Entrepreneur Simon Hodson plans a clean-energy revolution in a West Virginia coal-fired power plant; some scientists are skeptical.
Tony Robbins donned ear protection and stepped inside a nondescript metal building in southwestern Pennsylvania. What the celebrity motivational speaker saw was mesmerizing.
The roaring machines in front of him stood three stories tall and had the potential to create a revolutionary new energy source, he later wrote. The inventor of the equipment—and Robbins’s guide that day—was Simon Hodson, a white-haired California scientist with a background in cement and food packaging.
Hodson was using advanced technology to turn waste coal into fertilizer and other products. That was exciting enough, but Robbins had come for a visit because Hodson had told him about something even more thrilling.
The “quantum reformers” he had designed, Hodson had said, could turn coal into clean-burning hydrogen—without emitting any greenhouse gases. And that hydrogen, Hodson said, could run old coal-fired power plants, something that had never been done before.
Soon after that visit in September 2022, Robbins lent Hodson nearly $200 million to develop the potentially breakthrough technology. That amounted to the largest single wager he has ever made.
Together, the two men took over a defunct coal-fired power plant in West Virginia and set out to prove their revolutionary idea will actually work.
“If I’m wrong, I lose all that” money, Robbins said in an interview in April. Recently, Hodson’s company repaid him $75 million, according to his spokeswoman.
Motivational speaker Tony Robbins lent about $200 million to Hodson to fund the clean-energy project. PHOTO: PHELAN M. EBENHACK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Called Omnis, the company hasn’t publicly demonstrated that its clean-energy technology will work. Hodson said in a recent interview he is confident it will, but admits it might not. Scientists have expressed skepticism. After repeatedly pushing back the date for promised demonstrations, the company said Tuesday it planned to demonstrate the technology next week.
Omnis, which said earlier this year it would begin doing business under the name Omnigen, ticks a lot of boxes for a clean-energy startup. The technology it has trumpeted appeals to both sides of the political spectrum by promising to eliminate emissions while using fossil fuels, thereby saving jobs in a threatened industry.
President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act unleashed a gusher of public funding that, coupled with private-sector investment, is fueling clean-energy projects across the nation. They include efforts to use experimental and costly new technologies to pull carbon out of the air, produce solid-state batteries and develop nuclear-fusion reactors.
West Virginia’s most powerful politicians lined up to back the Hodson-Robbins project, which the company told state officials would cost $975 million.
On Aug. 30, business leaders gathered at Gov. Jim Justice’s luxury resort, the Greenbrier. Justice, a coal tycoon who is running for the Senate, presented a live video showing steam billowing from the once-defunct plant’s cooling towers. “A coal-fired power plant is taking new life right in front of our eyes,” he declared.
It was a dramatic moment, but the plant was still burning coal, not hydrogen.
For now, the West Virginia plant is generating electricity from coal.
Hodson said he is focusing on the science. “We’ve been told, ‘If this is for real, it’s the most important thing that’s happened in energy in 200 years,’ ” he said. “We know it’s real.”
Robbins said all doubts will vanish once the company successfully demonstrates the technology. Hodson, he said, is either “the best con man in the world…or one of the smartest guys.”
Hodson, 69, took an unlikely path into the clean-energy sector. After attending Brigham Young University, he followed his father into the cement industry. Eventually, he became a serial entrepreneur, bankrolled by a wealthy Saudi Arabian family.
Before Omnis, Hodson’s best-known venture was EarthShell, a company that made environmentally friendly Big Mac packaging for McDonald’s. It went public in 1998, projecting it would sell 1.8 billion Big Mac containers. The company struggled to mass produce the boxes, which were made of limestone and potato starch. It burned through hundreds of millions of dollars, and Hodson left the firm. EarthShell filed for bankruptcy in 2007. Hodson said recently that the core technology was a success.
EarthShell’s largest investor was Essam Khashoggi, brother of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and uncle of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist killed by Saudi operatives. Hodson and Essam Khashoggi worked together for decades. Some businesses associated with Hodson share California addresses with Khashoggi businesses, including E. Khashoggi Industries, or EKI. Hodson served as a top executive at EKI. Essam Khashoggi died in 2022.
Hodson founded Omnis several years after EarthShell filed for bankruptcy. In 2017, Omnis and coal giant Consol Energy launched a project in Pennsylvania to convert waste coal—the stuff left over from mining—into fertilizer and other products. That was the plant Robbins visited in 2022.
Hodson has said that new technology will convert coal into hydrogen, which will run the power plant without producing greenhouse gases.
Testing of the technology used at the project showed that it also produced hydrogen and graphite. Hydrogen can replace fossil fuels in steelmaking and chemical production without emitting carbon, and graphite is used in rechargeable batteries.
In late May, a fire broke out at the Pennsylvania site, destroying the building. The fire was unrelated to the company’s technology and the plant wasn’t operating at the time, an executive overseeing the project said. Hodson said the fire won’t affect the company’s plans to demonstrate its new technology.
‘Obsessed’
People who have worked with Hodson describe him as a gifted salesman. He uses lots of scientific terms and talks about society-changing technologies. Robbins said Hodson is focused on the smallest details of the technology he created for the power plant. “He’s obsessed,” Robbins said.
Hodson travels outside the U.S. frequently and often leaves town for weeks on trips to China or other countries. He said he often travels to meet experts “wherever they are.”
Before the power plant, he had already launched two businesses in West Virginia. Omnis Building said it would spend $40 million to build modular homes and use some coal-based products. At a March 2022 groundbreaking ceremony for a manufacturing facility where parts would be assembled, Justice said Omnis planned to do something revolutionary in the state.
Last October, a medical center in Morgantown, W.Va., raised $500,000 for Omnis to make homes for patients to live in while receiving treatment. Two years after the groundbreaking, though, the company hasn’t produced any houses, and when Journal reporters visited the manufacturing facility in February, it appeared to be empty.
Hodson said the medical center residence would be finished in August and the manufacturing facility would be completed in the fall. He blamed the delay on a contractor.
In late 2022, the West Virginia governor said a separate Hodson company would invest $60 million to extract valuable rare-earth metals from coal waste compounds. Again, Justice was enthusiastic, saying of Hodson, “If this man has the answer, he has the answer [to] something that would absolutely revolutionize the entire world.” The company is still looking to find a site for the business, Hodson said.
Scientist Simon Hodson says he has developed new technology to produce clean energy using coal. PHOTO: WEST VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
Hodson moved from California to West Virginia. His family office recently purchased a home in Morgantown for $2.7 million, county records show. His son, Jonathan, leads the building company. Many of Hodson’s employees are family members or longtime associates.
Robbins first heard about the Pennsylvania coal-waste-to-fertilizer project from a relative of Hodson’s in Utah. He thought the fertilizer could be part of a project to help feed struggling families. He also was impressed with Hodson’s involvement in developing the cement used in One World Trade Center. Robbins and Hodson started talking.
Best known as an author, life coach and speaker, Robbins also has written about personal finance. In “The Holy Grail of Investing,” he described his visit to the Omnis plant in Pennsylvania and delved into investment strategies. The No. 1 lesson for investors, he wrote, is “don’t lose”—a rule he attributes to Warren Buffett.
Robbins said he believed other investors would back Omnis if it successfully demonstrated its technology. To make that happen, Hodson bought West Virginia’s Pleasants Power Station, an old plant that had been shut down. Hodson said he gave Robbins a 50% stake in the plant.
Restarting the plant was important to Pleasants County, where it had once been a big employer and source of tax revenue that funded schools. In 1978, 51 workers died there when a cooling tower collapsed—one of the deadliest construction accidents in U.S. history.
The company had hired Michelle Christian, a former Small Business Administration official during the Trump administration, to manage government relations and make contacts in West Virginia’s business community.
The relationship eventually soured. When Christian and Hodson saw one another at the Greenbrier event, she accused him of misleading state and federal officials about the company’s technology and finances, according to a lawsuit she filed against the company alleging harassment, discrimination and unpaid wages around her subsequent departure from the company.
Hodson said Christian’s claim that the company misled officials and her other allegations are “completely incorrect.” Christian said in an email that she would be proven right. The company has sued her separately in a dispute over ownership of a laptop.
In November, West Virginia approved a $50 million low-interest loan for the power-plant project. Omnis also had begun talks with U.S. Energy Department officials about applying for a separate federal loan.
According to the state loan agreement, the power-plant company “prepared and submitted” an application for the Energy Department loan. Omnis was seeking approximately $800 million from the Energy Department, according to a letter the state’s department of economic development sent Hodson.
In March, the Energy Department told the company its technology hadn’t been tested sufficiently for Omnis to apply for a loan from the agency. The department typically provides loans for proven technologies with 1,000 to 2,000 hours of operations.
Hodson said Omnis would consider applying for the Energy Department loan after demonstrating its technology.
Testing challenge
Nansen Saleri, a former senior Saudi Aramco executive and longtime business partner of Hodson’s, was recently named president of technology at the company. He said the company will demonstrate the technology later this year to Energy Department officials.
Richard Hulme, the Omnis executive overseeing the power plant, declined to provide details about the technology until the company completes a demonstration. He said he is confident it will work. “It’s always just been a story,” he said about the company’s description of its nascent technology.
Last fall, Hodson said he would demonstrate the technology in December. In February, he told the Journal that the company faced “delays in equipment parts and labor,” which he attributed to fallout from Covid-19. The company said Tuesday it recently began operating the equipment and expects to produce graphite and hydrogen this week, and that it plans to demonstrate the technology next week.
Some scientists who reviewed Omnis’s public statements about its technology said some parts are difficult to understand without more information. For one, the heat to vaporize the coal would be generated by natural gas or other fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases. To meet its zero-emission commitment, the company would likely need to capture and sequester those gases at the plant, an expensive and nascent technology.
“There are a lot of existing technologies for CO2 capture that we will be utilizing,” Saleri said. Hodson, however, said there would be “no sequestration.” He said the zero-emissions aspect of the technology is proprietary.
Nansen Saleri, a former Saudi Aramco executive, is the company’s president of technology. PHOTO: JAMES NIELSEN/HOUSTON CHRONICLE/GETTY IMAGES
What differentiates Omnis’s method from others, Hodson said, is that it plans to heat coal to temperatures as high as 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit—about half the temperature at the sun’s surface and twice what is required to make steel. The superhigh heat, he said, will convert coal into higher-quality carbon products, such as graphite.
Attempts to produce and maintain such high heat for long periods often fail because the heat rapidly degrades the material containing it. Hodson said he has solved that problem, but he didn’t tell the Journal how.
John Eiler, a geochemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology and a member of Omnis’s advisory board, said in March that the company hadn’t yet shown that its technology can operate at high temperatures for weeks and months and whether it can efficiently scale up to operate at multiple power plants. “It’s premature to judge,” he said.
It typically takes about $5,000 to produce a ton of hydrogen without carbon emissions. Hodson said he can do it for $18.
“That number just seems impossible,” said Matteo Cargnello, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University.
In addition to producing hydrogen, Omnis’s coal-vaporization process is supposed to generate vast amounts of synthetic graphite, a key component of lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and other rechargeable devices. China dominates the synthetic graphite market, so a domestic source would be in high demand.
Omnis said the power plant will have the capacity to produce up to six million tons of it a year—about three times annual global consumption. The company hopes to run hundreds of power plants using the same technology, according to Hodson.
So far, Omnis hasn’t demonstrated publicly that its new technology will work.
“If the claims being made are accurate, this facility will disrupt the world graphite market,” said Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on Appalachia.
Hodson said he has met Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk and that his graphite can meet the carmaker’s graphite needs. In addition, the graphite bonanza will allow for other uses, such as building furniture, roads, bridges and power lines, he said. In a September presentation to West Virginia’s Public Energy Authority, Hodson said the technology can “give rise to a complete change of society.”
Omnis has much riding on the coming demonstration. If it succeeds, said Saleri, “It will usher in a new era in energy.”
“If we are wrong,” he said later, “we will have taken enormous risks in an attempt to solve one of the world’s biggest problems, and we will have failed.”
Jim Oberman and Elisa Cho contributed to this article.
Omnis has said that it will demonstrate the technology next week.
Write to Scott Patterson at [email protected] and Amrith Ramkumar at [email protected]
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Appeared in the July 12, 2024, print edition as ‘Plan to Turn Coal Into Clean Energy Draws Skepticism’.
URL: https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/green-energy-coal-tony-robbins-cd815724