In Book 23 of The Odyssey, the war is over. A stranger stands before Penelope claiming to be her husband. Others have made claims before. “I have been shuddering all the time through fear that someone might come here and deceive me with a lying story,” she says, “for there are many very wicked people […]
For the better part of a year, two questions have surfaced again and again in conversations across the bioeconomy. The first is simple. Where is the money? Not where was it in 2021. Not where people hoped it would be in 2024. Where is it now? The second question is equally persistent. How do we […]
Every few years, a technology becomes the hottest act in town. Investors chase it. Journalists write about it. Conference organizers move it to the main stage. Consultants produce forecasts measured in trillions. For a while, it feels like Beatlemania 1964. The crowds scream. The headlines multiply. Someone inevitably declares that “Clapton is God.” Then something […]
Everybody thinks musical chairs is a game of speed. It isn’t. The winner is not the fastest runner. The winner is the person who can still find a chair when the music stops. Right now, the music is playing loudly in renewable natural gas and biogas. Vanguard Renewables recently broke ground on a major anaerobic […]
At some point, the question changes. Not: “Is success still possible?” The evidence has already answered that. Not: “Are there opportunities?” The evidence has already answered that too. The question becomes: What do these successes have in common? That question led to The Compass. Not a report. Not a forecast. Not a collection of […]
The jury had been deliberating for hours. The case seemed straightforward enough. A commercial bioeconomy project lay dead. Not every project, certainly. Some had survived and even thrived. But enough had stalled, disappeared, or failed to reach operation that a consensus had emerged regarding the culprit. Technology. The foreman looked around the room. “All those […]
Once upon a time there was a daring and skillful hoop-jumper named Saff. No one could jump hoops like he. He could somersault through flaming hoops, sustainability hoops, carbon-intensity hoops. Children cheered him. Elders admired him. One day the King announced a grand hoop-jumping contest to be held in the Palace Gardens. The villagers were […]
For years, biorefinery commercialization has often been discussed as if it were a linear process: develop the technology, raise the capital, build the plant, scale the market. But after reviewing tens of thousands of deployment stories across fuels, chemicals, carbon, SAF, hydrogen, biomaterials and infrastructure systems, a different picture begins to emerge. Commercialization behaves less […]
A leaking diaper at two in the morning is not a branding inconvenience. It is system failure. There is no sustainability consultant standing beside the crib explaining polymer chemistry while exhausted parents strip sheets, search for clean pajamas, restart the washing machine, and try to calm a screaming child before sunrise. Which is why a […]
Evolution, at its core, is a tornado. A stainless-steel tank towers over the pilot floor, warm to the touch, alive with invisible motion. Inside, billions of microbes surge through gradients of sugar, oxygen, heat, stress, and waste, adapting minute by minute to changing conditions no operator can fully see. Tiny asymmetries amplify. Nutrients vanish. Waste […]
