Photo credits: Brenae Bowers Brix and Russ Campbell

Dan Morrell: This story starts the way all classic stories of tech entrepreneurship do: In Todd Brix's garage. Brix (MBA 1997) started his career in the oil and gas industry and had a long second act in the software sector. But about five years ago, he decided it was time for a big change.

Todd Brix: I had learned enough about software and had enough time in the software industry, [and] wanted to follow my original passion and love for chemistry and put it toward something that I thought needed additional investment of time and resources which was fundamentally what to do with carbon dioxide.

MORE

Hear all three episodes of this series

Skydeck podcast

MORE

Hear all three episodes of this series

Skydeck podcast

DM: Brix had watched the clean tech sector grow. He saw the advancements in green energy production and the promise of direct air capture. But there was something missing.

TB: There's a lot of people looking at how to make renewable energy that, when you generate it, doesn't produce CO2. And there's a lot of people who were thinking about capturing carbon dioxide from the air or from emission stacks. But there are very few people trying to figure out how to actually use renewable energy to convert carbon dioxide into the products that we need and want and use all over the world.

DM: That's how Brix ended up reading all the scientific research he could find on carbon conversion and turning his garage—temporarily—into a laboratory.

TB: I ultimately came upon an electrochemical type of process which turned out could be pretty easily prototyped at a very small scale in one's garage—buying some pieces of equipment and parts you can find online and reading literature about how to go do that. And that was just going to prove to myself that the technology could work and was viable.

DM: Turns out it was.

I'm Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck, and this is the third and final episode of Clearing the Air, our mini-series on carbon capture.

Todd Brix (MBA 1997) and HBS senior lecturer Jim Matheson

READ MORE

We'll return to Brix in a little bit, but he isn't alone in his efforts to turn captured carbon dioxide into a useful product.

HBS senior lecturer and longtime cleantech investor Jim Matheson, who we introduced in Episode 1, says that there's new ideas popping up constantly—and not just ways to capture the carbon, but about what to do with it after you have it.

Jim Matheson: When we look at the whole carbon capture, transport, storage-slash-sequestration-slash-reuse value chain, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening, really on either end.

DM: And sometimes, those new ideas use existing models from other industries.

JM: Many of the obvious techniques for storage is to actually use old reservoirs from the oil and gas activity, whether it's offshore or onshore. We have these enormous reservoirs that were once filled with oil or natural gas, and those are natural vessels for us to put the CO2 back into the ground.

DM: But that doesn't have to be the carbon's final destination.

JM: I'm a big fan of CO2 as a building block to actually make things. And I've been involved with a number of companies that have turned CO2 into fuels, CO2 into plastics, CO2 into cement, CO2 into rock, into building materials. The challenge of course, is that we're talking about enormous amounts of CO2 that both need to be captured and moved, but also need to be made into things. And the stuff you make has to be significantly high volumes.

DM: Back at Todd Brix's garage, where he was experimenting with how to turn carbon dioxide into something useful, he is starting small. But he notes that the concept is not exactly new.

TB: Remarkably, this is what plants do day in and day out—for the last 3.4 billion years on Earth.

DM: Today Brix is the cofounder and CEO of Ocochem, a startup developing an electrochemical process to turn carbon dioxide into formic acid. Now, formic acid is not something most people are familiar with, but it's a pretty important chemical compound. It's mainly used to preserve the hay and alfalfa that livestock eat. It's also a building block in making the chemicals that go into things like plastics, road materials, and a wide variety of other products. And Brix sees another potential use in the clean tech sector: to transport green hydrogen.

TB: We think we can use formic acid as a liquid hydrogen carrier, as a way of kind of chemically bonding hydrogen and moving hydrogen in a safer and much more affordable way than moving hydrogen around as an explosive compressed gas, and therefore kind of enable green hydrogen as a fuel and as a feedstock for the huge market that is currently represented, an even larger market which is expected over the next 20 or 30 years.

DM: And that business opportunity is vital, believes Brix.

TB: Because if you don't have an economically sustainable business model, the environmentally sustainable model that you might have created won't necessarily stand on its own over time.

DM: To date, Brix's company has raised more than 6.5 million dollars from organizations like the US Department of Energy and the US Army to pursue this idea. The company currently has a prototype—or "cell"—which turns carbon dioxide collected from bio-fermentation plants into formic acid. It hopes to produce a large-scale demonstration model by the end of the year and is working with a direct-air capture company to utilize carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But Brix's ultimate vision is even more ambitious.

TB: We see a world where we will be able to mass produce these types of cells, put them in modular configurations, and then deploy them anywhere in the world to either extract CO2 directly from the air or from emission stacks from industries that would otherwise be impossible to decarbonize.

DM: But Ocochem's approach differs from many of the models out there, where the carbon is either sequestered or reused in a way that permanently removes it from the atmosphere. What they do is essentially recycling: reusing the CO2—and finding value in it—over and over again. It's nature's model, Brix says.

TB: Plants breathe in CO2 and they extract water from the soil to make a variety of different molecules. But then when the plant dies or when the plant is consumed in some way, CO2 is inevitably the result. But it's all a circular carbon economy. The CO2 that gets released when that plant dies or decomposes gets breathed in by some other plant. And that's what we aspire to—to enable a circular carbon economy using humankind's CO2 emissions or the CO2 that's already in the air.

DM: The aspirations and energy are important. But getting these big plans into action requires not just new ideas or the capital to support them—but a clear signal from the market that there will be a return on investment, says Matheson.

JM: Because the markets signal backwards into the whole value chain of the storing, the moving and the capturing. It's hard to mobilize capital to do the capturing if it doesn't believe there's an economic "therefore" at the end of the value chain. So the carbon markets and the pricing of carbon becomes enormously important.

DM: Matheson has seen this play out before. From 2006 to 2011, VC firms invested more than $25 billion in clean energy companies and ultimately lost more than half of it. The era has been dubbed Cleantech 1.0.

JM: The ultimate challenge of Cleantech 1.0 was that the capital value chain that was supporting these companies was reasonably good at supporting them in the early innovation phase.

That's what venture capital does. It's a new invention: We're actually moving it from the lab into the early market. But the scale that these technologies need to be operated at is enormous. It's at the scale of the biggest thing that humankind has ever done, at the scale of oil and gas exploration, going to the moon. These are enormous undertakings both from an engineering,and also from a capital standpoint. And the challenge is that, without a clear signal about the economics of a project, it's very difficult to entice capital to come in and help that new invention move from proof of concept to a pilot, all the way to a world-scale plant, which requires hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases, billions of dollars to do without a clear ability to underwrite that project by saying, "I know that if I capture this amount of CO2, I can sell it to the marketplace."

So you have this pressure from both sides in that vexing challenge. And if either of those start to slow down, then the market senses it. If the market starts to slow down, the innovators and the innovation capital sort of senses it. So you've got to have this sort of perfect storm to get over this—not even the valley of death, I call it the Grand Canyon of death—from the innovation stage to deploying to the scale of the problem.

I think we're getting there. We're seeing some really interesting, not only progress on the technology concepts, but we're seeing some really interesting innovations around financing mechanisms that are going to support these innovations—not just in carbon capture, but across the whole of the climate innovation sector [that] are supporting these innovations to get across that Grand Canyon of death.

DM: Which is good, Matheson notes, because the climate goals defined by the International Panel on Climate Change require the whole world to be net zero on carbon emissions by 2050 in order to keep global temperature rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius. Which, you might remember from Episode 1, is the amount of global temperature rise, compared to pre-industrial times, after which scientists say serious climate catastrophes are likely.

So, yes, progress is positive.

JM: But we've got to get there fast.

DM: Thank you for listening to this Skydeck series. If you liked what we've put together here, please rate and review us.

This episode of Skydeck was co-produced with contributor April White, with additional production by PRX Productions, and was edited by Craig McDonald. It was developed in collaboration with the HBS Business and Environment Initiative. It is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

And if you are interested in hearing more about what businesses are doing, can do, and should do to confront climate change, be sure to check out HBS's Climate Rising podcast with host Professor Mike Toffel, which is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Post a Comment