Name: Meet the winner of Fortune Brainstorm E's Cool Companies Competition!
Uploaded: 2015-09-29
Duration: 5 min 13 s
Description: OPUS 12 won the title of the coolest eco-friendly company. Find out all about the startup from co-founder Etosha Cave right here!

[ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Imagine taking two components of the human breath, carbon dioxide and water, and using them to make products such as plastic or liquid fuels. Some of the same fuels you put into your car to drive with. Well Opus 12 is developing technology that could make that possible. And we're not looking to take carbon dioxide from the humans breath. But instead take it from these guy. So oil refineries, corn ethanol and natural gas fields emit over 100 million times of carbon dioxide per year. We can go in, pay them for their carbon dioxide and use it to make over 16 higher value chemicals. And in doing so we would create a multi billion dollar opportunity for ourselves. Now we've talked to oil refineries nd corn ethanol plants, and we've asked them which one of our products would be most useful to you? And across the board that said that ethanol is a product they already make on site as a revenue generating product and that they would be interested in increasing their yield so in some cases we can go in and take their waste carbon dioxide and increase their yield of ethanol by up to 50 %. So how would this work in practice so. We take in three inputs, which is carbon dioxide, water and electricity. And we would feed that into our reactor. Which would be bolted on site, it would be co- located with our customers. And then after that reactor would come ethanol. We would then use our customers existing supply chain to get our ethanol to market or enter into an off take agreement and sell the ethanol back at them. Now how does this technology work? Well we start with electricity. The same electricity that you use to power your home or charge your iPhone. And we run carbon dioxide and water within that electricity over a metal catalyst. And when you do that, the carbon dioxide and water will break down into smaller bits and pieces. And then if you have the right metal catalyst, the right amount of electricity, and the right conditions, those bits and pieces will reform into new molecules. And currently we can make 16 new molecules with this process. Now this technology was developed at Stanford University during my PhD and my co- founder's PhD and we teamed up together. Now we're scaling up the technology. We've identified three strategic advantages that we have that we think will make us successful. One is that we're operating in a very lean mode. So we're in a program at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab called Cyclotron Road and what this program allows us to do is it gives us access to the equipment that's there. So it literally saves us millions of dollars that we don't have to spend in buying equipment that we need to get this technology off the ground. Another advantage is that we have one of the best teams. So our founding team has previous startup experience from seed to series B. We've also hired two full time people who have decades worth of experience in scaling up this technology. And our third big advantage is that we're basically using arbitrage, so we see a coming era of surplus. intermittent cheap renewable electricity, we'll take that low cost electricity and connect it directly to our technology and then make a higher value product that we can sell in the marketplace. So lastly I invite you to join me in rethinking the way we look at carbon dioxide. Instead of throwing it away haphazardly, Let's use it to make valuable products in the future. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Thank you. [ APPLAUSE ] Abe, your turn. Please. My name is Abe. I'm not Catholic but, in the spirit of yesterday and today, I would say. You're doing god's work so, what you're doing is quite amazing. [ LAUGH ] The two comments I would make most broadly are really around some of the metrics we would need to see. Both CAPEX to get to commercialization, and I'm going to focus on that for a second. And then margins. What does the business look like, when it comes to maturity? On the CAPEX side, our experience over the last 15 years at Rockport has been Specifically the process technologies are very very difficult and very uncertain in development. Quite specifically, you've got to do lab scale. You've got scale that to pilot scale. You have to tweak it to make sure the economics makes sense. You have to find commercialization partners. Once you find commercialization partners you have to raise more money to put that pilot scale in place. And by the end of the time of that de- risk age, you've probably spent $ 100 million just to figure out whether this stuff works or not at commercial scale. So that's the biggest question, even when you do prove that the process works, can you actually make money as a business on it? Collin. I would say yes, what Abe said, but Yes it works it's huge and so I thought what was great about your presentation was that is very clear in terms of how to lay it out in terms of potential in your approach breaking it down into the markets your going to after So this is the type of presentation that I would say hey, I'd like to learn more, but I think you might have something. All right, Natasha, thank you. Thank you.

OPUS 12 won the title of the coolest eco-friendly company. Find out all about the startup from co-founder Etosha Cave right here!