Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest)  … The achievement of a major proof of concept is the news, in the case of Industrial Microbes — the ability to show that they can convert methane into multiple products (albeit at low efficiency, in these early days) in E. coli.

We visited iMicrobes’ early days here in The BioIncredibles. Now, time for a BioIncredibles 2 update.

“All the parts are working and we can get carbon to go from methane through central metabolism to more than a few target chemicals,” iMicrobes CTO Noah Helman tells The Digest.

… We’re getting somewhere in the battle to find something that extracts net positive value from methane without combusting it into CO2.

The Methane to Something besides power story

ARPA-E once observed:

Although [methane to fuels] conversion can currently be done chemically, this requires costly and energy-intensive processes that are only feasible at large scales. As a result, small and remote sources of methane cannot be leveraged to create cost-effective transportation fuels. New biological conversion technologies offer the potential for conversion processes feasible at small scales so that small, remote sources of methane can be accessed. Furthermore, these processes would have a small carbon footprint as to provide a clear environmental advantage over traditional fuels.

…fish 

In this case, the test is a two-stepper. A miracle it might be to get e.coli to utilize methane to make anything valuable at all — and Calysta and KnipBio have been hard at work on that science, too, converting methane to single cell protein as a fish feed (and the world is mighty short on sustainable fish feed that fish like to eat).

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But that’s only the first step of the Mikey Likes It test, because once you’ve figured out how to turn methane into a Molecule of Real Value, you have the challenge of finding someone who is both an owner of methane and in that particular MRV business. Otherwise, you have the challenge of persuading the MRV purveyor to get into the methane business, or the methane dealer to get into the MRV business. It was a challenge in biofuels to get oil companies to learn and master agricultural risk; and companies in the protein business don’t know beans, by and large, about industrial methane, and vice-versa. Not an insurmountable challenge, but definitely a hill to climb.

Much easier to find companies that have a specialty chemical business, and uses methane as a feedstock. In this case, one offers a much more direct route, through biotechnology, of making chemicals from methane. And as iMicrobes and ARPA-E recently observed:

Methane is an attractive raw material for chemical production because it is the major component of natural gas, which is inexpensive, abundant in the US, and available year-round. Renewable methane can be easily generated via the degradation of organic matter at farms, landfills, and wastewater treatment plants.

So, that’s the rationale — and Industrial Micobes has been hard at it. As have the likes of Mango Materials as well. Good news that iMicrobes recently raised a seed investment round from undisclosed partners and landed a large 2-year ARPA-E grant to explore the production of acetone and isopropanol from methane, as part of a team led by Prof. Terry Papoutsakis at the University of Delaware.

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Methane is cheaper than oil, and quite a bit cheaper than sugar. But, why not simply hand this problem off to the likes of Ginkgo BioWorks or Zymergen for their large-scale advanced industrialization of the world of microbe development. Well, Zymergen for one is more about strain optimization rather than wholesale novel pathway development, but what about all this talk about industrialization and the replacement of the artisan by the machine?

iMicrobes’ Helman sighs, He’s heard it before. “It seems there’s a place for both. We use high throughput tools and machine learning, but we’ve found that machines are more about a more well-defined problem, like squeezing tighter or increasing yield. But, trying to take something from zero to 1 and showing it is possible, that’s for people. The early stage is the artisan, because no one has come up with a robot that can come up with ideas.”

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Baby Boomers have been unhelpful in the pursuit of sustainable materials because too many resist change, and GenXers have been willing to cross the Rubicon, generally speaking, only if the economics are a slam-dunk. But Millennials think different, to use the Apple phrase. They’re not asking for sustainable materials, they’re shifting market share to those who have them and can tell that story. And Millennials, now aged 15 to 35, are increasingly the decision-makers. All those Mikeys Like It, the wholesale improvement of lifecycle emissions. And they’ll like methane-based chemicals that sequester all that carbon a whole bunch.   READ MORE