KiOR: The Inside True Story of a Company Gone Wrong. Part 4, the Year of Living Disingenuously

The Year of Living Disingenuously

Former GE CEO Jack Welch once said, “an organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” He added that “The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.”

Would KiOR pass the Welch test? For sure, numerous KiOR staffers of the time believed that the company had a management problem more than a technology problem. No matter how dire the technological challenges seemed.

As Paul O’Connor observed, “no one [in power] analyzed the pilot plant data. Andre [Ditsch] would say ‘oh, go out and hire MIT PhDs.’ But they are not the ones who are going to scale up a process. Fred let Andre go his way, and they hired too many people from Albemarle across the street. Catalysts are important; you need a few people. But you need a lot of process people, and that balance went wrong.”

Other staffers point to a highly competent technical team that had been assembled. “KiOR forced them out or fired them or they left because of the poor professional working environment,” said one team member of the time.

The balance was precarious, as 2012 dawned. Everything was riding on the performance in the first commercial plant.

In our next installment, we’ll see how that next-gen catalyst platform, and KiOR’s attempt to make Columbus produce 67 gallons per ton worked out. The promoters said that it was not only possible, it was being done at the Demo unit. The skeptics said that the Demo unit was producing 60% as much as was claimed. That Columbus would produce around half that, again. And then there was the Stealth Team, proposing a radical new technology capable, they believed, of reaching something like 80 gallons per ton. And then there was the “next-gen catalyst” platform that Cannon was referring to and “a steady march to our target yield of 92 gallons per bone dry ton.”

If 2012 was another year of private failure and public bravado, a year of living disingenuously, 2013 would be the year in which the multiple streams of fiction and non-fiction would merge into a river of raw data that would make the truth clear. The company had reached scale, but was still in the slow process of commissioning, so there was still room for doubt, or hope.

Skeptics, promoters, innovators — who would be proven right? We continue the story in the next part of our series.