TRANSCRIPTION 🔗
00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Today's show includes, among other things, directed evolution, rabbit poop, sustainable aviation fuel, and polyester. Let's do It. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Jennifer Holmgren, the CEO of lonz Tech. Jennifer's problem is this, how do you take pollution from steel plants, smokestacks, beat it to bacteria and get the bacteria to excrete Ethanol. Ethanol is a kind of alcohol. It's the kind of alcohol you drink, and in addition to being made in the alcohol you drink, ethanol is made as a fuel additive. In that context, it's often made from corn or sugarcane. But expanding the footprint of industrial agriculture to grow, say more corn for fuel, can mean more emissions and higher food prices. Hence the idea behind lonz tech find a different source of ethanol, one that doesn't require food crops. Lonza Tech was founded in two thousand and five by two scientists from New Zealand. Jennifer Holmgren was not one of them. She joined the company as CEO in twenty ten, when Lonzo Tech was moving from a sort of proof of concept to scaling in the real world. We started our conversation by talking about the scientific work that led to the company's creation. So is it right that the first kind of insight or idea is that there is a bacteria that ideally, theoretically could turn pollution carbon monoxide into ethanol.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: That's right. And the founders knew that this was possible because they knew that they were gas eating organisms, and they were able to go to a library in Germany which stores organisms that are known and cataloged and say I want that one, and that one and that one, and bring it to their lab and start using it.
00:02:29
Speaker 1: So they were getting like vials of bacteria.
00:02:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, huh yeah, absolutely.
00:02:35
Speaker 1: And did they find one that worked.
00:02:37
Speaker 2: Absolutely. But they had to do a lot of optimization because it's a bacteria that wants to make a different molecule, acetate, and they wanted to make ethanol, and so they had to do a lot of work to optimize the bacteria. And they did it without using genetic methods. They did it all by directed evolution, kind of like you you know, put two orkids together to make a third, So let's.
00:02:59
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that a little bit. So what what was the bacteria that they found.
00:03:04
Speaker 2: It's called C. Auto. So the long name is C. Auto orhanogenum, and we call it seouto, and it is an anaerobe. You can only find it in places where there's no oxygen, but it was around at the beginning of the Earth when there was no oxygen.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: Glory days exactly.
00:03:28
Speaker 2: It's glory days. We like to say, it's our great great great great great grandfather.
00:03:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, where does it hide? Where does a where does a microbe that doesn't like oxygen hide? Today?
00:03:38
Speaker 2: Well, it's been found in you know, gut biome like from rabbits. It's been found in.
00:03:48
Speaker 1: Is it true that it's in rabbit poop?
00:03:50
Speaker 2: Well? Yeah, so I was trying to be more delicate and saying bottom, yeah, take rabbit poop. Yeah, it's found in rabbit poop. So for all we know, it could be in our guts too. I don't know, but it's definitely in rabbit pooh. It is in you can find it in vents, underwaters, you can find it in all of these places where and it's that's actually one of the neat things about this bacteria. It is robust, it's strong, and it doesn't like oxygen, so oxygen will kill it. But it is something that allows you to do industrial biotech.
00:04:27
Speaker 1: Huh. So they find this very ancient bacteria. It's robust, but it's not it's not evolved to make ethanol. It's not evolved to make what you want. What's it evolved to make?
00:04:41
Speaker 2: It makes acitate as a primary product. So yeah, they evolved it to make ethanol as the primary product.
00:04:48
Speaker 1: So there is this sort of field of directed evolution, right, that is that that they're using here to like tell me about directed evolution. That's a relatively young field in this context, right, What is it? What does it mean? How do you do it?
00:05:02
Speaker 2: Well, it means you're putting stress on the bacteria and select colonies that are making what you wanted to make, and if you wanted to make ethanol, you select for those.
00:05:15
Speaker 1: So eventually, through sort of applying selective pressure in this way, they get to a strain of c auto that loves to make ethanol.
00:05:26
Speaker 2: Yep.
00:05:27
Speaker 1: Okay, yep. And that's around the time you get to the company, Is that right?
00:05:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there was still optimization to be done, and they had started using doing a pilot at a steel mill in New Zealand, and so I knew the system worked. I just didn't know how scalable it was to commercial scale. And by scalable I don't mean that you couldn't build a big one, but that you could make money for me building a big one.
00:05:53
Speaker 1: That's such a huge issue, right, Like this idea of people call it technoeconomics. Like there are a million clever ideas like this that are elegant and intellectually satisfying. But in this big sort of commodity, global scale world, the question is like, great, but can you make it at a competitive price at scale? Right? So how do you start to answer that question?
00:06:22
Speaker 2: Well, I think you need to start with what you think you can do, and then you validate it as you go from lab to pilot to demo, and then you ask yourself what else do I need to do to make it economic? And in our case, it's a really great bioreactor. It's also water recycling and media. If you don't you know, let me explain media. So when you grow a plant, you need fertilizer, right, nitrogen sulfur. And so what we had to do was figure out how to
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feed at a minimum amount of nitrogen and sulfur envitnments. All of these little things energy use, All of these impact the cost and so in a lot of ways, I like to think of a technoeconomic analysis as a tool that allows you to say, I got to optimize that because it's too expensive.
00:07:15
Speaker 1: So now you have factories in countries around the world. You were to some degree at least operating at scale. I'm curious, what are a few things you had to learn to get here?
00:07:27
Speaker 2: Well, I think a specific one is finding the right partners. We ended up going to China because we were looking for a steel mill that we could work with, and fifty percent of the world steel was made in China. They were also in growth mode. They wanted to reduce their carbon intensity, but they wanted to use it as a license to grow. And so China was in the right mode to think about new technologies, and so we were able to go there find a partner who was interested in using our technology and then demonstrating it. We built one hundred thousand gallon a year facility, and then we use that as a path to building basically a fifteen million gallon a year of facilacility, and that's what we have operating now. We have six facilities, average size thirty to fifty million gallons a year.
00:08:20
Speaker 1: Meaning each one produces thirty to fifty million gallons of ethanol. So tell me about a couple of the things you learned going from you know, the lab to tens of millions of gallons a year, Like, what were a couple of things that didn't work the first time that you had to figure out sort of specifically.
00:08:39
Speaker 2: You know, the bacteria's robust, like I told you, but it also needs to be coddled a little bit sometimes, and so you need to install some type of pre treatment, and so learning how to pre treat cheaply it was very important. Learning when we went from doing a steel milk gas to a fair alloy gas to a gas that's made from municipal solid waste right from trash. You you kind of handle the gas a little bit differently. And so we had focused on our process and we had spent some time on the gas, but we really learned, you know what, spend a little more time on the gas. So that's one thing we learn. The second thing I think we learned, and something that's obvious right, Building good relationships matters, right. Nothing works the first time, and having partners that are willing to be on the journey to improve and optimize as you scale is important. Right. These units are not like a Christmas gift. You open the box and voila, we're running a capacity. And so really it's about your partners and about their commitment to you, to the technology and to getting to scale.
00:09:54
Speaker 1: Let's talk about just what it looks like. So you said you have how many how many operating six are their China and India and Europe.
00:10:02
Speaker 2: We have one in Europe as well in Ghent in Belgium with our solar middle.
00:10:08
Speaker 1: So in a somewhat abstracted way, just like basically, what does one of your facilities look like?
00:10:14
Speaker 2: Like?
00:10:14
Speaker 1: Maybe we should start at the at the smoke stack, right, So there is what used to be pollution coming out a smoke stack or what happens.
00:10:23
Speaker 2: You don't let it go out, You intercept it before it goes out, You compress it and you put it into a reactor.
00:10:30
Speaker 1: So there's a gas and you particularly you want carbon monoxide. Still is that your.
00:10:35
Speaker 2: Put you want carbon monoxide? You can also use carbon dioxide if you have hydrogen. It depends on whether you have hydrogen or not how well you can process carbon dioxide. So let's just focus on carbon monoxide. That's like sugar for our bacteria. It's like yum, I'll take that.
00:10:51
Speaker 1: So then is the first thing you have to do? Separate out the carbon monoxide from the rest of the gas.
00:10:57
Speaker 2: You don't, Okay, So if you have a carbon monoxide, say forty percent carbon monoxide stream in a bunch of other gases, you can just pump that into your bioreactor and the bacteria will find it carbon monoxide and you'll just ignore all the other molecules floating around.
00:11:12
Speaker 1: Okay, So you pump that into the bioreactor. What's it what's it look like inside the biorector? What's going on in there?
00:11:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, so imagine a bunch of bubbles and imagine you've got bacteria that are dividing. Right, they're alive, they're dividing. So it's kind of not a clear liquid. You're you're seeing what look like little grape particles in there, but it's just bacteria floating about. Gas bubbles come in. That's all you see. And then on the back end you see ethanol.
00:11:42
Speaker 1: And in the bubbles in the tank. Is that like a medium you have created that your bacteria likes to live in.
00:11:49
Speaker 2: That's that's right, that's right. They're getting their vitamins, they're getting their minerals, they're getting their carbon source, that carbon monoxide, and they're floating about enjoying their day.
00:12:00
Speaker 1: And you're bubbling in the carbon monoxide the way like if there's a fish tank, you just bubble in the.
00:12:04
Speaker 2: Air exactly now. It it's continued. The process is constantly and the water is constantly moving around, and so it's not quite like a fish tank. But it's a great analogy and that works really well. And the key you said the bubbles like a fish tank. The key is to make those bubbles as small as possible. So it's kind of faking out a dissolution, right, It's like they're dissolved the amount of dissolved carbon monoxide getting to the bacteria so that they can find it, eat it and poop out ethanol.
00:12:40
Speaker 1: And how does the ethanol sort of come out of the tank.
00:12:44
Speaker 2: The ethanol is with water, and so we have to distill the ethanol out and then we take the water which also has media and other things and pump it back into
the reactors so that we're not wasting anything. We're you know, we're separating the bacteria, putting it back in the reactor, separating the ethanol through distillation, and then you just take the ethanol and clean it as much as you want. For fuel grade to blend with gasoline doesn't need to be that clean. For putting it into cosmetics, it needs to be really clean.
00:13:19
Speaker 1: And who are you selling your ethanol to, So.
00:13:24
Speaker 2: Most of the ethanol goes into blending with gasoline. That's what our partner in China is doing. But what we do is we take a small amount of it right now and we've used it to do project development or brand development. So Cody, for example, uses our ethanol in some of their perfumes. We've also converted it to polyester, and On has made running apparel with the polyester made from these recycled emissions. Mebel has used it in cleaning products. So we have quite a few partners that you would recognize, H and M. Craghoppers, they've all used our polyester. And it's kind of neat, right because if you stop and for a second think about this, you say, you know this was going to be pollution, it was going to be greenhouse gases and particulates and instead I'm wearing it.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: Yes, and how's the price.
00:14:19
Speaker 2: So it's more expensive than conventional polyesters. It's you would say, it's anywhere between one hundred and fifty twoe hundred and seventy percent. Fortunately, we have partners who are willing to pay more in the raw materials because the raw material is not what impacts the price of the product.
00:14:41
Speaker 1: Right, they can pay They can pay significantly more for the polyester, and it's such a trivial percentage of the final cost of the good that it doesn't move the needle much.
00:14:51
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I would have thought exactly the way you just said it. But unfortunately what it does is it impacts their margins. And in a world that's obsessed with profit and margins, you have to give credit to our partners for being able to say I am going to make an investment in creating this right because their business leaders are not getting the margins that others are getting. And so I think this is something I want to really hash out because I think we're driven to reduce our costs and to increase our profit and we've got these brave souls who are saying, well, I got to reduce carbon too, and that's important to us and to our future. And I'm going to go against the trend, and I'm not going to reduce my costs or increase my profit. I am going to do something good. So ARII Craghoppers has a whole line of clothing with our stuff, and they're trying to help us get to a scale where we can reduce the costs so that maybe someday they'll get to the margins they need.
00:15:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I feel like, I feel like it's great that these companies want to do this. But to be meaningful at a global level, you need to get to a place where the ethanol you sell is the same price as other ethanol, right, And I'm curious what has to happen for you to get there? Well, first of all, is that right? Do you think of it the same way? Are you trying to get to a place where your ethanol has cost the same as corn ethanol or any other ethanol?
00:16:29
Speaker 2: Right now, it's actually pretty close to corn ethanol. It's just that it costs a lot more than ethylene, which is how polyesters made.
00:16:36
Speaker 1: I see, So for fuel. Is the ethanol you make price competitive?
00:16:40
Speaker 2: It is pretty equivalent. Yeah. Yeah, the capital installed cost is much higher because they've optimized their capital for years and well hundreds of years, whereas we have not. But once you get past the capital recovery piece, the costs are about the same.
00:16:56
Speaker 1: So you're saying you're like competing against sort of depreciated assets. They built factories a long time ago. They don't sort of have to pay for the factories every month the way you do that kind of thing, that kind of challenge.
00:17:07
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right, But we'll get there. But you ask the more important question, and I guess we're focused on keeping carbon in the ground. At the end of the day, this lineary economy is not going to work, and we need to find a way to reuse all carbon that's already in circulation in our system, whether it's municipal solid waste, whether it's industrial waste, whether it's CO two that's in the atmosphere. We've got to figure out how to use that as the resource from which everything is made. So it's great, we need to reduce consumption, don't get me wrong, but we have a whole lot of global economies that are growing, and so how do we deliver to them what they need without pulling more carbon out of the ground. And that is what we focus on. So the question is are you cost competitive? Well, there's a lot of things that we can do that make us cost competitive when we get the bigger scales and we deploy more units. You know, this is the beginning of the journey, right the early days of the cell phone versus now. And so what you've got to do is just build more and reduce costs, improve the technology, reduce costs. But the other thing that biology allows you to do is it allows you to skip steps that you would naturally use in the petrochemical world. So today to make polyester, I go from ethanol to ethylene to ethylene oxide to meg to polyester. Now what if I could go from the gas not to ethanol, but to meg. Now I've put that whole supply chain inside my bacteria. Now I can be competitive because I'm processing less and I'm doing it at room close to room temperature, not like a thermo catalytic process. So there is a day when I believe we'll be competitive, but I think we're always going to have to ask ourselves the question what are the externalities that go along with the costs of the things we buy? And I know that's a delusional question. Everybody's like, well, we'll just take
not all of those and get a lot of keep stuff made from fossil carbon. But are we going to carbon tax? Do I have to be competitive with fossil.
00:19:19
Speaker 1: Well, like a carbon tax would solve the externality problem, right. The problem is when people use fossil fuel, they pollute, and they impose a cost on the world, and that cost is not reflected in the price of the good, and that is a market failure and you are competing against that market failure. And I agree that a carbon tax is a good idea, it's hasn't taken off politically in a broad way. So that's a challenge, right, And like people being willing to pay a green premium, seems limited by human nature at some margin.
00:19:53
Speaker 2: And that's why I want you to applaud the people that are trying fair enough.
00:19:59
Speaker 1: In a minute, how Lonza Tech is working on developing sustainable jet fuel. Airplane emissions are a really hard problem to solve. The physics of flight make it hard to create an economically sound electric plane, although people are working on that. People are working on hydrogen powered planes, but that's also really hard. It's clearly going to take a long time. So in the short to medium term progress is more likely to come from what are known as drop in sustainable aviation fuels, as in you can just drop them into the currently used fuels without having to redesign the whole plane. And Jennifer Holmgren has been working on drop in sustainable fuels since before she came to Lunza Tech.
00:20:58
Speaker 2: I've been working on sustainable aviation fuel from before there was such a thing as a drop in sustainable aviation fuel. So I worked on the first drop in fuels in my old job. We did flight demos, flight of the Green Hornet, all of that. We showed that you could make a hydrocarbon right and biofuels until then were oxygenates, ethanol, biodiesel, So we showed we could make a hydrocarbon that looked exactly like jet fuel, and that was certified. Those are the first drops that were certified for sustainable aviation fuel. All of the fuel that's made today that goes into an airplane that is not made from fossil carbon is made with that type of a process that takes fats, oils, greases and makes them to sustainable aviation fuel. The problem with that is how much we go back to the same problem we started with. How much of these biological feedstocks are there? The world uses one hundred billion gallons of aviation fuel today. You can't do it just food. And so when I came to lands Attack, I wanted to develop a route to aviation fuel from all of this ethanol that you could make from all of these waste resources. And that's why we were Pacific Northwest National Lab to develop a route to take ethanol. Any kind of ethanol doesn't have to be ours. Lots of other people know how to make ethanol to make sustainable aviation fuel. When we got that certified for flight, we did the ASDM work. We flew a flight with Virgin Atlantic from Orlando to Gatwick commercial flight by the way, that was kind of cool, two hundred plus people on board, made from recycled steel mill emissions. We realized that what we needed to do was build a ten million gallon a year facility, a large commercial scale, mini commercial scale facility, and so what we decided to do is to launch land SUGGETI zone entity and raise cash into it so that we could build that plant and go really really fast. And so that plant is in Georgia and it's in Soaprodue, Georgia, and it should be starting up momentarily.
00:23:15
Speaker 1: I would say more like tomorrow. What does momentarily mean.
00:23:19
Speaker 2: And think of it in it's in the last stages of shakedown, say within the next couple of months kind of differing.
00:23:27
Speaker 1: And what's going to happen at that factory.
00:23:30
Speaker 2: We're going to take ethanol and we're going to contain convert it to sustainable aviation fuel using the lens of jet alcohol, ethanol to sustainable aviation fuel, alcohol to jet technology.
00:23:42
Speaker 1: And is that fuel like a supplement? Like how does that work?
00:23:46
Speaker 2: Right now? Certification is for fifty to fifty blends. You can only put it with kerosene fifty to fifty.
00:23:56
Speaker 1: And are you using the ethanol you make from pollution from waste emissions at that plant?
00:24:04
Speaker 2: No, Because we decided that since what we needed to prove at commercial scale was the sustainable aviation field technology, we could use any ethanol to do that. We didn't need to raise the capital to build both. And so right now it can use our ethanol made from waste emissions, or it can use sugar cane ethanol, corn ethanol, cellulos any ethanol that they can find. That's the first part of the journey is just to show that they can get that technology to commercial scale.
00:24:38
Speaker 1: And what ethanol In fact, what is the source of the ethanol you're going to use there?
00:24:42
Speaker 2: The first ethanol will be sugarcane ethanol that's been brought from Brazil.
00:24:47
Speaker 1: And so what is the broader context for sustainable jet fuel right now? Like I know that's the whole conversation. Planes are very hard to decarbonize in many ways, So give me the broader context for jet fuel and where your plant fits.
00:25:05
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the world uses one hundred billion gallons a year of aviation fuel. The target that the industry has set for itself is a minimum of ten billion gallons by twenty thirty of sustainable aviation fuel. And today we're in the hundreds. It's let's say one hundred million gallons.
00:25:28
Speaker 1: Okay, So it has to go up by a factor of one hundred in a few years if they're going to make that. And just just like really dumb question, like what makes sustainable aviation fuel sustainable, Like what does it mean to say sustainable aviation fuel? Like what is that?
00:25:47
Speaker 2: It just means it has a lower carbon footprint, but it doesn't do it at the cost of a
very large water footprint or other things. Right, So the full life cycle analysis, the focus those in greenhouse gas emissions and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
00:26:03
Speaker 1: And is the basic idea that ethanol has lower greenhouse gas emissions? That and oil as a source for jet fuel And is that the very basic idea?
00:26:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the basic idea is take the ethanol to aviation fuel and compare that to fossil derived petroleum derive aviation fuel. That's where you make the comparison, not at the petroleum. That's a hard comparison to make. You make it at the product what you're going to put on the plane.
00:26:32
Speaker 1: And so just tell me more about you know, you're building a sustainable jet fuel plant, Like what is the broader industry? Like are there different technologies at your plant? Like what, I don't know anything about that side of the business. Tell me something about it.
00:26:48
Speaker 2: You know, you need to imagine a refinery, right, that's exactly what this looks like. If you drive by our plant in Soupertin, you it'll be like you're looking at a refinery, a refinery that is small, because refineries actually take very dense liquid and convert it to a bunch of different products through a bunch of unit operations. We only have really compact unit operation. It's really three steps. Takes the ethanol to ethylene, think of that, then take ethylene to sustainable aviation fuel in a two step process. The ethanol to ethylene is done with our partner technique. They have a technology that efficiently takes ethanol to ethylene and then we go from.
00:27:33
Speaker 1: There and is the hope that you will use your Lonza tech ethanol as the input at this plant soon eventually.
00:27:47
Speaker 2: Sure, we will use it at this plant. But also one of the things we're doing is building plants together. We have projects across the world in Europe, in the Middle East where we're taking waste like municipal solid waste, taking it to ethanol and taking ethanol to saffaf is sustainable aviation. Yes, thank you for that. Yeah.
00:28:06
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:28:06
Speaker 2: And we call that circular air by the way, that joint offering because obviously it's circular carbon from waste to aviation fuel, and it's the joint lens of tech lansa jet. So we do expect this plant, to expect other plants to use our ethanol, but moreover, we expect integrated solutions.
00:28:30
Speaker 1: I feel like there's this long history of people trying to use synthetic biology biotechnology to make fuel, and it has been really hard for a long time, and people talk about why it used to be a bad idea or why people who aren't making fuel talk about why fuel is not the right thing to make, Like, tell me about that history.
00:28:56
Speaker 2: I mean, look, you're trying to do something that's been done in a specific way for over one hundred and twenty years, right, and so now you're going to say, well, I'm going to do it in new way
and oh, by the way, it's going to be cheaper, cleaner, and better. And it's like, okay, let's get a dose of realism here. When you look at sustainable aviation fuel. I believe that the use of fat, soils and lipids, which is what is being done today. We're seeing more and more plants being built, so you're starting to get to the Okay, this is the cheaper part of the curve. Just like we did with solar, just like we did with cell phones. The only problem is now you've got to get to a point where you're going to be feedstock limited. And we just have to do the same thing with our technology and other technologies that are out there. Build enough, get to capacity, reduce costs, and keep building. And I think most people don't think about technology that way. Is sort of expected magically to show up without remembering. I always used to laugh, you know, I remember in twenty ten, because I have these articles. You'd see all of these publications. You know, solar is ten years out and will always be ten years out. Those were literally the headlines, right, you're nodding, so I know you remember this. But here we are. You can't turn around without seeing a solar installation, and every day we make it cheaper and better. It's cost competitive with fossil carbon power. And I just think people need to realize new technologies take twenty thirty plus years to deploy in a way that makes sense, and our technology is completely disruptive. Nobody had ever done this gas fermentation before, so I think a thirty year cycle to get to where you're economically viable and competitive everywhere is not unreasonable. We've been around for twenty years. We know our technology works. We derisk the technology, we've deristd the market. But now instead of deploying five at a time, we want to desploy twenty at a time. So you got to reduce the costs.
00:31:06
Speaker 1: What what do you think might go wrong? Like, what would be reasons you might not make it to where you want to get to.
00:31:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a lovely question. The hurdles are big, right, you know, legislation stands against you. Nobody'd ever heard of us doing gas fermentations. So corn and sugar cane, ethanol get incentives in the United States that we don't receive. So it's very hard to be competitive with something that's getting an incentive. I used the Tesla example. Remember Tesla couldn't sell in New Jersey because it didn't have dealerships and there were rules that actually block new ideas, new marketing methods, new sales method and that's the same thing with what we do. I also think there is this natural skepticism of anything new, and we always try to find the problem with it. And so for the first thirty years, twenty years, you've got to deal with people telling you what you're doing is wrong, and nobody ever says, Okay, what you're doing may not work, but that's okay because what we're doing isn't working and so we need to replace it. And so to me, what slows us down is people asking
the wrong questions. And I always say, this is a sector where we need allies. We need people saying they're going to get there. You need to push them along and to help them along. And this is what we're going to do to help these industries grow. Rather than not cost effective, not the same profit, not a good idea, I mean that negativism is draining.
00:32:59
Speaker 1: Thank you for going down the road of the sad story. Oh, let's talk about the happy story now, Like, tell me the happy story. What's what's the happy story of the next ten years.
00:33:10
Speaker 2: Well, the happy story is very simple. We have shown that you can take every type of waste carbon that's already above ground and make the products you use every day sustainable aviation fuel. We decarbonized steel mills at the same time that we decarbonize aviation, right, And you can poo poo that all you want, but the fact is we've done it. We've shown it. It works. And nobody can tell me that fresh fossil carbon is the future, and I can tell you, let's just keep that carbon in the ground. So what do the next ten years look like for us? We're going to keep showing you that We're going to show you that food, fuel and chemicals can all be made from waste carbon that's above ground.
00:33:50
Speaker 1: And specifically, like, what are the sort of big, big projects in the kind of short to medium term for you?
00:33:58
Speaker 2: Well, I think some of our big projects. First of all, we've got to scale sustainable aviation fuel, and so showing our first plant and its economics is going to enable a bunch of other plants to get built. The other thing I want to show is integration more and more to reduce costs. What you don't want is a unit that makes ethanol and a unit that makes aviation fuel, you know, next to each other and not integrated, or a unit that makes hydrogen that we need to convert CO two being a separate standalone. The more we integrate, the cheaper things get right. And so to me, as we make our technology cheaper, I want to also show that integration with others is cheaper and cheaper, and that's where your economies come in. And the final thing I want to do is just really show that biology needs to be thought of differently. We you know, petroleum is densest liquid known to man. That's why we've grown these massive, centralized refineries. What biology can do is use local resources, enabl a country to use its local feedstocks and be able to make selectively the product it wants. So do you want to make aviation fuel great? Do you want to make polyester great? And we want to do this and leverage the power of biology to enable economies to grow while their population grows, because the biggest concern I have is if you're developing economy and you're watching your population grow, every time they buy something, a dollar goes out of the country, so somebody else gets paid for the goods. I want people to be able to grow and grow their economies and grow the jobs and grow everything at the same time. And I think biology, with its ability to be distributed and local enables that, and frankly, I don't think anything else does. And I want to show that over the next five to ten years.
00:36:09
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. I want to finish with a lightning round oh uh Oh. Your dad, I have read, was an airline mechanic. Yeah, and I'm curious how his work influenced you.
00:36:36
Speaker 2: He taught me how to fix things and to want to fix things, and to care about aviation.
00:36:43
Speaker 1: What was something you fixed with your dad?
00:36:46
Speaker 2: Oh? Everything. I crawled around planes, although I never fixed anything. I just crawled around with him on planes and cars and things.
00:36:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's cool. What's one thing I should do if I visit Columbia?
00:36:59
Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh, eat the food. Yeah, the food is amazing.
00:37:05
Speaker 1: What's one thing I should eat?
00:37:07
Speaker 2: My favorite petic I don't know what are That's some plantains that are not ripe, so they're green, and you sqush them and you fry them and you squish them again and you put salt on them. It's kind of like the French fries of Barankilla, which is where I grew up.
00:37:27
Speaker 1: I understand that you went to the Paris Olympics. Oh, and you know, obviously you work a lot with microbes, and so I'm curious. Would you swim in the sun? Ah?
00:37:39
Speaker 2: I no.
00:37:45
Speaker 1: Tell me about the first greyhound that you rescued.
00:37:50
Speaker 2: We rescued two dogs, two greyhounds that had badly broken their legs and they had been repaired by an agency, and then we adopted them. I learned that thirty percent of greyhounds wash out because they've broken something or have been injured. It's a very sad, sad, sad thing, and they are amazing dogs, amazing.
00:38:23
Speaker 1: Jennifer Holmgren is the CEO of Lanz Tech. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem