Smoke out: a power plant with zero emissions seemed far-fetched--until bill brown built one.

• Author: Mims, Bryan
• Position: NC TREND: Clean energy

Two degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one from Duke University Law School, 18 years as a New York investment banker and, then, a eureka moment. Bill Brown was walking the streets of New York with one of his MIT classmates, Miles Palmer, who'd been designing military weapons systems. "I said, 'Miles, you've been building weapons of mass destruction, I've been building weapons of financial destruction. Why don't we get together and do something good for a change?'"

That was the genesis of 8 Rivers Capital, the venture-capital incubator the duo founded in Durham. Its mission: develop outside-the-box solutions to some of society's most vexing problems. "We didn't know what it was we were going to invent, and what we were going to finance," Brown says. "We just sort of stepped off the curb into the street. We did not know how we were going to cross the street."

Palmer would do the inventing, Brown would do the financing. The concept that eventually emerged: develop a power plant, fueled by coal or natural gas, that would have no carbon emissions, the biggest offender in warming the planet. Problem was, their design required extra equipment that required extra power--and thus cost extra money. When Brown floated the idea to power companies, they gave him the cold, hard truth: Nobody wants to pay more to be clean.

That was almost eight years ago. Brown is 61 now, sitting in a conference room outside his office on the American Tobacco Campus. It's been a winding path to this moment, but such restlessness has paid off. After college, "I didn't know what to do with my life. I wasn't focusing." Maybe, he thought, he could go back home to Waynesville and practice law with his father, a "country lawyer." With biology and political science degrees from MIT, he enrolled in law school and graduated in 1980. He did go home to Waynesville and spent a year working with his dad before practicing law in New York. In 1990, he went from high-powered lawyer to high-pressured financier. For the next 18 years--first at Goldman Sachs, then at AIG and Morgan Stanley--he helped finance major deals and ran a variety of businesses. Months before the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, he and Palmer formed 8 Rivers.

Brown took a professorship at Duke's law school, where he recruited talent for his new company. But no one was able to solve the problem of turning what is known as "carbon capture" into a viable power plant. Undaunted, Brown and Palmer...