Then and Now: 120 Bioeconomy Pioneers look at yesterday, today, inspirations and challenges

Cynthia “C.J”. Warner

Then:  Running global refining at BP –  and, among other things, working on finding renewable feedstocks that we could co-process with Crude.   And not finding much of anything that could be produced at sufficient scale to matter to us.

Now:  Running Operations at Tesoro, and working on – among other things –  developing renewable feedstocks to co-process in our refineries.  And making some promising progress!

Inspirations:  It’s innovation in service of many people’s dreams; it’s hugely challenging and requires effective collaboration across many boundaries; and, although we have regulatory help to drive progress, it still requires focus on being competitive which will foster the kind of strength needed for this industry to ultimately be successful.

Challenges: Competition with incumbents is extremely challenging because the existing industry is so highly efficient and has huge economies of scale.  But, being able to compete head-to-head (without huge subsidies) is necessary for true and sustainable success. So, it takes much more money and more time to get to commercial success than in other industries such as tech devices.