The Wolfpack Hunts Value in a Dumpster Fire: Heard on the Floor at ABLC 2026

ABLC mornings begin, as they always do, with coffee, conversations, and small acts of confusion. This year, a grandfather—tasked with entertaining his grandkids between sessions—handed them ABLC conference swag lip balms, confidently explaining how to speak into them as if they were microphones. The children obliged. For a moment, the room was full of voices, none of them amplified, all of them sincere.

And then the Wolfpack took the stage.

“There is a beautiful valley where companies live on hype. You can fake it till you make it. All you need to succeed is a Series A and a dream…” A pause. “This… is not that place.”

The room goes still. Not silent—never silent—but still in the way a field goes still when the wind shifts and something notices something else.

This is ABLC 2026. The coffee is hot. The capital is cold. Outside, the world flickers—oil swinging, supply chains buckling, policy lagging, capital retreating. Inside, the Wolfpack has arrived. They don’t hunt dreams. They hunt assumptions.

Not that the room lacked humor. At one point, the gap between projects and a Calculated Emissions Value Letter from Washington was compared to an Evel Knievel jump—except this time it was “CEVL Knievel,” lining up a rocketcycle at the edge of the Snake River Canyon and hoping the landing ramp existed on the other side. The laughter was immediate.
So was the recognition. Because that’s exactly what it feels like: full throttle, high stakes, and no guarantee there’s anything waiting for you when you land.

As Rebecca Boudreaux of Oberon Fuels would later translate it for the room, the job description has changed: Make money in the middle of a dumpster fire. No one laughs. Because everyone already knows.

When the Wolfpack gets underway, Wolf Collings goes first. Two phones, one model, no patience. “Show me the cash flow,” he says. “Not the deck.” Wolf Dodds doesn’t look up from the chemistry. “The reaction doesn’t care what you modeled.” Wolf Iademarco adjusts his tie, already halfway to the conclusion. “You don’t have a project. You have exposure.”

From above, Wolf Nejame has seen this before. “Looks great from 30,000 feet,” he says. “Try landing it.” Wolf Slome flips through the schedule, then lets the pages fall.
“That timeline? Fiction.” Wolf Stone holds up the feedstock like evidence. “This doesn’t scale the way you think it does.”
And then Wolf Weiss lets the room settle. He doesn’t look at the model. He looks at the people. “How are you explaining this,” he asks, “to a world that doesn’t care the way you do?”

A pause. Because that’s the question no spreadsheet answers.

If you want to understand ABLC 2026, start there. Not with the panels. Not with the slides. Not even with the deals. Start with the shift. This is no longer an industry asking how to scale. It’s an industry being asked whether it deserves to.

The Wolfpack’s first law is simple: one miracle per project.

“If you don’t have one, why bother? If you have two, it’s not a project—it’s a fantasy.” That line lands because it explains almost everything. Too many systems are not engineered to persist; they are assembled to impress. Feedstock assumptions layered on policy assumptions layered on capital assumptions, all held together by timelines that exist primarily in PowerPoint.

Under that kind of structure, fragility behaves like an invisible interest rate. It doesn’t show up in the model—until it does. And when it does, it compounds fast. Gasification versus pyrolysis? The debate misses the point. Gasification always looks closer to commercial than it is. Pyrolysis always looks more built than it is. The real question isn’t which one works in theory—it’s which one survives contact with markets, logistics, and time.

And then there’s the feedstock. Wolf Dodds, still focused on the chemistry, brings it back to first principles: you don’t just gasify wood chips—you gasify whatever came with them. Dirt. Metal. Contaminants. The occasional surprise.

“You have to scrub everything out,” he says. “Including the bits of running shoe that got thrown in with the wood chips… so it doesn’t kill your catalyst.”

A beat. Another wolf adds, deadpan: “The petroleum industry likes to throw the shoes in there. Just to see if you’re paying attention.” The room laughs. joke is the point: feedstock is never clean, and the system either handles reality—or it fails.

Louisiana CCS? Above ground, elegant. Below ground, less certain. The Wolfpack’s critique was less about theory than geology: drill in the wrong place and you’re not storing carbon—you’re crashing into salt domes that don’t behave the way the model says they should.

Somewhere in the translation, that became something else entirely. One version had it as trucks careening into collapsing domes—Friday night, Cajun country, F-250s, bad decisions, and there goes your sequestration plan. The room took a moment to enjoy that version.

Then the Pack pulled it back to reality. Combine forest slash with unproven CCS, and one wolf summed it up as an “inverse poop sandwich”—a structure where the risks stack faster than the value. When one developer pointed to 2028 commercial operations at scale, the Pack didn’t debate the ambition. They asked a simpler question: lease on a time machine?

Then they kept going. Because a time machine might not be enough. To close the gap between where the project stands and where the model says it will be, you’d have to rip a hole in the space-time continuum. At which point, one wolf noted dryly, even Captain Picard might have some skepticism about your timeline.

The room laughs. But not for long. Because everyone knows exactly what’s being said: timelines don’t fail gradually. They fail all at once.

But even if a project survives the Wolfpack’s scrutiny, it still has to survive Washington. And Washington doesn’t care how good your model looks at 30,000 feet. It cares what you can prove on paper. Policy doesn’t rescue projects. It reveals them.

Eric McAfee of Aemetis delivered the message with force: without a Calculated Emissions Value Letter, projects don’t stall—they disappear. The difference between viability and vapor can be a single piece of paper. Meanwhile, the regulatory environment grows more complex by the week—RED III, CORSIA, UDB—an alphabet soup that thickens faster than clarity. Add geopolitical pressure from the Strait of Hormuz and downstream impacts on fertilizers, and the terrain becomes harder, not easier.
In that context, one attendee offered a definition that stuck:

SAF now stands for Subsidize All Fats. It was a joke. It wasn’t wrong.

Finance, as always, tells the truth last—and most clearly. JR Claeys of USDA put numbers to the problem: $2.8 billion lost over fifty years in guaranteed lending, with another $2 billion at risk in the next five. That’s not cyclical noise. That’s structural fragility. Poornima Sharma reframed the Valley of Death: sometimes your investor is the valley. Expectations scale faster than systems. Meanwhile, OSBL—Outside Battery Limits—quietly consumes up to half of project CapEx. Pipes, tanks, utilities—the unglamorous reality that determines whether anything runs at all.

Hendrik from Bio Base Europe supplied the image no one will forget. Venture capital, he said, is looking at an egg and painting a bird. The $50 billion that vanished from biotech wasn’t bad luck. It was gravity.

The technical sessions offered no refuge. Gerhard Muggen of BTG Bioliquids—self-described pyromaniac—delivered the simplest truth of the week: new plants run at roughly 10 percent uptime in year one. Not a ramp. A test. It’s your auditor. His advice on Big Oil was equally direct: don’t wait for them. They are slow, and they are not coming to save your timeline.

And yet.

Even here, signals of persistence flicker. Anellotech is turning waste plastic into Formula 1 fuel. Whitefox is helping legacy ethanol plants leapfrog performance ceilings. Oberon is putting tree-based DME into consumer products—close enough to home that a six-year-old is now reading labels for feedstock. Nereo Rodriguez may have coined the most hopeful phrase of the week: biodegradable PLA as happy plastic—the free-range egg of polymers.

Even in a dumpster fire, some things don’t burn. But notice what survives. Not the systems trying to do everything. The ones finding traction are doing less, not more—positioning themselves as high-value ingredients inside larger systems rather than trying to own the whole value chain. Less capital. Less fragility. More persistence.

So what’s the takeaway? Not optimism. Not pessimism. Selection.
Never fall in love with a feedstock, Jennifer Holmgren once warned — but just maybe, fall in love with the feedstock no one else can love, be the Beauty to its Beast.  Don’t assume the market will catch up to your molecule. Don’t build a system that requires two miracles to survive its first year. And don’t confuse a story with a structure.

Because the Wolfpack isn’t there to discourage you.It’s there to tell you what survives. And in the end, the question isn’t whether your model works. It’s whether anyone outside this room has a reason to care.

If they don’t— the Wolfpack already knows how this ends.

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