KiOR: the inside true story of a company gone wrong, Part 2

Did KIOR include water in its bio-oil yield claims?

KiOR’s assertion that the technology “is already competitive with oil at $50/barrel with existing subsidies” seems remarkably similar to the speculative analysis completed by Andre Ditsch at the time of the UOP/PNNL paper, based on 65 gallon per ton yields. There is no documentation that The Digest has been able to uncover, nor any scientist we have interviewed familiar with the actual data out of the pilot plant, that supports KIOR yields at breakeven points.

A KiOR staffer relates a tale about André Ditsch. “Suppose you had a restaurant that seated 200 people,” Ditsch is reported to have told a KIOR team member, when questioned about the reporting of the KiOR numbers. “And, you only seated 10 today, but you were going to seat all 200 in the future. If you say that you are at 100% occupancy, that’s not misleading, because you are going to be at 100% eventually.”

The truth may well be that the KiOR yield claims were based around liquids, rather than bio-oil, coming out of the process.

The state of Mississippi alleges just that. Specifically, that:

“Ditsch’s failure to accurately adjust for losses to water and other waste products also rendered the representations to Mississippi officials false. When the BCC reactor was operated at high oxygen levels (greater than 10%), a substantial percentage – more than 30% – of the biocrude produced by the BCC reactor was lost to water. 

“Ditsch’s failure to make an appropriate reduction for losses to water served to substantially inflate his yield estimate; and, as a consequence, the Company’s financial projections misleadingly made the Company appear commercially viable. Neither KiOR nor Khosla nor Cuneo notified Mississippi officials that the Company’s financial projections were grossly inflated to overstated yields.”

Paul O’Connor, as a member of the KiOR board, has a similar theory.

“Hacskaylo, what a disaster area. The 67 gallon figure, that is where I became suspicious. The board hardly saw technical information, as you can imagine people like Condoleezza Rice were not going to be very familiar with technical detail. They were showing us graphs with yields of 68-72 gallons per ton out of the pilot, and they aid that the demo plant was even better. Now my initial reaction was — you’ve got 100 people working in R&D, you’ve got all the best equipment in the world, you’ve figured it out, that’s great.

“But one day I noticed the R&D director, John Hacskaylo fiddling around with the axis, and in his comments to us, he was talking about top of the reactor yield.

“Top of the reactor? That’s the yield coming out of the pyrolysis unit, but that is not the yield coming out of the plant. You have to condense, and you have to recover oil from water, and you lose in the hydrotreater, because for one thing you have to take out oxygen. It’s not a real yield coming out of the plant.

Top of the reactor yields, in the context of transportation fuels, is like counting scotch and water as pure scotch whiskey. Or including the weight of  the orange peel in a projection of orange juice yields.

“If you’re saying 68 at the top of the reactor, at best you are making 55 in the plant. At best. So that’s when I insisted on a technology audit,” O’Connor told The Digest. “It was definitely not at 68-72. There were some points where you could get above 60 but only momentarily, under ideal conditions, for instance with very fresh catalyst. And only in the pilot.” O’Connor confirmed that the demo plant was generating yields in the 30s or low 40s at most.

“Who did the analysis? Were they just stupid or crooks?” O’Connor asked. “It’s not for me to say.”