Alumnus keeps his work – and heart – close to Virginia Tech
With an air-capture technology that turns pollutants into renewable commodities, MOVA President Steve Critchfield is hoping to take a Hokie-led business to the big time.
Steve Critchfield has always been one to seize a good opportunity.
In his senior year of high school in Falls Church, his grandmother informed him she would cover half the cost of attending any university in the world. But if he went to Virginia Tech, she’d pay for his full education.
For Critchfield, the deal was a no-brainer.
“When I set foot on the Drillfield for the first time, it was instant love,” he said.
Critchfield went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 1980. Over the four decades since, he’s partnered with Virginia Tech to help establish the Steger Poetry Prize, create a certificate program for city managers, and sponsor the Aaron Slack Memorial Diversity and Social Justice Fund, which provides scholarships and funding to promote diversity and social justice in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
A member of the CALS Dean’s Advisory Council and the advisory board for the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Critchfield was named CALS’ Outstanding Alumnus in 2016.
“Virginia Tech provided me with an atmosphere to grow and to be exposed to different cultures, perspectives, and people,” Critchfield said. “I received more than just an education in Blacksburg – I received a foundation built on Hokie Stone. Sharing my time and financial support helps me pay it forward, exposes me to new ideas, and helps me to keep building on the foundation I received at Virginia Tech.”
Critchfield’s love for Virginia Tech is matched only by his passion for the New River and Roanoke Valleys, where he’s created or backed the start-up of 10 locally based companies, served on the board of the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council, and invested in revitalizing the town of Pulaski.
“It’s all part of giving back,” he said. “I see rural Virginia as the birthplace for next-generation, climate-smart technology and agriculture. It’s a perfect fit for our communities to create jobs, support agriculture, add tax revenue, and revitalize rural downtowns.”
Converting pollution into profit
His current venture, MOVA Technologies, aims to turn air pollution into renewable commodities. With a team almost entirely composed of Hokie engineering alumni, MOVA produces industrial-sized panel-bed filters that selectively capture pollutants from the air to be recycled and reused.
“It’s going to revolutionize pollution control,” Critchfield said. “For the first time, these pollutants are siloed and separated to be resold back into industry as valuable commodities. There’s a market for every pollutant if it’s separate. Instead of going into our atmosphere as pollution, nitrogen can be used as fertilizer, carbon dioxide for soda bubbles, ammonia for fuel, etc.”
The concept was the brainchild of the late University Distinguished Professor Emeritus Arthur Squires, who was a key collaborator on the Manhattan Project and a close friend of Critchfield’s family.
“Two days before he passed away, Arthur delivered to me eight provisional patents,” Critchfield said. “Even though I didn’t know anything about chemistry, I knew Arthur was brilliant and his ideas deserved to be explored.”
MOVA’s technology relies on a panel-bed filtration system about the size of a refrigerator. Pollutants are sucked from the air into the device and through a solid sorbent – a sand-like filtration material that removes the “bad” pollution through a chemical reaction and saves clean gas to be stored.
MOVA tested and developed the technology with Virginia Tech researchers and explored its use in agriculture through federal grant-funded projects. In a project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, MOVA’s system successfully removed ammonia from a commercial poultry house to be used for fertilizer.
“The birds were healthier because they weren’t breathing ammonia,” he said. “They had measurable weight gain, which means more money for producers and less impact to the environment.”
Growing climate-smart “VEGGtables”
Critchfield has also partnered with VEGG Inc. — another Hokie-owned, Pulaski-based startup, in which Critchfield is an investor, that aims to convert abandoned school buildings into indoor vertical farming operations.
In a pilot project at Pulaski’s Jefferson Elementary School, which has been vacant since 1993, MOVA’s filters harvest carbon dioxide from the facility to be recycled back into growing fresh vegetables. VEGG hopes to rent space to local growers looking to expand into controlled environment agriculture with a carbon neutral – or potentially negative – footprint.
“I’m very lucky to have Steve as my mentor,” said VEGG co-founder Luke Allison, a 2017 Virginia Tech graduate who is also the director of communications and advancement at MOVA. “His dedication to improving communities is contagious. Steve always told me it should be our dream to get paid to do good things. I’ve taken that to heart.”
Through MOVA and VEGG, Critchfield combines his passions for entrepreneurship, small-town revitalization, Virginia Tech, and climate-smart agriculture. In the future, he hopes to commercialize MOVA’s filters for use across manufacturing, agriculture, and commodities, as well as carbon capture.
“I feel like I’m carrying forth all the learning I started back in 1976 as an agricultural economics student,” he said. “We want to create a true circular economy of reducing and reusing pollution — using a triple-bottom-line approach that has social, environmental, and economic benefits.”
