Genomatica and the new road to bioeconomy innovation

From Endearing to Enduring

You don’t see too many shout outs on industry conference stages by one CEO to the technologists of another company, but a few years back Solazyme CEO Jonathan Wolfson took a portion of his keynote address to praise Genomatica’s 6000 ton, 6 week butanediol production campaign, which sounds about as interesting as life insurance and that’s why Wolfson wanted to single it out.

It wasn’t life insurance, it was the Big Bang of the advanced bioeconomy. Suddenly the whole thing burst into light, right there. 

As Jennifer Holmgren once observed, you can run solar and wind technology now through the end of time, and they’ll make lots of sustainable energy but they won’t make sustainable yoga pants.

The new world of sustainability isn’t just about light bulbs and electric drives — as humans, we wear stuff, eat stuff, and inhabit stuff. A lot of the future is going to be about Stuff, and stuff is really hard to make, you’re not just capturing photons or whirling a turbine, you have to start with X and make Y, possibly Z. Capturing energy and doing something with it — which is the whole point of solar technology — is barely getting to first base in advanced materials technology.

Stuff is tough.

The quirky world of renewables

Which is why the Big Bang of the advanced economy wasn’t about Grid-Scale Solar, or A Mighty Wind, it was about Big Stuff.

What makes stuff tough? It’s the challenge of finding the right target, and thence a productive process, both. It’s the search for the Goldilocks molecule.

But there is also the problem of the quirky logic of renewables itself. The quirky logic of carbon pricing — you get help for this molecule but not that one, you get it here but not there, in one place the carbon price is huge and somewhere else it is nominal. Then, there’s the quirky calculus of sustainability — feedstocks and technologies get a bad name based on public whim, not science, and some technologies that aren’t very sustainable at all get a whole lotta love from the environmental community.

Not to mention the quirky logic of the average venture capitalist, and I usually see them dancing to a song I remember by Joe Tex, called I Gotcha:

You never should’ve promised to me, give it here
Don’t hold back, now give it here
Don’t say nothin’, just give it here
Come on