A.I.M's Interview: Sapphire Energy's C.J. Warner and Tim Zenk

by David Schwartz (Algae Industry Magazine) ...C.J. (Warner, Sapphire Energy's President and Chairman) keynoted at the recent Algal Biomass Summit, attending along with Tim Zenk, Sapphire’s Vice President of Corporate Affairs, who was formerly executive vice president for the Edelman communications firm, doing international work on behalf of the Clinton/Gore administration.

The two made some time to give us an update on their progress at Sapphire Energy, truly a bellwether for the biofuel sector of the algae industry.

C.J.: ...I would say, though, that we are not blind to the advice that financiers might give to try and find higher revenue streams earlier on. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s actually a good philosophy. But if you don’t keep your business model focused on where you’re trying to go, you aim off with your innovation. So, we’re staying focused on the long term, and aiming high with our innovation and our technology, and then, in the short term when we actually start producing, we’ll be able to make those high margin products as well. But we’re not going to stop there. That’s just going to help us in the short term.

C.J.: Well, it’s perfectly analogous to any other form of agriculture. The pests are out there, the weeds are out there, and they’re going to come. So you might as well attract them early on, figure out how to deal with them, and then just move ahead knowing that they’re there. So that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in Las Cruces with those open ponds. We’re learning how to deal with those pests. We have focused on crop protection, and we have various mechanisms for dealing with it, both from a strain selection standpoint—taking strains that are already able to cope with it, or that can be given traits that make it easier to cope with. And then we also have cultivation techniques that enable us to protect our crops.

...C.J.: Next summer we’ll start Phase One of the commercial demonstration system. We’ll start to demonstrate the full integrated process and then we’ll keep growing it all the way through to 2015.

...C.J.: Currently CO2 is a waste stream. As soon as we start realizing it is a source of carbon, which is useful, and we can fix it into fuels and start making valuable products out of it, we’ll realize that what was yesterday’s waste is today’s feedstock.

C.J.: Well, the great news is that all the first principles have actually been proved out. So we don’t have any lurking issue that we simply don’t know how to deal with. Now what it really is all about is scale-up. And scale-up is not a simple thing, so I don’t want to minimize that. But what we know is that it is not impossible, but it’s going to take a lot of effort, and we need to be disciplined about it and not skip steps, because when you do that you risk making costly mistakes. So the more we can make sure we are really stepping our way through it, the more we can learn at the proper level and then fix it before it’s too big, and then go to the next level. It really is about ironing out all the things that you learn each time you get a little bit bigger, and then run in an integrated fashion.

...On the world stage, how do you see this playing out? What is the role of the U.S. in this global industry’s development?

Tim: Well, our philosophy here at Sapphire is: let’s do it in America first, and the rest of the world will take care of itself. Once we get it rolling here in the United States, we’ll move on abroad, and it’s in our national interest to do that. Everybody in this government would like to see technology spread throughout the world that we develop here on our soil. READ MORE