How can biofuels challenge the oil industry?

Big bet: Neil Lenninger is chief technology officer of Amyris. The company uses genetically modified yeast to make chemicals and biofuels.

In the mid-1990s, when Neil Lenninger was still an undergraduate, he was a member of the 21-point poker team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He defeated the banker by using card tricks and won hundreds. Ten thousand U.S. dollars. However, compared to what he will do next, the bet is even lower: he co-founded Amyris, a synthetic biology company that beats oil companies by making biofuels. .

Right now, luck seems to stand on the side of the oil company. Biofuel companies like Ameris have engineered yeast to make a hydrocarbon instead of diesel. Now, these companies should have produced hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel. However, it turns out that the difficulty of producing biofuels is greater than their imagination and the cost is higher. Funds for biofuel companies such as Range Fuels have already been warned and filed for bankruptcy.

In early February, Ameris also announced that it will withdraw from almost all biofuels businesses and focus on manufacturing small batches of fine chemicals such as moisturizers. The company’s chief technology officer Ranninger said: “We play with 21 points is really great, as a team, we can easily win seven figures of money. However, fuel and chemicals are trillions of businesses, scale There are several orders of magnitude difference."

Some green energy companies - such as Amiris' competitors LS9 and Gevo, battery maker Seeo, and electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors - their founders or employees are Young engineers from schools like Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are determined to use their talents to solve challenges such as climate change, rather than plunge into the pharmaceutical industry or Wall Street. In the mid-2000s, the US Department of Energy called on the “best and brightest students ... to change the global energy industry landscape” and, in this context, the number of passionate students participating in undergraduate energy courses Soared.

Renninger is a chemical engineer and biologist who was at the forefront of this energy wave. At the beginning of its establishment, Amritus was ambitioned to change the world. The company’s first project is to genetically engineer related microbes to create a malaria drug that promises to save the lives of tens of thousands of people. Ronninger said: "Our compensation is not very generous. They joined because they can gain powerful influence with their science and they are encouraged."

In the next step, Amritus set a more ambitious goal: large-scale production of biofuels, large enough to challenge oil consumption. Ronninger said: "We could say that our next product was strawberry spice, but this will not make Ameris employees excited, but will be unconditionally rejected. Because in the end, who will I wonder if you made a better strawberry spice?"

However, after about seven years of research and development on biofuels, Ameris now requires employees to develop strawberry spices. The company announced its focus on converting biofuels to relatively small batches of products, such as a squalane, a moisturizer for cosmetics, and oils for flavors and fragrances, as well as additives such as plastic bottle additives. Industrial chemicals.

Renninger said that Amritus has not totally given up on fuel production. The company managed to maintain the small-scale production of biofuels; about 150 buses in a city in Brazil use the company's products, but the demand for these buses is only a few hundred thousand liters a year, and it will have an impact on the fuel industry. Consumption must reach several billion liters. The company now hopes to build a larger biofuel plant in France's Total and Cosan's ethanol and natural gas companies in Brazil. Renninger added: “To achieve a production capacity of 1 billion liters requires huge sums of money. We want to use the power of other parties. The balance sheets of these partners allow them to obtain funds at low cost. We cannot do this at this point. ”

Amirus still needs to prove that its own production process can be economically applied to the 50 million-liter fuel plant that is being built this year. The company hopes that the price of spices and specialty chemicals will be higher than that of biofuels, which may make small-volume products profitable. This is an adventurous strategy - because of the fierce competition in the specialty chemicals industry. Moreover, using micro-organisms, even producing millions of liters of fuel is quite challenging. Last year, power shortages and pollution caused Ameris to struggle to reach its production target at a contract manufacturing plant.

At the same time, companies also need to keep employees interested in related products because these products do not have the potential to change the world like biofuels. Some employees have attacked squalane for environmental reasons because it is usually produced using shark liver. In order to stimulate everyone's interest in the development of synthetic squalane, they distributed leaflets for “Saving the Shark” in various laboratories of Amiris.

Ten years ago, Renninger laid out the concept of Amiris when she took a Thai food delivery and wine. He said that if he and other founders knew that they would produce moisturizer one day, the company would not have been able to do so. But for him, the story is not over yet. He said: "We only consider squalane to be a step in the journey. Is squalane important to the company's own interests? Yes. But do we want to be remembered for this? No. Our goal is higher than this. Much more."