I had a secondary school science teacher who used to say that the 19th century was the century of physics, the 20th was the century of chemistry and the 21st will be the century of biology. Developments in synthetic biology (“synbio”) have opened up inspiring opportunities to reimagine our production processes. (The Economist had an excellent introduction to synbio a while back - paywall.) Around climate these have been prominent in the alternative proteins space whether it is Impossible’s heme-heavy peas, cultivated meat like Future Meat Company or precision fermentation like the Every Company, and in agriculture such as Inari (that recently announced another $124mm in funding including from CPP) and Gingko and Bayer’s JV Joyn Bio. There have also been some notable companies the industrial side, whether in energy or chemicals, such as LanzaTech and Solugen, but things are just getting started. One of the most interesting companies in the industrial synbio space is Cemvita Factory, who is working hand-in-glove with the traditional industry to accelerate decarbonisation and recently announced a new “colour” of hydrogen production - gold hydrogen. I tuned into MCJ to listen to Cemvita’s CEO and co-founder Moji Karimi talk about where they are at and where they are going.
The founders (brother / sister team) started by working on applications for using custom microbes in space to convert CO2 to sugars for deep space travel, before realising the much bigger market (and pressing challenges) here on earth. [Removing exhaled CO2 for astronauts also the origin of direct-air-capture technology, as it happens.]
Cemvita is a microbe design platform for industrial decarbonisation with three primary streams:
Biomining - microbes for minerals
Carbon-negative biomanufacuring - CO2 as feedstock
Subsurface biomanufacture - oil-> hydrogen, CO2 -> CH4
Partnerships: Cemvita deliberately made the choice to be a platform rather than product business, so has delivery partners for each of the product streams to create the product for the offtaker. The partnership with industry is reflected in their investor base - Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Sumitomo Corp and, for Gold Hydrogen specifically, Chart Industries, as well as our friends at 8090 Partners.
Mining: This is the most advanced stream and aims to reduce both the carbon footprint and general environmental impact of mining. Mining involves a lot of energy with transport and crushing of ore etc, but also lots of horrible chemicals from the leaching process (sulphuric acid for copper, cyanide for gold) resulting in ponds of highly toxic runoff (acid mine drainage or “AMD”), which need to be brought from ph of 2 up to 7 over time. Below:
Bioleaching is already used to in 20% of copper production globally, but the technology has a lot of room for improvement. Further, biomining technology could open up low-grade lithium resources in the United States (for anyone who wants to fall down this rabbit hole - great resource here). [Point of lingo - when ore deposits become economically viable, they go from being “resources” to “reserves”.]
Biomanufacturing - Cemvita are using microbes that use CO2 as feedstock to make precursors to chemicals and fuels such as ethylene, where they have a joint project with Oxy (an area where LanzaTech, coincidentally, just announced a development), and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) where United Airlines are the offtaker and Oxy again the delivery partner.
Subsurface biomanufacture: The most nascent of Cemvita’s business lines, this is probably the most exciting application of their technology, particularly gold hydrogen. As it stands, oil companies have thousands of depleted oil wells that are, at best, worthless, or at worst, represent a liability because of the need to seal them properly. The promise of the ability to radically revalue these as assets and pave a way for the oil and gas sector to deploy their considerable skills and resources towards the energy transition.
CO2->Methane: The other application besides hydrogen of subsurface biomanufacture, squeezing the last bit of value out of oil wells. Already CO2 is used to keep oil wells producing longer, through enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Cemvita is looking to use microbes to convert the CO2 into natural gas. Opens the possibility of somewhat more circular carbon economy, but much lower down on the climate impact given the methane would be burnt.