Harvey Hodd, CEO and Founder at Rivan, is building what he believes will be the cheapest synthetic fuels on Earth. And he’s not doing it through tweaks or outsourcing, but by deconstructing the problem and rebuilding from the ground up.
Despite growing awareness of the negative environmental impact of fossil fuels, aviation, steel, cement, and chemical production still depend heavily on carbon-intensive hydrocarbons. According to the International Energy Agency, global CO₂ emissions from fuel combustion rose to 36.8 gigatonnes in 2022. Without a dramatic change in energy sources, these figures are unlikely to fall.
Rivan’s answer is to tackle the problem at scale through full vertical integration, meaning the company designs, builds, and manufactures everything in its clean fuel system: solar arrays, direct air capture (DAC), electrolysers, synthesis reactors, and distribution. By bringing every variable under control, each component can be improved.
“We own every variable. Every nut and bolt. Every bit of steel, rubber – we cut it, bend it, weld it. We do everything.”
The engineering mission
Rivan’s operation is a modular system that starts with custom-designed solar arrays powering DAC units that use limestone to absorb CO₂ from the air. Heating the limestone to around 1,000°C releases the carbon. Water is then split into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis, and the hydrogen is combined with CO₂ in a Sabatier reactor to produce synthetic methane. However, this is a simplistic overview of what Rivan is achieving. The whole system is highly engineered, with each part designed to work in harmony. The fuel is clean and grid-ready, “it goes straight into the gas grid.”
Designed for impact
The company aims to build one megawatt-class machine per day, introducing small design changes along the way.
“By the end of the year, there might be 10,000 small changes. Ultimately, it drives the cost down.”
Because Rivan designs and builds everything in-house, it avoids the inflated costs of third-party suppliers. Instead, it focuses on simplifying and owning the entire engineering challenge. The result is a cleaner system, both environmentally and structurally.
Currently, the company has its 100kW pilot running, and with a recent £10 million investment, the team is scaling up to a 1MW plant which, if successful, will be the largest synthetic fuel plant in Europe.
A different kind of engineering company
Rivan isn’t just trying to solve a climate problem. It’s also building an environment where engineers can do the best work of their lives. There is no handholding, but there is trust, autonomy, and purpose.
“There’s a huge amount of responsibility, big resources, and we work very fast … there’s very little chain of command.”
New team members work on real-world problems from day one. Every small contribution is connected to the big picture. The ideal Rivan engineer is what Hodd describes as “full stack” hardware – someone with deep curiosity, who wants to build from first principles, and doesn’t need to hand-off their work halfway through.
Qualifications aren’t the key ingredients here, the hunger to learn, grow, and make the world a better place are. It is important to Hodd that Rivan’s engineers see the link between small tasks and large goals, so each person knows the outcome of their input, and works with purpose.
Not the easiest route – but the right one
Rivan’s approach is capital-intensive, hardware-focused, and technologically demanding. But it’s built around long-term environmental impact, not short-term gain.
“Very few people believe what we can do today is true. And we’ve got to prove that it works.”
Importantly, Rivan doesn’t patent its technology. Instead, it hopes others will copy the model – because if it works, that would be a win for the planet.
“We can act as a trailblazer … accelerating carbon capture by showing what’s possible.”
A future beyond fossil fuels
Synthetic fuels could play a pivotal part in decarbonising sectors that can’t be easily electrified. The UK’s Climate Change Committee has said that synthetic fuels may be essential for decarbonising aviation and shipping. But for synthetic fuels to succeed, they need to compete on cost and scale. That’s where Rivan is focusing its efforts: taking sunlight and air and engineering them into industrial-scale fuel solutions. If the company can prove its model works – and that it can scale – it may help shift an entire industry.
Its distribution model, feeding directly into the grid, means that change could come without building anything new downstream. As a concept, it’s clean through and through.
If you’re interested in joining the Rivan team, visit www.rivan.com or email harvey@rivan.com.
This article originally appeared in the September’25 magazine issue of Electronic Specifier Design – see ES’s Magazine Archives for more featured publications.
