They Might Be Giants, the story of syngas fermentation and Jupeng Bio

First things first, this is a story of syngas fermentation, not the definitive story, though it’s pretty definitive on the Jupeng Bio story. For the definitive story of the entire landscape of syngas fermentation, it would have been required to bring back the late Richard Forster of LanzaTech, the late Jim Gaddy of BRI, into a room and that’s been impossible for some years now. I’d have paired them with Mark Niederschulte of Jupeng Bio, Bill Roe of Coskata, Jennifer Holmgren and Sean Simpson of LanzaTech, Tim Cesarek of Synata Bio, possibly, Wes Bolsen, Dan Cummings, Ralph Panner, Todd Kimball, Ray Huenke, Peter Williams, Vinod Khosla, and Doug Cameron, to name a few at top of mind, far from all. The result would run not the length of a Digest column but the length of the Bible, both testaments, and it wouldn’t be near enough to tell the story.

Years ago, they called it “the technology that dare not speak its name” because it was too crazy risky, when they did not call it “the technology that could not scale” between the guffaws in many board rooms. After the laughter subsided, the catcalls, the tech-shaming, those who stayed to learn, usually came away impressed. Many invested in three companies — then, LanzaTech, Coskata and Ineos Bio. Later, LanzaTech, Synata Bio and Jupeng Bio. The technology landscape is littered with good ideas that did not work out, but the Big Three of syngas fermentation have shown remarkable resiliency.

It’s a simple idea, in concept, it’s all about execution. Find an organism that can consume the carbon found in waste gases if they are bubbled into an aqueous solution in just the right way, and especially find one that produces a waste product (to them) that is valuable (to us), such as ethanol. Yes, simple idea. Execution? Not simple. One of the shining success stories of the advanced bioeconomy is the pioneers of syngas fermentation proving it could be done, done reliably enough, fast enough, long enough, efficiently enough. Then, proving that engineers could take it to sufficient scale to make an impact on carbon and get enough economies of scale to make it interesting to investors and the owners of waste carbon feedstocks. Good news, the world has a lot of syngas.

I’ve known Mark Niederschulte, Jupeng Bio’s CEO, for about 15 years more or less, and we had a chance several months ago to have a long, off-the-record conversation about the story of syngas fermentation, and in recent days we had another one, shorter, for the record, in which we reached all the way back to 1989 and forward to today. It’s a bright story, and not only for those who cheered the LanzaTech IPO and the several successful scale-ups and the many products demonstrated by the LanzaTech organism portfolio. There’s far more here. I am looking forward to hosting Jennifer Holmgren, Tim Cesarek and Mark Niederschulte on the ABLC stage at the end of next month. Consider this column a down payment on the exploration into this technology platform and its success to date and opportunity ahead.

Jim Lane 

Mark, let’s start with your entry point into the world of syngas renewables. 

Mark Niederschulte 

I’ve been at this since July of 2006 when I got into this area at BP. BP’s goal in renewables at the time was “what is the gain relative to emissions?” Then, when we got sold to INEOS, now we were part of a private company that prioritized making money as well as addressing emissions. So, the perspective changed because the question changed, but not the outcome, or even some of the challenges that even existed back then. Such as, thinking of a carbon emission as a form of disposing of waste carbon, if you wish to dispose of it by converting it into a useful product that offsets the use of new fossil carbon, it typically requires hydrogen. If you are trying to minimize the carbon footprint, you need green hydrogen. So, where are you going to get affordable green hydrogen? 

Back then, if you brought up electrolysis, they’d go, “yeah, right, no one’s going to pay you a market price that’s 10 times fossil price, for hydrogen. So that’ll never be a viable carbon disposal method.” 

So, that’s how biomass gasification came to dominate, not only from a desire to more productively use biomass. 

Jim Lane 

So in some ways, this was the search for hydrogen.

Mark Niederschulte

Green hydrogen framed it, renewable hydrogen.  The syngas we could make from biomass was a little carbon monoxide dominant, but it’s got enough hydrogen in it so that the fermentation worked and we could make ethanol and single cell protein. And that was 100% green in the eyes of all the green groups, at that time. So that was really our focus. But once renewable electricity got cheap enough, you had a source of hydrogen, independent of biomass gasification, which allowed you to deal with all these waste gases. And of course, China is the king of waste gases, because they have syngas everywhere. Yes, INEOS had refineries and chemical plants, but it’s nothing like China. So, the business model and the feedstocks have continued to evolve.

Jim Lane 

Let me go back a little bit further, in your own backstory. Amoco and BP merged in the 1990s. Did you come from the BP side or the Amoco side?

Mark Niederschulte 

Amoco. I started at the Amoco Research Center in 1988

Jim Lane

What were you doing at the company before encountering syngas fermentation?

Mark Niederschulte  

I got my PhD at the University of Illinois, and then went with the herd north to Amoco and did research. I was working on modeling for new plants. Then I moved to the chemical plant and worked there for a while. Then, Amoco needed somebody to be their technical representative with all the big PTA (terephthalic acid) JVs they had, so I moved into that business, and that’s when I that was, from 1993. I flew 150-200,000 miles that year, and I never fell below 100,000 until COVID hit. During that period, I went to China for the first time. After I did that for a while, then they decided they wanted to move me into business. So then I got into specialty chemicals, commodity chemicals, pretty much all the chemicals we had. So PTA, nitrile, I was a commercial manager. 

Jim Lane

I remember at one time BP Amoco was the number one customer out of Chicago to London for American Airlines.

Mark Niederschulte  

O’Hare was a major hub for United, and major hub for American. Amoco was actually flying United, and then we were bought by BP. They said, Oh yeah, you’re gonna be flying American now. And we’re like, really? We were all super high in United’s frequent flyer program, and that actually mattered back then. Nowadays, it’s kind of commodity. And they said, no worries, we will work that out. And they did. We got to fly first class for the price of a business ticket, and did that for years. I actually had to stop going to London so much because I was going to have to pay taxes in the UK. They said, “you’ve exceeded the number of days allowed, so you can’t come here anymore, you have to go to Germany.” I would go visit the plants in Germany and things like that. But, my boss was in the UK, so I always stopped in the UK.

Jim Lane 

So in the mid-2000s, that’s when you had your first meetings on gas fermentation technology.

Mark Niederschulte  

In 2004, I was managing the technology licensing and catalyst business for BP; we were the large world’s largest licensor of petrochemical technology. And they said, we want to get into renewables technology, so go find us somebody to talk to. So we looked at 324 companies around the world, just to figure out what would matter to BP.  BP started with three principles. It has to be safe, it has to be reliable, most importantly, it has to be scalable. Because if it was a specialty chemical, or it makes little plants or something like that, because our emissions were so high, it wouldn’t do anything for BP.

Jim Lane

So, you had to have big wins?

Mark Niederschulte  

In a way. They said, “We get that it may not make money. Every day in all of our factories, whether refinery, chemical plant, we pay to reduce our pollution.“ And I mean, for sure, [companies like BP] don’t get enough credit for the amount of money they spend trying to reduce pollution. I mean, it’s inherent in what they do, or they at least attempted to do. They said “It’s okay if it’s not going to be a huge money maker, but it has to be a huge pollution reducer. It’s got to make a material difference.”

Jim Lane 

So volume was a big deal.

Mark Niederschulte  

Yes, the ability for it to be the used widely. Ideally, you convert a lot of carbon, and convert it in something people want to buy. And so when we found the syngas fermentation platform, it didn’t take too much effort to say, Okay, well, we know there’s a lot of CO around. And we know that if you make ethanol, you can do all kinds of things with ethanol, right? You can make ethylene out of it, and then you have polyethylene. 

Jim Lane 

So, you met with Jim Gaddy, and you’d seen the technology. How, how far was it along at that point?

Mark Niederschulte

Well, actually, I met with Jim Gaddy, and I went to New Zealand to meet with LanzaTech, and I spoke with Bill Roe at Coskata. I went to meet with everybody, and I talked to some of the universities that were doing the research. If you remember, Coskata was formed in 2006, Sean and Richard had formed LanzaTech in 2005 and so they were a year old. Coskata was kind of new. And then Gaddy, he started research on this in 1989 and by 2006 he had a 400 liter CSTR fermenter at pilot scale, which had been built in 2000 and the gasifier been added in 2003. So, he had a fully integrated pilot plant, biomass in, ethanol out. He’d been running that, the fully integrated plant for three years, and the fermenter at pilot scale for six.

Jim Lane

So, he was the only one at that stage that was fully integrated?

Mark Niederschulte

Yes. Sean had shown me his lab. He had rented lab space in a building and in New Zealand, and he had some bubble columns and things like that. But they were nowhere close to what Gaddy had done, at that time. Gaddy’s problem at that time, he had all this data, and he had done enough work with the engineering companies to realize he couldn’t pay for the plant. It was over $100 million and he’s, like, “I don’t have it.” So, he looked at us, and he’s like, great, you give me the 100 million dollars, and then I’ll let you do licensing. We’re, like, “No, I don’t think so.” Then we got sold to INEOS. I was included in that; all the technology licensing was included in that. So the effort that went to INEOS

Jim Lane  

And things stopped, paused? What happened? 

Mark Niederschulte 

Jim Ratcliffe is the primary owner of INEOS. He’s a fascinating guy, and he’s also extremely smart. We went to talk to him. We assumed he would tell us to shut that effort down, because it was new technology, not commercially proven and all that. And he didn’t, he actually liked the idea. He said, we have waste gases, it’d be great to try to reduce some of our carbon emissions. So he let us continue, and we finally completed negotiations. We bought BRI July 1, 2008 and that was INEOS Bio. And we started the design of Vero Beach.

Jim Lane  

Where was New Planet Energy in all this?

Mark Niederschulte 

New Planet Energy was trying to buy the technology instead of us. They were bidding against us, and they had the Vero Beach site. So, we worked together; they were very tiny percentage of the Vero Beach project.

Jim Lane

Then there were discussions with DOE and USDA that took place.

Mark Niederschulte 

Dan Cummings was our business manager, he used to work for USDA and knew a lot of people in DC, and we had worked with some consultants that also helped us. But it took the project team a full year’s work to finish everything required to apply for those. Eventually, we got the USDA grant, the USDA loan, and the Treasury renewable energy production grant, but it added a year to the timeline.

Jim Lane  

So, the commercial project became well known, and proceeded towards completion. What happened then?

Mark Niederschulte

The plant was mechanically complete in May 2012, and we made our first commercial production of ethanol in the big fermenter in 2013 and we spent a lot of the time in between, commissioning the unit, figuring out how to process biomass so they would work in the gasifier. Now, I was raised on a farm, so at least I was familiar with agricultural operations, but, man, moving around raw biomass and shredding it and screening it and drying it and getting it into the biomass gasifier, that wasn’t something that was our sweet spot, for sure. But, we got the right people in place, and that took a little while. 

Jim Lane

Aside from the logistics, how was the biomass itself working?

Mark Niederschulte

One of the things we did when we went to that site, we were paid to take all of the county’s biomass that had previously been just sent to the landfill. or just chopped up, and used for mulch. So, we got all kinds of different biomass, not like what we were used to seeing in Arkansas, which was more like shredded oak trees and stuff. Here, we had all the invasive species, too numerous to list, that they were always fighting in Florida, And, palm trees, which are tough. Also, Florida Power and Light brought us all their right-of-way trimmings, stuff like that. Nothing we ever processed was the same by the day, sometimes by the hour. That was a challenge. And then, the torrential rain. It was difficult.

Jim Lane

What was the most difficult thing in biomass handling, size, consistency?

Mark Niederschulte

The gasifier itself is pretty forgiving on size. It can take six inch long, sticks, things like that, but it couldn’t take the sand. It seems obvious now that we talk about it, being Florida and all, but we didn’t screen out the sand at first. So we got sand into all of our rotating equipment, you know, the things that move in the gasifier, which caused mechanical problems. So, we had to get through that, and once we solved all those problems, then we started running much better, and that’s when we made the ethanol. 

Yet, we had non-technology problems that absolutely killed us. The first one went back to the fact that we were producing electricity. To Florida Power and Light, we were an electricity producer, not a consumer. So, if there was ever an issue with the local grid, like a lightning strike on a local transformer or something, they closed the interconnect and shut us off.  And our system wasn’t designed for that properly, turns out, and it kept shutting our plant down. 

So that run, that first ethanol run in July of 2013, it stopped because there was a lightning storm in Vero Beach and Florida Power and Light shut the power off. That’s when we discovered that Vero Beach is the lightning capital of the US. We should have known that, but we didn’t know it. And that when you have a really hot gasifier and you shut it off, and you don’t have the ability to run the blowers and cool it down, that’s really hard on it. So, we had to work through that, and I have to say, Florida Power and Light was not the most receptive partner, we had to solve it on our own. 

So, this is a big 750 cubic meter fermenter, and when it is shut off from gas, it dies. Then you got to figure out disposal. So, that took time to work out. The, we discovered the hydrogen cyanide. The fermenter would be running really well, and then it would die, and hydrogen cyanide has a very, very short half life. So if you took a gas sample and you analyzed it, it never showed up because it was long gone. So it took us a while to figure out it was hydrogen cyanide. We had to design a removal system, put that into the pilot plant. Worked fabulous in the pilot plant, put it into Vero Beach, designed it, had it built, installed. we turned it on, and never saw cyanide again. It worked wonderfully. 

So all’s good, we’re making fuel. We were almost two years into the plant, and we were running better.We had two gasifiers, for reliability, if one was having issues, we could run on one. But, turns out one of the heat exchangers was improperly manufactured and it failed. One of the big ones. We had two big heat exchangers, so we were down to one gasifier. So we became unreliable in terms of operating hours. 

Then, the final straw. There was a German company who supplied our syngas compressor; we only had one of those because we thought it would be reliable enough not to be an issue. So, we shut down for maintenance after three years, they flew in from Germany, did the maintenance, we turned it back on, and the unit exploded. 

So that was why we disappeared off the radar, nothing to do with our technology, we had to wait more than a year for the new unit. So, we made other improvements in the meantime, and stuff like that. But it was hard to explain.  

Yet, we had over 40,000 hours of operating data from the fermenters, and over 12,000 hours of operating data from the gasifiers. So we took all that data, sat down with the vendors who supplied the equipment, and with Amec who did the design, construction and the after-startup support. We brought them on site, and we basically designed the second plant. So what would we change about the gasifier? What would we change about the fermenter and anything else? And we had that design.

But support for biofuels was waning. Fracking came in the US and now, you could build chemical plants off that low cost platform. There hadn’t been a world scale, new technology, chemical plant built in a long time. All of a sudden they were all being announced, new crackers, things like that. So, INEOS decided to sell the business. The logical place to put our types of plants was China. We had 10 companies bid on it, and Jupeng won the bid. 

Jim Lane 

Did they buy the Vero Beach project?

Mark Niederschulte  

In the fall of 2016 a hurricane hit Vero Beach, there was damage at the plant, and Jupeng said, we don’t want it, we want our plant in China. So they didn’t put in an offer on the plant. We took the design that was already complete, and that is Shanxi Bio.

Jim Lane  

 I think you told me at one point, is that almost everybody, or everybody who had an opportunity to come over, came over to Jupeng.

Mark Niederschulte 

Yes,  100% of the people we offered jobs; we had an engineering group, we had a research group. So everybody at Fayetteville came. We didn’t try to get all the operators, because we didn’t have an operating plant, but we took a lot of the operating engineers, and then the commercial people like myself, they all went.

Jim Lane 

If I recall correctly, you stayed in the same office building.

Mark Niederschulte

Yes, INEOS Bio moved us to Houston in 2015 and we were sold in 2016, the sale was finalized in April 2017 when we got CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) approval, and I went down the hallway, from the south part of the building to the north part of the building on the same floor. I have the same parking spot, we’re all in the same building, we just take a left instead of a right out of the elevator, and a different sign on the door. It was very friendly, we’re still all friends.

Jim Lane 

It’s been seven years since the closing of the sale, summarize what happened during that period. 

Mark Niederschulte

First year, we had to find where we were going to build [the new plant], what gas stream was the logical one to use, and who are we going to obtain it from, how to get steam and utilities. So it took us a year to find the right partner. Once we did that, signed all the contracts, started the engineering again, then Amec (now, Wood) office in Shanghai did the detailed design and then did construction management. We chose a complex in China and Shanxi that had both coal to liquids plants and a liquefied natural gas plant, both with waste gases; they had the utilities, things like that. And, Shanxi is a high density industrial province; so, lots of vendors and highly qualified people chemical plant operations. That’s where we built the plant, and we turned it on in December of 2020. But it was the time of COVID and we had a heck of a time getting people into China to commission and start it up and help with operations. And that was, that’s that was pretty much painful through 2022.

Jim Lane

Tell us about the COVID period.

Mark Niederschulte 

As an example, in 2019 when we were actively doing the project, I would go to China once a month and no problem. It actually was cheaper for me to fly to Shanghai than it was to fly to Fayetteville from Houston, which still blows my mind. It was $650 to go to Shanghai, $750 to go to Fayetteville. Once COVID hit, you had to quarantine, and you had a limit on how long you could stay, 90 days.

Jim Lane

What was the quarantine like? How long, where? You sat in the hotel room and did nothing with someone tossed you food in a bag, like a leper colony?

Mark Niederschulte

Yeah like that, only worse. We all got off the plane. They checked us to make sure we didn’t have any issues, put us on a bus, took us to a hotel, everybody’s in hazmat suits, showed us to the room, and they pointed to the threshold, and they said, If you step over, this quarantine starts again. When you hear a knock on the door, don’t answer it. That just means we’re delivering food, We’ll come by and measure your temperature once a day, roughly the same time. So when you hear that knock, open up the door, don’t speak, have a mask on. And, that’s what I did. It wasn’t fun. It was 14 days of that, and then another 14 days where you could actually go outside, but you couldn’t do anything for 28 days. And, then we got to go to the plant, where they wanted to quarantine us again, but we were able to be quarantined at the plant [for a week]. We couldn’t interact with anybody, but we could actually be in the plant. So we had our own little office, but we couldn’t interact with anybody from the China team.

Jim Lane

So, 35 days in total. It was, I think when Apollo 11 came back, I think they got 14 days. 

Mark Niederschulte 

Yeah, Apollo was a case of theoretical strange microbes from outer space. This was guaranteed to kill you, [COVID] microbes from wherever they came from. On the return, the US didn’t, thankfully, require quarantine. We sent two teams over. I went with the first team. Our engineering manager went with a second team. We had six or seven, depending on what we were trying to do. In two senses, we were lucky. One, our quarantine hotel actually had decent internet access, so I could do emails, and work on project documents most of the time, though it definitely slowed us down. Second, we’re really lucky as a company that we have people that have dedicated their life’s work to seeing this technology be successful. It’s more than a job, it’s kind of a calling. At first, I was wondering what kind of response we would get when we said, “Hey, we’re going to ask you to go to China. It’s going to be 90 days. You’re going to spend 35 days in quarantine. Can’t tell you what it’s going to be like, but we really need you to go.” Everybody said yes.

Jim Lane

What kind of team did you have at this time resident in China?

Mark Niederschulte

Our owner is based in Beijing, so his office is was expanded to accommodate Jupeng Bio personnel; we’ve got business BD people, business development people, project engineer, process engineers, and the Shanxi office at the plant, and we have more than 70 full-time staff — normal for an operating plant. 

Jim Lane

What does it look like in Shanxi, today?

Mark Niederschulte  

So if you were to put a picture of the fermentation unit at Vero Beach next to a picture of the fermentation unit at Shanxi Bio, you would think they were the same plant, aside from units enclosed at Shanxi for cold weather which was not an issue at Vero Beach. The fermentation section at Vero Beach worked pretty well, there were some improvements we made, but nothing like what we’ve done for the gasifier. The Vero Beach fermenter could make roughly 20,000 tons of ethanol, now that fermenter can make about 40,000 so we basically doubled the productivity. Also, we’re recovering the cell mass as single cell protein. And to give you a really rough approximation of cell mass, it’s roughly 20% of the ethanol production. At Shanxi Bio, we’re recovering the single cell protein for animal feed, aquaculture, and there are derivatives of single cell protein as higher value products. 

Jim Lane 

I wanted to ask you about the feedstock because you mentioned that the Vero biomass feedstock phantasmagoria was a daily Cracker Jack surprise. Now, it’s waste gas at this plant, is that more consistent?

Mark Niederschulte

It’s a waste gas, so it’s not like we can give our supplier a spec, right? So that’s something we’re working on that actively right now, because we see a variation of 50% relative in the CO content. It can go down to 20%, then 30, and then 40, sometimes slowly, sometimes quick, and the ratio of CO and hydrogen is always changing. With biomass, it has a relatively consistent carbon to hydrogen ratio, and so you’d see variation based on how well you were able to stop the conversion at the CO and not go all the way to CO2. And, once we started the gasifier and it’s running, it’s only biomass going in. So the only way to adjust the conversion and to adjust, you know, so that you deal with wetter or drier feedstock is to convert more or less of the CO and hydrogen to CO2 and water. So, we have variations, but the carbon hydrogen balance was more or less consistent.

Jim Lane

Going back 20 years ago, you mentioned you had visited Coskata and LanzaTech. Back then, syngas fermentation was the “technology they said would never work at scale”, there were a lot of investments in other technology approaches because of the “crazy risk” perception. Many of those other companies and technology platforms went away. Yet, all three of the syngas fermentation technologies are still with us. Is that something you expected from what you learned back then, or is this a good surprise?

Mark Niederschulte

We put two years into the evaluation. I saw Dr. Gaddy on late July of 2006 and we bought it July 1 2008 so over that two year period, I had an awful lot of smart people in BP and consultants, and I had the different perspectives that Sean Simpson had and Bill Roe and the technical people at Coskata and then Dr Gaddy and his staff. Really, after we talked about it and got our hands on the data, the concern on it was the hydrogen side, would you ever get access to enough hydrogen to make it economic? But as far as the scale side, no problem. As far as the safety side, chemical guys aren’t so worried about syngas. Gas sounds kind of scary, but a lot of people have natural gas in their homes, and they manage not to blow themselves up. And ethanol as a building block in the chemical industry and its use directly as a fuel was well known. So we all thought it was great. 

And, Dr Gaddy, prior to the sale, had his know-how manual. The stuff where he said, I can’t tell you that, because it’s not patented. I’ll give you all my patents. I’ll explain the patents, but I’m not going to give you all this know how till you pay for it, because once you’ve got it, I can’t get it back. And even under an NDA, I’m not willing to do it. So when we closed the sale we had a worry over a smoking gun, the ‘yeah, but…’ — but, there wasn’t one. As good chemical plant operations people would, our questions were, how do we get more out of the equipment? How do you make it more reliable? And he would give us limits, and we found that in operating the plant we could exceed even his limits. So, there have been cases where we have reach two and a half times the ’absolute limit’.

Jim Lane

Give me an example.

Mark Niederschulte

We went to China, to use a recent example, and we said, look, here are the parameters we like to operate in. And if you go above these you stress the bacteria out. And we quite like our bacteria. We quite like them to think life is good and to just happily live and make ethanol. Don’t drink too much of it. Go to bed early, and, you know, reproduce and be happy. And if you go to these [levels], we said, you’re going to stress them out, and they don’t want to be stressed out any more than you do. 

I came in the next day and they were running like, about 30% over what we told them not to do. And we said, no, no, no, no, we got to change it. And then I looked at it, and they’d been there for like, nine or 10 hours. So we said, oh, well, fine, don’t go any higher, but let’s just stay here for a little while. And it was fine. We’re finding some of the limitations when you get to commercial scale, the limitations are limitations of the equipment, the operating environment allowed by that equipment. 

Jim Lane

So, it’s not a case that results decline as you progress to scale?

Mark Niederschulte

If you think about lab scale, you know, that’s glassware. And you know, we’re running in fermenters that are not high pressure, but certainly higher than glass, which are atmospheric, and not running with highly designed mass transfer agitators. So, what we can do is so different from what we see in the lab that some of the boundaries we thought existed, once we nudged up against them and went over them, we just kept going. And once we determined we could keep going, then we kept going in more areas and found the bacteria is much more robust and much more flexible than we gave it credit. That’s what we found.

Jim Lane

What’s been the most interesting lesson you learned?

Mark Niederschulte

As I mentioned, I got to talk to Sean Simpson at LanzaTech when it was just the Sean and Richard show, and Sean is a microbiologist. He and Richard were all about the microbiology side. And you see today with LanzaTech, “the bacteria is the factory” and things like that. But, Dr. Gaddy was a professor of chemical engineering. He told me this. “We figured out how to make the biology work and explain it to somebody that doesn’t have a microbiology degree, because chemical plant operators probably are not microbiologists.” His experience was all around safety, reliability, repeatability, you know, how are you going to keep something that, if you stop feeding and it dies, alive and stuff like that, completely different conversation from what I was having with Sean.

I loved both of the conversations. I found them fascinating, completely different. My perception was that Coskata was the one trying to figure out how to wedge itself into this space. Gaddy had already staked out the commercialization, operational side of using the biological technology, and Sean was firmly in the camp of what microbiology can do with this bacteria and genetic manipulation. So, Coskata became Synata Bio and they had quite a bit of work on reactors.

When we talked about this in BP, there wasn’t the appetite to go so deep into microbiology, that was not the driver, What is especially interesting to me is that the thing that became the commodity was the genetic manipulation. You can get a gene sequencing now for what, a couple thousand dollars, you can get them quickly. But it’s not what you genetically do to the bacteria, it’s what the bacteria can inherently do if you can figure out how to give it the right environment. So if you can remove constraints that are imposed on it by its environment, which is how you manage mass transfer and feedstock and catalyst and things like that. The bacteria, even native, you know, no modifications involved, can do some amazing things. That’s basically what Dr Gaddy had asserted. And he was right. God, bless his heart. 

Jim Lane

What, what can the industry do to go faster in the future? It takes so many years to bring these technologies to scale. 

Mark Niederschulte  

We actually have been working on that. Example, CO2 fermentation is something we’ve known about, but we said, this hydrogen thing’s an issue, right? And then we discovered, particularly in China, where they have a vast excess of renewable electricity and an interconnect problem. So, they’re willing to do green hydrogen and put in electrolyzers, or give you the renewable electricity, and you put in your own electrolyzers. We went from “wow, we think this is going to work”, to demonstrating it in a commercial fermenter in seven months. In part, because our skill set is the plant, because we had both the Vero Beach, all the learnings, implementing those learnings, getting to the next generation at Shanxi Bio, we’ve been running the fermenter at pilot scale for 24 years. So we have this huge category of data and experiences, what works, what doesn’t work. So, this was a completely different organism. The CO2 fermentation wasn’t bacteria, it was archaea, and yet, we were still able to bring it to commercial scale on very, very short period of time.

Jim Lane

There’s been a lot of discussion about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Are you a believer that that are with these large data sets that you have, there are with AI some opportunities to gain insights.

Mark Niederschulte 

We do. We haven’t figured out how to marry the data set with the AI capability, yet. When we’re running a fermenter, we get his massive data set, and if we could use AI to query it, you know, correlate something. that would be useful, because sometimes we see, you know, for what it’s worth, you get different outcomes with the same bacteria in the same operating conditions, depending on its state, is it happy and hearty, or is it stressed and recovering? 

Jim Lane 

So, a pending assignment. If I could give you a magic wand and you could make the next two years be exactly as you wish them to be., what would the next two years bring for the company and the technology?

Mark Niederschulte

Honestly, money. We’ve got so much technology improvements that we’ve demonstrated because we put our CO2 conversion technology on Shanxi Bio; we have this second generation design for the biomass gas fire. We found somebody with whom to build. It looks like they’d be a great partner. But, you know, we’re we’re not INEOS, so and we just don’t have the money to do everything as fast as we could do it, so we’ll do it in time, and that’s what we’ve been doing.

Jim Lane

What would be the best kind of a company you’d like to be or a investor or source of money you’d like to be in introduced to what, what would the ideal one be?

Mark Niederschulte 

We’re in our round B now we’re trying to close it. Our biggest shareholder outside of Jupeng is Sinopec, the Sinopec capital arm, and they’re obviously a strategic company and we’re doing work with them as well on the engineering side. And, we’re talking to people in sustainable aviation fuels and some other ethanol derivatives, people in single cell protein area. Over time, we’d like to expand our investor set.

So, we’ll leave the Jupeng Bio story there, but it wouldn’t a story in which the phrase “Dr. Gaddy” is invoked without a Gaddy tale, told. So many people tell so many of them. I’ll mention three.

First one. One day, Jim Gaddy is meeting a class for the first time at the University of Arkansas, where he taught. He had two books on his lecture desk, one was the class textbook, one was a nice, fancy copy of the Bible. He held up up the textbook and said, “This is the book we study by.” Then, he held up up the Bible and said, “This is the book I live by.”

Second, is a saying.  “Always forgive, but never forget, so that it doesn’t happen a second time.”

Last one. One day, Dr. Gaddy was asked by a first-year PhD student, why didn’t he schedule weekly meetings, like, it seemed, all the other groups on campus did.? He replied, I’ll hold meetings when it’s needed, but a weekly meeting just forces people to make up presentations to fill the time.

Makes you think. How many presentations, the multi-slide type, we’ve all sat through where the message was always the same: no progress, in as many distracting, obfuscating, “we’re busy as bees” words as possible.  I think of how much time I might have saved, had I lived up on Planet Gaddy instead of Planet Earth. Of course, it’s what you’d expect from an engineer, always pushing on rate, always pushing on yield. Just a little more. Just a little more there. Maybe, a little more, here. Thirty-five years later, presto! Magic! Syngas fermentation has arrived. Plenty of waste gas out there, and waste biomass, in this world gone awry. So, plenty to work on.

Sigh, Planet Gaddy. Here on Earth, it seems that investors never forgive and always forget. But let’s not forget syngas fermentation. These three companies, They Might be Giants.

Read more about Jupeng Bio, here.