For Stafford Sheehan, co-founder of Air Company, harnessing science is his company’s greatest asset.
“Our pitch to our biggest customer right now is being able to produce fuel from literally just the air,” Sheehan said.
Sheehan, BC ’11, gave the keynote address at the annual Solstice Entrepreneurship Conference hosted by Start@Shea on Saturday. He discussed his entrepreneurial journey from Boston College to co-founding Air Company and running a successful business while working to negate global carbon emissions.
Air Company now engineers “scalable, modular technology that helps industries reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” transforming carbon dioxide into fuel, according to its website.
After graduating from BC with a degree in mathematics and chemistry, Sheehan set off to New Haven to attend graduate school at Yale.
“I did research in a lab here, and that led me to do research in a lab at Yale,” Sheehan said. “So one thing led to another and I decided to take this path of running businesses rather than an academic path of being a professor somewhere.”
Sheehan said that he experimented with creating a company during his time at Yale.
“I started out by spinning a company out of Yale,” Sheehan said. “I kind of cut my teeth with that a little bit.”
While the company now works to solve climate change by addressing major issues like creating sustainable aviation fuel, its initial line of products were much different.
“We started out with vodka and perfume as products,” Sheehan said.
Sheehan said his company’s selling point was the environmental friendliness of its products in comparison to its competitors.
“The ethyl alcohol, the ethanol in that is made from carbon dioxide which is captured from the air,” Sheehan said. “So that’s kind of the sales pitch for a lot of our early products.”
An important part of Sheehan’s business philosophy is not only working to mitigate climate change but also to create value for their customers, he said. That value can come in many forms.
“For our work with the U.S. military, we reduce fuel supply chain risk by producing fuel on site,” Sheehan said. “So that means you don’t have to get diesel fuel, jet fuel, gasoline, into a contested environment.”
Now, one of the major focuses of the company is creating more sustainable aviation fuels.
According to Our World in Data, the aviation industry currently accounts for 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions—and the figure is only growing.
While some float the possibility of using powerful batteries to fuel planes, Sheehan said this is unrealistic, as the required batteries are too heavy. Additionally, jet fuel cannot be easily replaced with batteries, unlike other forms of fuel like diesel.
“[Jet fuel] is a very specific type of fuel with a very specific formulation,” Sheehan said. “That’s where energy density and the amount of energy you have in a gallon of fuel is really important.”
The continued success of Air Company could have major impacts on a global scale, Sheehan said.
“Ultimately, we could address 10 percent of global CO2 emissions,” Sheehan said. “So if you look at a bunch of different studies of where greenhouse gas emissions come from and why you need to decarbonize certain industries, really, what we could address is around 10 percent of global greenhouse gas. That’s really our, I would say, North Star.”
But despite Air Company’s work thus far, Sheehan believes that dealing with those emissions will require a larger effort.
“You know it’s not going to be just Air Company,” Sheehan said. “There are going to be many companies in this industry that are going to come together to try to tackle that. There’s no silver bullet for a lot of these things. There’s no single source.”
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