Genomatica and the new road to bioeconomy innovation

GF Biochemicals is an example. Here’s a company that set out to make sustainable levulinic acid. Eventually discovering that no matter how well they made levulinic acid, they needed customers to develop applications for levulinic. It wasn’t that anyone thought that was a bad idea. It’s just that you can’t make levulinic very cost-effectively from petroleum or natural gas, so nobody ever focused much on the task. Offtakes were hard to come by, prices not what were expected. You hardly hear of levulinic any more, and the same problem has beset companies that set out to make succinic acid.

Choosing the molecule

The DOE put out a famous list in 2004 of chemicals that could be effectively made from renewables, and a number of companies have been pursuing the molecules on that list, and succinic acid was one of them. All of those ventures will struggle with adoption because of the lack of applications.

Genomatica CEO Christophe Schilling

“That’s for the big companies,” Genomatica CEO Christophe Schilling told the Digest not long ago. “Companies like Reverdia can be successful with succinic acid, and DuPont with PDO, because they have the organizational history and the patience to develop those markets over a long period of time. Those molecules will be very valuable to them, and they are doing the hard work to develop the markets.”

But as Schilling explains, that’s a tough equation for the smaller company. 

You see, the world of chemicals is made up of three categories they don’t teach you about in the School of Chemistry but you learn about in the School of Life.

1. Molecules that you can make in vast quantities, cheap as hell, from petroleum and natural gas, and that the petro guys have been working on to optimize down the costs and scale to Jupiterian proportions for up to 100 years and for which applications abound.

2. Molecules that you can’t make in vast quantities, cheap as hell, from petroleum and natural gas, and so the petro guys have been completely ignoring, so that no matter how well you make it from some alternative there is going to be a painful scale-up, optimization and application development effort that only really big companies that think in two-figure year scales and eight-figure investment scales are ever going to succeed at.

3. Molecules that you can’t make cheaply in vast quantities from petroleum and natural gas, but have existing, smallish, high-value markets anyway because of some unavoidably attractive chemical properties. Here, smaller companies can get into the game.

That’s why Genomatica’s most recent pivot is of great interest.