Ian Houston was told repeatedly that his carbon capture project was unworkable. He proved everybody wrong
Ian Houston won't reveal how much he's invested in his start-up, Origo. If anything, he's a touch embarrassed that so little money has been spent on solving a problem so many people told him couldn't be solved. His company's product, which Houston engineered from scratch, is the Ecobox, a car-exhaust carbon capture device. "Everyone said it couldn't be done because you can't do carbon capture on a moving vehicle."
But Houston, who learned his engineering skills in the army, "upside down in a tank being shot at", says he used his knowledge of ballistics to work out how to capture the moving carbon molecules. "I know how to manipulate a projectile through the air to effect it to go where I want it to go. A molecule of Co2 is a projectile, so I moved it how I wanted to move it."
It took him a couple of weeks to develop a prototype, which he fitted to the exhaust of his Mitsubishi Shogun, an emissions-heavy "Chelsea tractor" of a vehicle. "Factory emissions on that were 275g per kilometre. I reduced it to sub 100 grams. It went from being in the highest road tax band to no road tax." Origo has pre-estimated orders of 880,000 Ecoboxes per month, "mostly from car dealerships".
Houston's can-do attitude was severely tested on a tour of the UK's major universities. He says he understood 99 per cent of his invention but was looking for academic confirmation that what he had discovered was workable. "For 12 months I went to all the universities in the UK trying to get someone to understand what I was doing. They would just say, 'that can't happen. You couldn't have found that.' Nobody opened the door to me, except Durham. They cottoned on and said, 'wow, you're right.' It was the best feeling I've ever had."
Origo is already building up a cult following in the motor industry, thanks largely to Houston's budget engineering. "People [in the motor industry] ask me the budget, I say X, they say we spend a million pounds a day on R&D and we can't do this." But they are given a target of a six per cent reduction, he says. "When you give someone a target, that's what they aspire to. My target was zero. I wanted to prove that an internal combustion engine could compete with an electric car—be better than an electric car. And that's what I did."
Origo's small team of ten are encouraged to be free thinkers, says Houston. It's a different approach to many R&D teams, he adds. "I look at it logically. I go back to the start and ask why. R&D guys are trained to think outside the box. What we do is look at the box. We redesign it and then think about the things to put back inside. We don't run the numbers first, we build and get it to work first," he says.
One of the main advantages of carbon capture technology is that it not only reduces carbon emissions but also allows the stored carbon to be converted into fuel. Houston envisages a council-funded infrastructure in which users take their used exhaust-cartridges to special depots to get the captured carbon converted into petrol or biofuel. There could even be facilities at Tesco, he says, a company he is already in talks with. "You go there to offload your Co2 and get reward points, because they can convert that Co2 into biofuel to power their store. They could even put it in their forecourt to sell back to you."
Houston says a more promising application of Ecobox is attaching it to buildings to capture the carbon from people's breath. Origo has signed a partnership with John Lennon airport in Liverpool to trial Co2 capture from inside the terminal building. The Co2 can then be recycled through a photo-bioreactor to produce an algae-based biofuel, which would be used to power the airport's ground vehicles and generate electricity for heat and lighting. The trial should provide around 250 litres of biofuel a day. If successful, a permanent system could produce up to 3,000 litres.
"We could capture up to 10 tonnes just from the passengers walking to get their flight," says Houston. If you can take that Co2 and convert it back to fuel, you're reducing the carbon footprint of that airport and the passenger." He says he has since designed a system for use inside a plane. Theoretically, that could one day mean the breath from passengers alone will be keeping a flight in the air, because the time it takes to convert carbon into fuel is falling fast. "Once you capture the Co2 we can move it anywhere and release it at will," adds Houston.
A serious offer for Origo has already been turned down. Although the company's main revenue stream is currently the ecobox, Houston sees its future in carbon trading. "If we do one million cars we can take 8,000 tons of Co2 a day [out of] the atmosphere. That's just cars," he says— "add in shopping centres, sports stadiums," all feeding real-time carbon capture information back to Origo, ready to be traded. "My target is one percent of the carbon market in ten years. It's currently a market worth £130bn a year."
Posted 29 July 2009 : Director.co.uk
