Ten years ago, Visolis entered the federal innovation pipeline through Cyclotron Road—the DOE-backed fellowship that helped define the climate-tech generation. Founder Deepak Dugar was part of a wave of scientists trying to turn low-carbon chemistry into real industry. Today, Visolis is winning scale-up funding from the Department of Defense. Same company. Same core science. Different […]
There’s a quiet bond among people who choose this work, the bioeconomy. You don’t end up here because it’s easy. If easy were the goal, there are cleaner career paths, simpler markets, less friction. Heck, go get rich working on petroleum. Here, progress comes with resistance. Every gain seems to arrive with a counterforce — […]
The spreadsheet worked. The chemistry was sound. The model penciled. And yet the project stalled, downsized, or died somewhere between final investment decision and steel in the ground. If you’ve worked on a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project in the bioeconomy, this story will feel familiar. The usual explanations follow: demand softness, policy uncertainty, buyer hesitation, macro […]
In today’s bioeconomy, the theoretical has no value. Only the tangible survives. The Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference convenes in March not as a symposium but as an operational summit in the middle of policy crossfire, capital hesitation, and supply chain fragility. The era of “design, build, test, learn” has given way to something more blunt: […]
If you’re looking for a clean signal in the bioeconomy this week, you won’t find one. What you will find is pressure—steady, measurable, and building across the Corn Belt. U.S. corn yields continue to climb, driven by better genetics, better agronomy, and relentless improvements in logistics. This is not speculative supply. It is science doing […]
If the clean fuels industry is living through an Alice-in-Wonderland moment, it’s not because things feel fanciful. It’s because the rules keep changing shape just as the clock gets louder. That was the unspoken theme running through the Clean Fuels Conference this year, where delegates heard repeated variations on the same question: Are we on […]
On February 6, 1819, Stamford Raffles signed a treaty on a humid strip of land at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Singapore had no army, no natural resources, and no clear sovereign authority he could legally negotiate with. So Raffles did something more subtle. He elevated Tengku Hussein to the sultanate of Johor, […]
On June 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill that many American businesses believed would ruin them. The Pure Food and Drugs Act had been opposed for more than two decades by patent-medicine manufacturers, whiskey rectifiers, and food producers who warned that regulation would destroy consumer choice, cripple commerce, and hand the federal government […]
I was standing at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign a few months ago, giving a keynote. I came to Illinois more or less to see the corn — every year, we do a “harvest tour” to look at the changing face of American feedstocks and supply chain […]
Last week at Paine Field, something important happened. More than 175 people gathered inside Boeing’s Future of Flight building to launch the Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator—not as a ribbon-cutting exercise, but as a declaration of intent: to turn sustainable aviation fuel ambition into commercial velocity. The room was full of people who have been pushing […]
