OCO, says Brix, ultimately lies not on the R&D or the tech itself, but rather in the scale of the business. “Unlike most of the chemical or energy industry, where you have to build mammoth plants in order to be economically viable, we want to become economically viable by the scale of mass production, using mass-assembly techniques to lower the cost,” says Brix. “Our long-term vision, really, is to dramatically reduce the cost of producing this electrofuel, to the point where it’s as cheap—if not cheaper—than many of the fuel alternatives that are available. And that’s based on a very simple proposition, which is that people basically pay us to use their CO₂.”

The added bonus for the rest of us? A solution to one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems. “We’re upsetting the balance of nature by emitting too much CO₂,” says Brix, “and as stewards of this planet we have a responsibility to apply our ingenuity to bring the balance back.”

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