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 decarbonize. 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 specializes 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 electrolyze water and CO2 at commercial-scale volumes.
Taking such experiments from laboratory to pilot project to commercial production may be labor-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, yearslong 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.”
