Late is better than never.
It’s been a while, but I’m excited to get back into the swing of writing about our mountain of technical struggles, and maybe touch on a few things that have been working well.
Let’s dive in where we left off: hydrogen sulfide scrubbing. It turns out that, much like quicksand to the average American schoolchild, hydrogen sulfide isn’t really that big of a problem down the road. Some further research and conversations with scientists, who’ve been working with our microbes longer than I’ve been alive, led us to find that only elemental sulfur causes hydrogen sulfide production. Complex sulfur ions like sulfates and sulfites should not be a problem then, but we will have to avoid any sulfides. Luckily, sulfides aren’t ubiquitous in most sources of food waste nor in pure carbohydrate commodities (they smell like rotten eggs), which are our two prime substrates.
Speaking of, we’ve broadened our business model significantly after spending some time reframing the benefits our process provides. This stems from a few conversations we’ve had with potential food processing partners, who produce enough carbohydrate waste to turn a serious profit, but are more skeptical about selling hydrogen and carbon; to them, our output gasses are just another waste product. That leaves us with two options: either we handle the gasses ourselves (sell to local industry, gas dealers, run a hydrogen fuel cell, etc.) and eat whatever costs are associated, or we add another link with the chain and colocate with a downstream process. The latter of the two brings us to our new model.
There are plenty of American companies looking to make a lot of high-purity, sustainable complex hydrocarbons using precision fermentation, but they’re squeezed for substrate just like us. Anytime we pitch to a food-waste-producing company, the company has to weigh the cost of cleaning up their act and making less food waste against the technical risk of adopting our process. Similarly, a few of these companies are finding that their sources of carbon dioxide are inclined to take the simpler route, which is just cutting emissions at their source rather than repurposing them.
Our proposed partnership is much like one of those extendable claw grabbers, we give these downstream fermenters quick access to inexpensive and pure carbon sources that they previously didn’t have access to, and while we’re at it, a supplemental stream of hydrogen. Notice that we’re also no longer constrained by the presence of food waste, which means that we can expand our horizons to non-waste substrates. If the math ends up working out, we may be able to turn a profit on commoditized corn, wheat, and even sugar as a precursor to hydrogen. Profits aside, our process is hypermotile, meaning that you could safely ship our bioreactors and a whole boatload of molasses anywhere with less hassle than shipping the equivalent hydrogen gas or liquid.
There’s been more progress than a single email could hold, so I’ll cut this short and tell you all about it next week. Before I end, I also would like to formally announce the closing of our MVP round. We’ve raised $120k from the 1517 Fund and Illinois Ventures to get us scaled another 100x (at least) by March and to get a patent through the pipeline. I’m feeling amped.
-Henry Markarian