OCOchem: a new low-carbon way to make chemicals, without the big, dirty factories

OCOchem’s pilot plant for producing formates via electrolytic cells

The global chemicals industry is big, and it’s dirty. Chemical plants consume lots of fossil fuels, both to power the high-temperature, high-pressure processes involved and often as a feedstock for the chemicals produced. And to maximise production, those plants are typically built to be as large as possible.

Todd Brix, CEO of startup OCOchem, has a different vision for how to build a modern chemicals industry: Manufacture lots of small machines that are powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels to do the work.

“The way we make cars, the way we make TVs, the way we make semiconductor chips should be the same way we make chemicals plants,” Brix said.

Last week, the company’s pilot plant in Richland, Washington, started producing a class of chemicals known as formates, used in everything from deicing airplanes to preserving animal feed. But instead of the conventional hot, dirty method of combining methanol with carbon monoxide derived from fossil fuels, OCOchem makes formate with just water and carbon dioxide inside four 1.5-metre electrolytic modules.

OCOchem fills those modules with water and carbon dioxide and then zaps the solution with electricity, causing an electrochemical reaction that yields formic acid, a combination of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. Chemically speaking, it’s ​“one of the simplest molecules you can imagine,” Brix said — basically, ​“CO2 with two hydrogen atoms attached to it.”

The $5 million project can make up to 60 tons of formic acid per year. That’s not a lot, compared with the roughly 1 million tons per year of formates produced globally. But being able to deliver an industrial chemical cost-effectively in such small amounts is one of the selling points, Brix explained.

“Once you want to scale out and make more formate, you just make more modules. That’s the power of economies of scale of mass production,” he said. ​“We can rapidly scale that technology out, and make a lot of little chemical plants, and stack them together.”

Factory-built modular devices are being tried out across various industries, from fertiliser to steel — and they are even being considered for nuclear power. It’s already a winning pathway in the renewable energy sector, where mass-produced solar panels and lithium-ion battery cells have seen costs drop steeply as production volumes increase and manufacturers consistently improve each new generation of products.

“What the solar industry does is mass-produce solar panels — and what we are trying to do is mass-produce chemical plants,” Brix said. ​“That allows you to dramatically lower the costs over time.”

Tiny chemicals-production cells are a bit more complicated than solar panels, of course. But OCOchem’s electrolytic cells aren’t taking on anything as dangerous as nuclear fission. Brix described the process as akin to ​“artificial photosynthesis.” Plants use water, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the energy from sunlight. OCOchem cells, which operate at ambient temperatures and pressures, electrify water and carbon dioxide and emit only formic acid, which is corrosive but not flammable or explosive.

Using electrolysis to produce formate is far from a unique idea, said Brix, who worked at Chevron, Intel, and Microsoft before founding OCOchem in 2020. In fact, researchers have been trying to do it for decades. But the efforts he’s aware of have struggled to expand cells to a size that can support commercially viable volumes.

“We started with a reactor that was 10 square centimetres in size,” Brix said. ​“We’ve scaled that up by a factor of 1,500.” OCOchem has developed patented technologies that can handle the required current density, or electrical throughput, to achieve this increased size and manufactures these key components itself. It then works with a contract manufacturer to assemble them into cells, which otherwise use off-the-shelf equipment from other electrolysis-based industries.

OCOchem raised $5 million in 2023 and has secured federal and state grants for its early technology development, as well as an undisclosed amount of early-stage support from Halliburton Labs, the tech accelerator of oil services company Halliburton. The four cells in the pilot facility are the first it’s produced via this assembly-line process, Brix said, but the company is preparing to scale up its manufacturing to meet orders for more than $300 million in prepurchase contracts.

Those contracts are for the formate it will make, not for the equipment itself, he noted. ​“Our goal is to be the developer of the technology and operator of the plant and share ownership of the plant with various partners.”

A cleaner — and cheaper — path to bigger chemicals markets? 

OCOchem’s process emits no carbon dioxide, unlike the fossil-fuel-based processes used to make formates today, Brix said. Much of the world’s supply of the chemicals is from factories that are part of China’s expanding coal-fed chemicals industry. Whether OCOchem’s formate is considered low, zero, or negative-carbon depends on two key factors: the carbon footprint of the electricity used to make it and the carbon dioxide going into its cells.

Right now, OCOchem plans to get its CO2 ​“from the highest purity and cheapest sources we can find,” Brix said. ​“That turns out to be biogenic CO2,” or gas captured from ethanol plants, breweries, wastewater-treatment facilities, and similar sources. Some of that CO2 is used today as coolant in refrigeration and for carbonating beverages. CO2 that can’t find industrial purchasers is either captured at the expense of its emitter or, far more often, vented into the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change.

Plenty of industries, ranging from sustainable aviation fuel to lower-carbon cement, are planning to rely on captured CO2 to decarbonise. Consulting firm EcoEngineers studied OCOchem’s process and found that every ton the company produces could avoid a combined 7.2 tons of CO2 emissions, compared with fossil-fuel-fed formate production, both by displacing fossil fuels and fixing captured CO2 in the formic acid it makes.

But OCOchem doesn’t need a ​“green premium” for its low-carbon bona fides, Brix said. Instead, it’s relying on offering customers a cost-competitive alternative to formate shipped from overseas. That’s not possible with its pilot-scale facility today, he stressed. But ​“even at 10,000 tons per year, which is a small chemical plant, we’ll have lower cost of production” than typical fossil-fuel-fed plants. ​“We can say, ​‘Whatever your market price is, we’ll meet it.’”

More chemical markets beckon. Formic acid can be processed into a number of organic compounds, including many now made from fossil fuels, he said — ​“not because they’re higher performance, or cleaner, or cheaper, but because they do the job good enough.”

Formates and formic acid could also serve as ​“hydrogen carriers,” Brix said. Hydrogen, when it’s produced in ways that don’t cause greenhouse gas emissions, can be used to cut the carbon impact of industries from steelmaking to shipping. It’s unlikely that OCOchem’s formates would be a cost-effective source of hydrogen at large volumes, but they could serve as a convenient medium for transporting hydrogen in trucks, he said.

The trick is to find cost-effective ways to separate the hydrogen molecules from the formates once they reach their destination, said Ye Xu, associate professor of chemical engineering at Louisiana State University. Xu specialises in research in surface chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis — the fundamental study of the interaction of solid catalysts with molecules. He’s been working on a project to crack hydrogen from formates in a way that’s economically viable—one of many being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

“If you need to transport huge quantities of hydrogen atoms, you have to compress hydrogen gas under extremely high pressure. That causes cost problems and safety problems,” Xu said, especially for chemicals being transported by truck or train. Hydrogen-bearing formates, by contrast, are ​“not flammable. They don’t explode. They are not toxic. These are some very attractive characteristics.”

When it comes to separating the hydrogen atoms from formate molecules at the end of the journey, so far ​“the stumbling block is the speed of the reaction,” he said. ​“Formates are stable substances and slowly decompose on their own.” Speeding up the process requires a catalyst, and ​“according to the scientific literature, the only catalyst that works is palladium” — a costly metal, which, like the chemically similar platinum, is already in high demand for electronics, automotive, and many other industrial uses.

Xu’s search for substitute catalysts to make formate a viable hydrogen carrier involves massive computational research as well as collaboration with scientists doing real-world research. In a way, Brix noted, it’s a similar process to the years of research that have gone into OCOchem’s core technologies, such as the gas-diffusion electrodes that allow it to electrolyse water and CO2 at commercial-scale volumes.

Taking such experiments from laboratory to pilot project to commercial production may be labour-intensive and costly. But building, testing, and redesigning the next generation of technologies is a lot easier and faster on an assembly line than as part of a complicated, years-long engineering, procurement, and construction project to build large-scale facilities, Brix said.

“We’ve built the best little Lego block we can. Now we want to stack the Lego blocks together,” Brix said, and ​“just build more and more stacks. And from there, it’s rinse, lather, repeat.” 

By Jeff St. John, Canary Media