He spent eight years inside oil refineries. Then he decided the most interesting reactor in the world was already buried under our feet.
Michael Alexander runs Addis Energy, a Somerville startup with a deceptively simple promise: make ammonia inside the Earth, not inside a fossil-fueled factory.
Ammonia is the invisible molecule that keeps roughly half the planet fed. It is the backbone of fertilizer, and for more than a century the only way to make it at scale has been the Haber-Bosch process - a brute-force industrial reaction that runs hot, runs high-pressure, and burns enormous quantities of natural gas. It accounts for something close to two percent of all human carbon emissions. Alexander wants to retire it.
His method sounds almost like alchemy until you read the chemistry. Take iron-rich rock. Add water, add a source of nitrogen, add a copper-and-nickel-based catalyst. Then let the planet's own heat and pressure do the work. Ferrous iron strips oxygen, hydrogen forms, nitrogen joins in, and ammonia comes back up the well. No giant plant. No imported natural gas. The crust does the manufacturing.
The line he uses to disarm skeptics is the cleanest summary of the whole company: “There's novel chemistry that's wrapped in an oil and gas package.” The chemistry is new. The toolkit - drilling, pumping fluids, pulling product out of the ground - is a hundred years old and sitting idle in every oilfield in America.
That reframing is the reason Addis exists, and it is pure Alexander. He does not treat the oil and gas industry as the villain to be defeated. He treats it as the most capable industrial workforce on Earth, waiting for a better thing to point itself at.
Before any of this, Alexander was a chemical engineer with grease under his fingernails - more than eight years inside refineries at Shell and Marathon Petroleum, with a stint at Air Products along the way. He knew subsurface engineering not from a slide deck but from the field. That detail matters, because it is exactly the credential most climate founders lack.
He arrived at Harvard Business School in 2022 and went hunting through the hydrogen landscape, the way every energy-curious MBA does. And mostly he came away unconvinced. Too many pitches consumed more energy than they delivered. He was, by his own account, a hard sell - allergic to anything that did not pencil out on additionality.
Then he ran into geologic approaches: the idea that the ground itself could generate hydrogen, and that the reaction could be net energy-positive rather than a fancy way to lose electricity. At Harvard he also ran into Charlie Mitchell, now Addis's COO. Together they found their way to MIT, to materials-science professor Iwnetim Abate and the battery-and-tough-tech veteran Yet-Ming Chiang, whose lab had the chemistry to make the dream real.
Four founders, two campuses, one molecule. The team formed in 2024 and named the company Addis - and pointed it at the most stubbornly dirty corner of heavy industry.
Seed led by At One Ventures, with Engine Ventures & Pillar VC.
Locate iron-rich (ferrous) formations underground - the kind that are abundant and ordinary, not rare deposits you have to go prospecting for.
Pump in water (the hydrogen source), nitrogen, and a copper-and-nickel-based catalyst, using the same drilling and pumping playbook as oil and gas.
Subsurface heat and pressure - around 130°C and a couple of atmospheres - drive a redox reaction. Ferrous iron frees hydrogen; nitrogen joins to form NH₃.
Extract clean ammonia at the surface. In lab tests it forms within hours; a single well could theoretically yield 40,000 kg a day. No Haber-Bosch, no fossil feedstock.
Conventional ammonia, made by Haber-Bosch, is one of the most carbon-intensive industrial processes on the planet - and it underpins the food supply.
Addis estimates that replacing US ammonia production with its geologic method could save roughly 500 billion cubic feet of natural gas every year.
Drills, pumps, wells and decades of subsurface know-how already exist. Addis points that infrastructure at clean chemistry instead of scrapping it.
Spend five minutes with Alexander's public appearances and a pattern shows up: he is measured where founders are usually breathless.
Observers describe a polished, practiced affect - the kind of person who can stand in a room of energy-infrastructure veterans and a room of venture capitalists and speak both dialects without code-switching awkwardly. He is generous with his time and easy to talk to, which is part of why a company built on subsurface geochemistry can be explained to a stranger in a single sentence.
The skepticism is not a pose. It is the engine. He spent years in an industry that punishes wishful thinking, and he brought that allergy to magical math with him into climate tech. When he says a process is net energy-positive, he means he checked. That credibility is the quiet asset behind the louder chemistry.
He has taken the stage at CERAWeek, the energy world's biggest annual gathering - a signal that the incumbents he hopes to recruit are at least willing to listen.