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RIVAN Mines the Sky for Fossil-free Fuels
- Daisy Moll
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
On this week's episode of Profit Meets Purpose, Harvey Hodd came on to discuss his latest venture RIVAN, which is developing synthetic fuels with a difference.
Listen to the full episode here.
In an era where climate commitments are at odds with the realities of entrenched fossil fuel dependence, RIVAN is exploring an alternative approach to fuel: mining the sky instead of drilling the earth. Founded just over a year ago by serial entrepreneur Harvey Hodd, RIVAN is building synthetic fuels through captured carbon and renewable energy with the ambition of producing the cheapest synthetic fuels in the world.
Hodd has successfully built and sold two software companies, and is now turning his attention to one of the defining challenges of our time: how to remove gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while meeting the world’s demand for energy.
“Carbon dioxide in the air is the problem of our time,” Hodd explained on Profit Meets Purpose. “To really drive the cost down of capturing carbon dioxide, you need to create a product more valuable than the carbon itself,” he explains, referring to the carbon credit market.
There is increasing pressure for large emitting industries to decarbonise as we move towards net zero commitments. Especially those where current alternatives are not feasible. For instance, the aviation industry is required to be net zero by 2050. From 2025 it is now a legal requirement for airlines to use sustainable aviation fuels. Starting at 2% this year and growing to 22% by 2040, and reaching 40% by 2050.
Vertical integration
To produce synthetic fuels, RIVAN captures carbon dioxide from the air, creates hydrogen through electrolysis, and then combines the two in a chemical reactor to form fuel. RIVAN designs and builds every part of this process itself from the capture systems and hydrogen units to the reactors and even its own solar power supply.
By keeping everything in-house and adopting a fully vertically integrated approach, the company believes it can reduce costs, improve efficiency, and scale up more quickly. This, in turn, would make synthetic fuels more affordable and capable of removing huge volumes of carbon from the atmosphere.
“Every nut and bolt, every piece of metal; we do almost everything,” Hodd explained. “It’s the only way to drive down the cost.”
The company’s pilot plant, now operating on a former RAF base in Wiltshire, is already producing tens of thousands of litres of hydrogen daily.
“Our market is limited by supply, not demand. If we can supply fuels at a certain price point, it will immediately get purchased, absolutely billions of pounds of it.”
While hydrogen adoption requires infrastructure overhauls in most carbon-intensive sectors, use of RIVAN’s synthetic fuels does not involve the same level of disruption. “They are chemically identical to fossil fuels,” explains Hodd. “That means a cement plant or refinery could decarbonise overnight without changing a thing.”
RIVAN’s model is based on reaching businesses in dispersed locations, with the firm producing fuels, injecting them directly into the gas grid, and selling to industrial buyers looking to decarbonise. With global energy markets interconnected, fuels produced in one corner of Europe can be consumed seamlessly in another.
Where Hodd has founded companies in the past there are a few principles that he is applying to the growth of RIVAN. Speed is something that he builds by and is a piece of advice he would give to other founders out there trying to achieve growth in their business.
Hodd sees speed as absolutely fundamental to survival in a startup. He stresses that speed compounds, shaving hours off tasks today becomes days saved in weeks, which adds up to months over the course of a year. That compounding effect, he argues, is the most powerful antidote to the huge amounts of capital being poured into R&D and product development.
Beyond survival and efficiency, Harvey also believes speed creates energy which will attract talented people who want to work in an environment without bureaucracy, where decisions and execution happen quickly.
The long road ahead
Despite its building momentum, Hodd is under no illusions about the scale of the challenge RIVAN faces. “Synthetic fuels have historically been incredibly expensive,” he said. “This is going to be brutal for the next 20 years. But if we succeed, everything changes.”
Like Tesla in the electric vehicle sector, RIVAN aims to influence the wider industry to follow suit. Hodd is clear-eyed about what’s at stake: “If we can produce fuels at the price we say we can, oil and gas will be incentivised to change how they operate. That’s the ambition.”
For now, RIVAN is still small, still young, but with a vision big enough to reshape the energy sector.