Investing In the Biomass Industry

by Amol Deshpande I am an investor and entrepreneur with a passion for biomass in all its forms. As a partner with the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), I am involved with three different biomass-related technology investments focused on extracting the energy value from organic waste such as food waste, yard trimmings, wood and municipal solid waste (MSW). The venture capital industry began investing in biomass, in earnest, five years ago when hype around ethanol and other biobased fuels led to an unsustainable capacity expansion and strained feedstock supplies. This was followed by an era of numerous investments in "second generation" biofuels and chemicals, mostly focused on sugar and syngas platforms or algae. All of these involved some metabolic engineering or related breakthrough energy conversion. These investments are interesting and worthwhile, but fundamentally challenged. First, in most cases, proprietary feedstock supply chains must be built around these innovations, i.e., thousands of tons of specially cultivated biomass (e.g., energy crops) need to be redirected to wherever the plant is. Second, technology hurdles in yield and selectivity must be overcome where organisms or catalysts are tasked with producing novel output and scaled up from liters to millions of […]

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