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

Joel Stone

Then:  In 2005 the present day founders/managing partners of Claeris founded ASAlliances Biofuels (ASAB), a pioneering company; ASAB was the largest ethanol development project in the world with a production capacity of 330 million gallons per year. ASAB became one of the first dynamic business enterprises to emerge out of the highly fragmented ethanol industry.Joel Stone became the first employee and COO of ASAB in 2006. ASAB was capitalized with $432 million of debt and equity. The financing was and remains the largest ethanol financing ever completed and was awarded the Project Finance Institute 2006 Environmental Deal of the Year. After bringing on board a high caliber management team to manage the construction and startup of three facilities a sale of the business was engineered. Joel was directly involved in the sale of ASAB coordinating meetings with potential buyers. July 27, 2007 ASAB was in the final dealmaking. August 2007, ASAB was sold to Verasun Energy Corp.for $725 million.

Now: I am President and founder of ConVergInce Advisers and is considered a pioneer in biotechnology related to his sustained involvement since the early years with his innovation in technology development and innovations in business and commercial business growth. He has been a long term visionary and respected leader in commercialization of industrial biotechnology with numerous accomplishments since the 1970’s.  Joel is the former President of Green Biologics Inc. where he led the development of the commercial platform of the company in North America for renewable n-butanol for use in the renewable chemical markets and ultimately performance derivatives. He now also serves as Executive VP for Lee Enterprises Consulting and offers adviser services for industrial biotechnology companies overseeing practice groups in renewable chemicals, biofuels, and Anaerobic Digestion/Biogas.

Inspirations: With an increasing awareness of health and environmental concerns, and the growing demand for greener products, the chemical industry is moving rapidly to add renewable alternative chemicals to their hydrocarbon-based products.

Challenges:  Finding abundant, cost effective feedstock, and assessing technological innovations are the current keys to this industry. As consumer acceptance and government support for these products continues to increase, research and innovation will continue to drive this industry forward. All of these elements are resulting in disruptive innovation leading into a reinvention of the chemical industry as it is known today. My view of industry is best understood through the following quote I use on my personal emails: “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

Through my past experiences I envision new challenges to range from project conceptualization, leadership through process and/or project engineering, and commercial strategy including program or project management for bio-chemical production. Collaborations and partnerships will be required to survive the Valley of Death during process development and scale up of fermentation and downstream processes to pilot scale, demonstration scale, and on the design, installation and startup of commercial operations.

Integrating synthetic biology into the processes of the future will be a unique undertaking by harnessing the engineering expertise of commercialization experts with the new science including CRISPR, nanotechnology and innovations yet to come.