It’s the universe’s most abundant element—and yet maddeningly scarce in usable form here on Earth. It slips through steel, leaks from tanks, embrittles pipelines, and ignites at the faintest spark. You can’t ship it easily. You can’t bottle it cheaply. It hides in plain sight. Hydrogen, hydrogen everywhere—and not a drop to use. We dug […]
At the Anonymous Bar in Prague, the cocktails come from a masked bartender, and the motto is “the impossible is possible”. On nights where absinthe swirls with the ghosts of the Velvet Revolution—ethanol isn’t just a drink, it’s rebellion in a glass. Freedom gained. Futures rewritten. A reminder that in 1989, impossibility cracked, toppled, and […]
The house lights dim. Conversations soften to a hum. In a ballroom a few blocks from the Capitol, the people who move the bioeconomy—scientists, financiers, policymakers, and entrepreneurs—lean forward. This is ABLC 2026, the long-anticipated turning point from development to deployment, when feedstocks, finance, and technology finally converge in one room and on one timeline. […]
38 AD. A balcony of the palace complex, the northwest angle of the Palatine Hill. The new emperor Caligula stands before the Senate and People of Rome, his voice rising above a tumult of applause as togas ripple like surf in the sunlight. The crowd strains to catch his words. “What did he say?” asks […]
November 30, 1977, Kansas City. The Seattle SuperSonics were exhausted — three games in five nights over Thanksgiving, losses piling up, their record a miserable 5–17. The season was over before it began. They hardly knew or cared whether they were flying Frontier or Air Midwest. The coach seats were too small for the big […]
The smell of tar and cedar hung over the harbor at Fort Victoria. Rain hissed on the deck of the Royal Saxon, drumming a rhythm that only sailors and timekeepers understand. Captain Henry Ward Collier sat at his desk beneath a swinging lamp, pen scratching across damp paper — a letter home before the tide. […]
Act I — The Spark April 20, 1962 — the night air was restless with the sound of engines.In Seattle, the Space Needle stood ready to crown the Century 21 World’s Fair, a steel exclamation point aimed at tomorrow. In New York, floodlights swept the façade of the Coliseum on Columbus Circle as the International […]
Late in the season, under a slate Oklahoma sky, CVR Energy looked at its cards, and folded. Like a gambler with a hand gone wrong, the company announced it would stop making renewable diesel at its Wynnewood refinery — “unfavorable economics of the renewables business,” they said — and switch back to petroleum. Eighty million […]
The house lights dimmed and the chatter softened, the way it does when the next card might decide everything. In place of tuxedos: blazers. In place of martinis: macchiatos. Yet it had all the tension of James Bond playing Le Chiffre for every chip in Casino Royale. It’s ABLC Next, and the bioeconomy stands at […]
Comedy, Chemistry, and the Art of Realism at ABLC “There is a beautiful valley, where companies live on hype, all you need is a dream and a Series A. This…is not that place.” Laughter ripples through the crowd and builds as the opening credits roll: animated wolves skiing while talking on the phone, flying from […]
