Today, August 12th 2026, we announce a major milestone in our mission to make synthetic fuels cheaper than fossil fuels. We’ve deployed our full-scale, 1 MW synthetic natural gas (SNG) system at our UK facility. Once commissioning is complete, this system will produce the cheapest synthetic natural gas in history, immediately competing with the £300b/yr+ spent by the EU on imported fossil fuels.
This is a massive step in our vision to enable production of low-cost, useful synthetic fuels, anywhere on earth.
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Rivan’s mission is to make life sustainable on earth, by making synthetic fuels cheaper than fossil.
Despite electrification, we’re forecast to use more fossil fuels in 2050 than we do today, largely driven by AI and industries you can’t electrify: cement, steel, chemicals and aviation. Heavy industry relies on fossil fuels to deliver energy density and molecular feedstocks that electrification can’t. This is a particular problem for Europe, where 95% of all oil and gas consumed is imported, leaving the continent exposed to large pricing and supply shocks – recently felt with the Strait of Hormuz closure. In late July, gas prices hit >£50/MWh, representing a 82% increase from this time last year, and 7x more expensive than domestic gas prices in the USA.
If we want to decarbonise those industries, we don’t have many options. Alternatives, such as hydrogen, are too expensive, lack scale, or require vast infrastructure change. Synthetic fuels, specifically synthetic natural gas, offer perhaps the only solution – acting as scalable drop-in replacements with no carbon footprint.
Historically, synthetic fuels have been uncompetitive with fossil fuels because power (the electricity required for synthetic fuel production) and hardware (the equipment that transforms electricity into fuels) have been too expensive. Rivan started 2 years ago to reimagine this, designing off-grid, modular, autonomous synthetic fuel plants to dramatically reduce the cost of production.
1MW Milestone
Traditional synthetic fuel production is plagued by an outdated way of thinking, driving up costs and keeping us locked in the past. From day 1, we defined an entirely different set of design requirements to dramatically reduce costs:
| Traditional synthetic fuel production | Rivan |
|---|---|
| Grid connected, steady-state power | Off-grid variable power |
| Bespoke, low-volume manufacture | Modular design, scalable for mass-manufacturing |
| Steady-state, 24/7 operation | Dispatchable operation |
| Opex heavy operation | Autonomous operation |
These design requirements manifested in a 1MW modular system that can scale infinitely, akin to how utility scale batteries have been deployed in the GWs:
Designed to be deployed in arrays of 100’s – 1000’s of systems, dramatically increasing scale and reducing cost from the traditional one-off, bespoke model:
To bring that vision to life, we made two fundamental decisions about our engineering and process:
- Vertically integrating power and hardware into a single product to reduce cost and increase performance
- Manufacturing in-house to drive feedback loops that increase speed and reduce cost
10 months ago, we validated our 100kW reactor and electrolyser performance, delivering GSMR spec SNG ready to be injected into the European gas-grid. In just 168 days, we’ve scaled these systems up, integrated to our off-grid solar, and created a design we’re ready to mass-manufacture:
Power
To access the cheapest power, we designed our own DC beyond the grid solar, capable of outputting <£10/MWh DC electricity.
To achieve this, we designed the 1MW array as a power system that integrated directly into our downstream hardware, removing ~ 60% of the peripheral hardware that is often required with either grid connection or integration with process equipment:
System
The core sub-systems of our 1MW synthetic natural gas plant are our electrolyser, reactor, power management and control, CO2 supply and balance-of-plant – all vertically integrated into our 1MW solar array:
Against industry benchmarks for SNG plants, our hardware is >11x lower cost (£/kW).
Reactor
Key thermal management design and control philosophy updated enabled us to rapidly upscale our reactor design from our 100kW pilot:
- Significantly increasing throughput whilst reducing cost
- Drastically simplified design enabling mass manufacturing
- Reduction in pressure equipment category greatly reducing regulatory burden
- Removal of high precision sensing and control systems, with improved operating envelope
Electrolyser
Our 100kW electrolyser validated direct integration to DC solar, enabling fast dispatchability of performance without intermittent storage. Our 1MW design took this architecture and integrated it into a robust, scalable design.
Using the World Bank reference point for alkaline electrolysers, Rivan’s electrolyser is >90% cheaper than industry standards.
CO₂
For this system, we’re using liquid biogenic CO₂ from a nearby anaerobic digestion (AD) plant. Millions of tonnes of carbon-neutral biogenic CO₂ is vented each year from AD plants across Europe with almost no value, forming a great opportunity for Rivan to use in our production. The CO₂ is stored in cryogenic tanks ahead of mixing with H₂ and feeding into our reactor.
As we scale, we’ll incorporate our own direct-air-capture (DAC) system that is currently being scaled up. We’ve spoken about our approach to DAC here.
Engineering culture
Our design requirements are so different that it wouldn’t have been possible to build this 1MW hardware without a very specific engineering environment:
- Small teams
- Low information overhead. Pods of <5 people. Smaller teams of talented people working harder, and with more autonomy, than large bloated teams.
- High accountability and autonomy
- All team members, no matter position in the company, are trusted with large parts of the system and are given large budgets to deliver on timelines.
- Rapid R&D development cycles
- Comprehensive testing rigs paired with in-house fabrication capabilities allows us to turn around a new electrolyser design iteration in less than a week.
This engineering focus and environment is key to enabling Rivan to design, deploy and iterate our systems at a rapid pace similar to the automotive industry.
The Team
It goes without saying, but the dedication, talent and intensity of our V3 team was the only reason this product has been deployed. Hundreds of people have been involved in this project, but our core V3 team below were there from start to finish. This is just the beginning!
What’s Next
We’re now commissioning the 1MW system at our plant in the UK. Once through commissioning, we expect our 1MW system to produce SNG 80% cheaper than anyone in history – a key milestone on our quest for cheaper synthetic natural gas than fossil. We’re targeting cost parity of our first SNG product with natural gas in certain European markets by 2028. This system is capable of producing SNG on-par with imported fossil natural gas in Europe – produced domestically, with no supply or pricing shocks, and no carbon footprint.
Beyond our 1MW system, we’re now rapidly iterating to design our next system (V4) to deliver lower costs, better performance, and greater manufacturability. As we validate autonomous operation, we’re preparing our first large-scale production run, taking this system and building ~10 to deploy in 2027.
