Photo by Brenae Bowers Brix

Todd Brix (MBA 1997, Baker Scholar), a chemical engineer and businessman who spent 18 years at Microsoft, wanted to come up with a solution to one of the biggest challenges facing the world today: What to do with all the carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere. “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 says. It’s a process that’s worked for 3.5 billion years. “We need to look at CO₂ as a resource,” he explains.

So Brix set out in 2017 to create a renewable platform chemical (a substance used as a building block for other chemicals) from carbon dioxide. After four months of weighing alternatives, he settled on formic acid: a commodity chemical and energy-rich electrofuel, or carbon-neutral synthetic fuel, that can be stored much like a traditional liquid hydrocarbon (think gasoline). That epiphany became the foundation for OCO Corporation, named for the chemical formula of carbon dioxide. OCO, founded alongside his father and fellow green chemical engineer Terry Brix, could provide the R&D to turn carbon dioxide into an electrofuel, the technology to make it a reality, and the plants and factories to scale it.

OCO’s bread and butter is a processing device called an electrolyzer, which combines electricity and CO₂ and splits water to make formic acid. That formic acid can then be sold to customers who use it to create products—from cleaning products and bactericides to tires and textiles—or for storing intermittent renewable energy until it is ready to be used, by converting it back into hydrogen or electricity. 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 outside Columbus, Ohio, to show that this new technology works and is cost-effective to boot.

The success of OCO, says Brix, lies the scale of the business. “Unlike most of the chemical or energy industry, where you have to build mammoth plants in order to be economic, we want to become economic by the scale of mass production.” Rather than scaling up the electrolyzers at OCO, Brix and his team hope to scale out. “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.”

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