Heard on the Floor at ABLC: The Economics of Urgency

The hallways at ABLC Next ring like a refinery at shift change — loud, hot, and running on caffeine. Policy hawks, tech dreamers, financiers, and feedstock wranglers crowd the lobby, swapping figures and phone numbers. Everyone agrees on one thing: time’s running out.

The bioeconomy has grown, but the world hasn’t. We’re short on energy, short on patience, short on policy clarity. As Gevo CEO Pat Gruber put it, “Talking about SAF is BS. Some people need jet fuel, others need emissions reductions — and we have to detach the carbon from the fuels if we want to grow fast and build fast.”

The next decade will decide who scales and who fades. The mood? Urgent, unfiltered, already halfway out the door to build the next plant.

Keasling’s Mic Drop: Design for Scale, or Don’t Bother

The crowd didn’t know who the “Secret Speaker” would be until he stepped onto the stage — but when Jay Keasling appeared, the room drew a collective breath. The godfather of synthetic biology, thirty-three years in the trenches from Berkeley to Amyris to Lygos, wasn’t there to reminisce. He came to call time.

“We’ve built an amazing science,” Keasling began, “but we’ve forgotten the factory.” His message was simple, and it hit like a cymbal crash: biology can make almost anything now — fifty-thousand-base-pair DNA in a single run — but if you don’t design for downstream processing, you’re designing for failure.

Too many of the field’s brightest, he said, still spend years perfecting microbes that can’t survive the pilot plant. “We need bioprocess engineers working side-by-side with metabolic engineers,” he urged. “The lab and the plant have to evolve together.”

He went further: the materials sector, he argued, is harder than pharma. “In pharma, there’s a path — stage gates, FDA milestones, clear exits. In materials? No one’s waiting with a checkbook. The plastics we’re trying to replace were perfected decades ago. You’re not competing with nature — you’re competing with inertia.”

And then came the global warning. Keasling noted that bio-manufacturing in China is “extremely cheap to do — feedstock, energy, personnel, construction — all of it.” If the U.S. wants to reshore, it can’t do it on sentiment; it has to do it on cost and scale.

Still, his talk wasn’t cynical. It was a hand-off. “The next generation,” he said, “is incredibly smart and driven. They want to do the right thing. Our job is to help them stay grounded in reality — because optimism without economics isn’t entrepreneurship, it’s a hobby.”

When he left the stage, there was no applause line. Just the quiet awareness that one of the field’s founding architects had just redrawn the blueprint.

Gruber’s Gospel: Food, Fuel, and a Little Less Fantasy

“We’ve been living in a fantasy world where CO₂ is treated like the end of everything,” said Gruber, pacing the stage. “It’s not. The average person knows it. The real problem is making something that works and makes money. If it abates carbon too — great. But start with food and energy. Those are the things that make life possible.”

His model flips the script. At Gevo’s North Dakota plant, one-third of every ton of corn becomes ethanol, one-third protein, and one-third CO₂ — and that last fraction now has a price tag. With a 1.3-mile-deep sequestration well directly under the site, Gevo sells that carbon separately, verified by the ton. “We detach the carbon from the fuel,” he said. “Sell the jet fuel as jet fuel. Sell the carbon to people who care. That’s how you build fast, at scale, and with profit.”

Then the kicker: “And stop calling it SAF,” Gruber snapped. “That word’s a bunch of BS people hide behind. It’s jet fuel. There’s a 2.3-billion-gallon shortfall coming. Let’s build the plants and fill the tanks. No BS. Just do it.”

Molecules, Money, and Momentum

By midweek, the talk had shifted from theory to throughput. The air outside the ballroom smelled faintly of jet fuel — or maybe ambition. Everywhere you turned, someone was sketching a project on a napkin or scrolling through the LCFS calculator on their phone.

Across sessions, a pattern emerged: the industry’s best minds are no longer arguing over chemistry — they’re fighting for capital, feedstock, and build speed. “We don’t need more ideas,” one investor muttered in the hallway. “We need more cranes.”

The Molecule Makers

Methanol, ethanol, ammonia, and SAF all had their moment under the lights. SunGas Renewables outlined a plan to turn 2.5 million tons of green wood into 500 million tons of green methanol by 2050 in Louisiana. Next Clean Fuels walked through its $3 billion Oregon project, aiming for 45,000 barrels a day of renewable diesel and jet fuel. Vertemas, a newcomer with swagger, pitched its single-step alcohol-to-gasoline process: no hydrogen required, no drama attached, with a carbon reduction range that could make a regulator weep with joy.

At the center of it all: the battle for feedstocks. Wendy Owens of Hexas Biomass threw down the gauntlet. “We can’t solve this on waste alone. Sixty percent of the biomass has to come from purpose-grown crops, full stop.” That line set half the room scribbling notes, the other half glancing nervously at their supply-chain partners.

The Builders and the Bankers

The Finance Summit brought its own kind of tension — not the speculative sizzle of venture capital, but the slow heartbeat of project finance. Ten refineries. Five billion each. That’s the scale we’re talking about now. And while investors love momentum, they worship insurance.

Tad Dritz, looking every inch the Wall Street cowboy, walked through policies that might finally make that worship practical: performance guarantees for tech developers, startup repair coverage for the shaky months between mechanical completion and commercial ops, and output protection to keep the debt service steady when the turbines hiccup. In short: certainty for a business defined by risk.

The Algorithms Join the Action

Even the software was getting applause. AI made its debut as a serious industry tool — not as hype, but as muscle. Rimba showed off a platform that optimizes plant performance in real time, trimming costs and cutting error rates. Digest AI took the stage with a quieter but equally potent claim: that it can slash project overhead, streamline communication, and turn weeks of marketing into hours.

On the show floor, the divide between human and machine collaboration felt less like a boundary and more like a workflow. “If we can train AI to think like a process engineer,” one attendee said, “we might finally stop losing money between the spreadsheet and the centrifuge.”

The Takeaway: Urgency Is the New Feedstock

By the time the lights dimmed and the last slide deck flickered off, one truth hung in the air like the scent of jet-A — nobody’s waiting anymore.

Keasling drew the map. Gruber redrew the rules. The rest of the industry filled in the margins — molecule by molecule, contract by contract, model by model. The next decade won’t be about imagination. It’ll be about velocity.

At ABLC Next, the message was unmistakable: we’ve talked enough about saving the world. Now it’s time to build it — fast, modular, verified, and profitable.

The Last Word

At the end of the first full day of ABLC NEXT, as the crowd thinned and the name badges curled at the edges, Jay Keasling was still talking with a small knot of young founders near the escalator. One of them asked what lesson mattered most after three decades in the trenches. He smiled — the kind of smile that comes from equal parts pride and scar tissue.

“The science will keep surprising you,” he said. “The hard part is remembering that the real experiment is us — how fast we learn, how honest we are when we fail, and how much we share before we start over.”

That’s the heartbeat of ABLC. The molecules matter. The models matter. But in the end, it’s the mix of courage and curiosity that carries the day — the human chemistry that turns ideas into industries.

And as the elevators closed and the lights went down, you could almost hear it — the next deal being sketched on the back of a program, the next molecule being born in a hotel bar.