23. Making Carbon-Negative Chemicals and Fuels at Scale w/ Sean Simpson

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Sean Simpson, strategic advisor and former CSO of LanzaTech. We talk with Sean about using biology to convert greenhouse gases into ethanol, how to scale up and sell a novel biological process, and the economic and policy requirements of engineering biology for global challenges.

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Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to EBRC and Translation. We're a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Heidi Klumpa, a postdoc in Mo Khalil and Mary Dunlops groups at Boston University. And I'm Andrew Hunt, an incoming postdoc in David Baker's lab at the University of Washington. Today we're joined by Sean Simpson, the founder of Lonsatech, a carbon recycling company that converts industrial gaseous waste into valuable chemicals. Sean served as CSO of the company for nearly 20 years and has recently transitioned to a role of strategic advisor. Thank you so much for joining us today. No, at all. Great to be here. So to get us started, Sean, could you introduce yourself a little and talk about your journey from PhD to founding Lonsatech? Yeah, sure. So mine's kind of a journey of change up your field in order to constantly look for something that's perhaps a little easier or an area you can be more successful. So my PhD is actually in plant biology. I did my PhD in the University of York in the group of Dinobols. And from that point, I worked on sort of plant drought resistance as in a postdoc. I ended up winning a Royal Society Fellowship to work at a government research institute in the Jirka system in Japan and worked there for a couple of years. And then I moved to New Zealand. I got a job in New Zealand in a company that was doing forestry biotech. And there we were looking at trying to improve the composition of the trees or tailor the composition of trees really for the pulp and paper industry, but also the lumber industry. So if you can change how lignin is deposited or the chemistry of lignin or you can change how cellulose is deposited in a tree, you can dramatically influence the value of that tree in those industries. And this was around the year 2000. And it was a job that gave me a really great insight into the economics actually of lignocellulosic biomass and wood, etc. And what was really interesting was that this was at the foundation of the thinking around the use of lignocellulosic biomass as a feedstock for making fuels. And so as a plant biologist and now someone who had a kind of a view of the world of lignocellulosic biomass from the perspective of the forester and the industry, I both knew the technical challenge associated with converting lignocellulosic biomass into anything, the chemistry of these trees and this material. The nature of this material meant that it was really, really difficult to deal with. And then the economics fundamentally told me that this material is also pretty expensive if you're looking to make a low value commodity out of it as a feedstock. And so that was really the foundational kind of trigger to start thinking about alternative ways of producing sustainable low carbon fuels and chemicals for myself and my co-founder. So it was an interesting journey because I did my PhD in the University of York in the UK. I worked in Japan, which is a fascinating place to work. It was really like you can imagine going from York, which has half the buildings in York are like a thousand years old to go to Japan in the future. It was more Blade Runner than Witcher. And then going from there to New Zealand, which was kind of going to a sort of countryside town and working in forestry. But loved it, loved every minute of it. Very cool. Ronan, can you then also introduce us to what Lanzatec does and what inspired you to found it? Yeah, so I kind of touched on this a little bit. But yeah, so Lanzatec has developed a process to convert the broadest possible spectrum of above ground carbon sources into fuels and chemicals that are, of course, sustainable. And really, the founding of Lanzatec was really about economics, about a philosophy around feedstock access and what we needed to overcome in order to truly transition to the point of having sustainable fuels and sustainable chemicals. We consider the scale of the oil industry. And if that is the industry that we must displace, and it absolutely is, if that's the industry we must transition from, the first thing we have to ask ourselves is, what's the size of that industry? And today it's around 90 million barrels a day of material being processed. And so if you start to think, OK, we're going to make sustainable fuels or sustainable chemicals from wood, and we're going to use wood at a rate of an energy equivalent of 90 million barrels a day, you realize that you're facing a biodiverse catastrophe in trying to implement that. And you're never going to truly displace this industry fundamentally. And so we ask ourselves, and then, of course, the economics of using wood or woody materials is also super, super challenging from a technical perspective. And those are the two things that we realized. So we're saying, well, what would be ideal? And what would be ideal would be a technology that could use materials that are available today at extreme volume that are low cost, available above ground, and don't compete with the food chain. And that would be ideal. And what we really describe there are waste resources, emissions from industry, waste from society, waste from agriculture. And all of those exist at their extreme volumes. They're often aggregated or produced in a single place already. And the economics of these things is such that they're pretty inexpensive. And so that's where we started. And so we looked at gas fermentation because, obviously, emissions from industry are gases, solid waste streams like municipal solid waste and agricultural waste can be turned into gases through a process called gasification. And hey, if you can convert gases, then you can also access CO2, the ultimate kind of prize here as a carbon source for making things so long as you had a sustainable source of hydrogen. So using gases was our thing. And then we started the company in 2005. And in 2005, there were these things called libraries that you could go to. And in these libraries, it was packed full of journals that I would spend much of my time sort of like leafing through and discovering things randomly. And one of the things that I became really fascinated about in these journals was a lot of the discussion around sort of the origins of life and how did the first microbes kind of emerge from the sediment on Earth. And a lot of that discussion, of course, is around the sedogens. Sedogens are organisms that can take simple molecules like carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide and use these as the sole source of carbon and energy to make products. And of course, most of them make acetic acid, but there's some that make ethanol. So they take acetic acid that one step further and make ethanol. And so really this kind of thinking around this philosophy around feedstocks and kind of this nerdy hobby I had around thinking about gas fermentation from the perspective of what's the origins of life were sort of culminated in this idea of using a sedogens to convert the largest possible spectrum of feedstocks into sustainable fuels and chemicals. So it's an idea that only a biologist could have. The challenge was that to make it work, you really needed chemical engineers. So it was like an idea a biologist could have, but then a problem that only a chemical engineer could solve. Because really the problems then are kind of how do you tame this organism and feed this organism with gases at a scale and at a rate that made sense in terms of fuel and chemical production. And so that was really the start of LensTech. Yeah, that's really awesome. I think the thinking about the origin of life is a highly underrated way to do really important science and come up with cool engineering problems too. So another thing you just touched on as well that I really loved when I first heard about it, and it's so simple but it makes so much sense is just like once you make your feedstock a waste stream, someone else's waste stream, it's cheap and it's a great way to recycle things and turn waste into something valuable. And so this is sort of one of my favorite things about your process is we basically take a greenhouse waste gas steel mill off gas and turn it into a feedstock. And so can you talk a little bit about some of the advantages from a biological manufacturing perspective of using something like this as a gaseous feedstock and then maybe what else you think you might be able to go after as feedstocks with LensTech Yeah, I mean I think the first thing to say is that biology is extremely good at taming chaotic inputs and making highly defined molecules out of this kind of chaos. I mean that's what living in the world is. We deal with chaotic inputs and we synthesize those into really defined specific outputs and very complex outputs in many ways. So our organism takes carbon monoxide and hydrogen and makes ethanol and itself, so it replicates and itself is a bag of extremely complicated chemicals, but that's all it does. So it just makes these two things and it does it completely regardless of kind of the chemistry of the input almost. So the input of carbon monoxide, the input of hydrogen, the input of carbon dioxide, they can fluctuate, but the nature of the output will stay the same. So this ability of biology to harmonize chaos into definitive outputs is the great advantage of biological processes. When you apply chaos to a chemical catalyst, you get sort of chaotic outputs. When you apply chaos to a biological catalyst, you get unified outputs and that's really, really, really, really important when it comes to a processing facility because no one's going to operate their steel mill to harmonize the output for my biological gas fermentation plots. So the output from any industrial process or any gasification process is taking municipal waste or taking agricultural waste is going to necessarily produce a really chaotic output and the biological system is going to harmonize those and produce defined, valuable, sustainable products from that chaotic input. So as to what we can make, I mean, in the first instance, we make ethanol and I actually think ethanol is a super, super exciting molecule. Yes, you can blend it with gasoline and we can put it in our cars, but actually we dehydrate ethanol and you're making now ethylene and you've got the whole ethylene value chain that opens up to you. So this is now plastics and fibers, fabrics, et cetera, et cetera, all become available to you through the ethylene value chain. We've also, with the organism that we use, we have a clostridium-based system. We developed a synthetic biology capability as you know with that organism and we've demonstrated over a hundred different molecules that can be made by that organism from the gases that we process. I think the first instance, what we will focus on are going to be molecules that can be separated actually with the same or quite similar downstream processing technologies that are used for ethanol. So these are volatile products that can be separated by distillation. So you're thinking there of isopropanol or acetone or perhaps, you know, or other kind of volatile molecules. But thereafter, I think there's an opportunity to look at multiple different products that can come out and, you know, we've looked at products, you know, it's an anaerobic system. So there is advantages of producing molecules like isoprene, for example, because there's a much lower safety hazard. And all of these become accessible to us as we go forward and we've already demonstrated the production of these at very small scale in this system. So I think there's an enormous spectrum of products that can be made, but always for us it's a focus very much on the economics of that production and trying to execute these in a way that, or the development of these in a way that we can roll out as quickly as possible, sort of technically. Yeah, very cool. Yeah. Actually, we want to talk a bit about the organism because I guess part of Lonsatec's success comes from investing in a non-model anaerobic organism, Clostridium auto-opthinogeneum. We're wondering why is working with non-model organisms important and what science and engineering work did you have to do to make Seattle a feasible organism for your process? Yeah. Working with non-model organisms is really important, mostly because scientists are pretty lazy. So we've kind of based a lot of the things that we've done to date around these model organisms that were chosen for no other reason than they were easy to work with. So they're not necessarily ideal for the things that we need to do. And so, I mean, certainly for something like gas fermentation, there's no way to work with a model organism and execute on a gas fermentation process. People have thought about transferring pathways like the Wood-Longdale pathway that allows gases to be used as a source of carbon energy into model organisms. But frankly, that's like bringing the mountain to Mohammed. It's kind of a little bit of a futile effort. So for us, it was really important to work with a model organism. A couple of things, like if you look at this organism, if you get this organism from, for example, a culture collection, the parental strain, the wild type strain, that's a spore-forming organism. And obviously, for a fermentation process, you don't want a spore-forming organism. So you quickly select that away. And that's actually relatively trivial to do by operating the organism in a continuous system. But then what we really had to do was kind of get this organism that was really quite difficult to grow initially. Really, it needed yeast extract and all these other kind of exotic sort of prima donna-y inputs and transition it over to being an organism that could live on a really well-defined and really minimal media in the presence of incredible amounts of carbon monoxide, so really high concentrations of a toxic flammable gas. At first, it didn't really like that. So it was like the first, I would say, two years of the company were really dedicated to selecting for an organism that would grow on a highly minimal media and would grow really well just on carbon monoxide as the sole source of carbon energy. And that was because initially, we focused very much on the use of emissions from steelmaking as the carbon source we wanted to go after. And so, as I say, that did take a good couple of years to come up with a proprietary strain that could do that, but we did it. And so now the performance of that strain is quite different to that of the parent. But that was all really selection. And when we started working with this thing, there wasn't a genome sequence for an acetogen, never mind our acetogen. And so we went through all of that process. And that was really instructive. We used getting the genome sequences away to actually inform how we minimise the media and how we plot out exactly what media components are going to be essential in this process. And we really used that to tremendous advantage. But yeah, working with a non-model, it's an anaerobic, so you spend a lot of time in glove boxes, which, if you've worked in a non-air-conditioned lab, isn't the greatest thing on earth. No, definitely not. It's really impressive. I feel like I spent my entire PhD trying to find the easiest ways to do things. And I always appreciate when people go out of their way to pick an organism that's challenging and wrangle it. That's really cool. Well, we kind of didn't have a choice. Did you ever think maybe we do have a choice? Like, should we try something different? Were there backup plans? Not really. So actually, when you look in the world of acetogens, they're literally called acetogens because they make acetic acid. And there are very few of them that make solvents. And so we were kind of boxed into this corner of like, okay, well, we've got to pick one of these that makes a solvent that people know about. We sort of toyed with the idea of doing some kind of like environmental bio-discovery type project, but we didn't have the resources for that. And then we sort of toyed with the idea of trying to transfer the wood-lunged pathway into like E. coli or something, but we didn't have the patience for that. And so we just went for it. You already touched on this a little bit, but I want to delve a little bit deeper. So it seems like currently Lansatec's main product is carbon negative ethanol. And you talked about how there's a lot of other potential options, and I'm hoping you can delve a little deeper into how you connect that to the rest of the petroleum-based chemical and fuels industry and sort of maybe what we need to invest there. And then maybe a little bonus question of if you think there's any blind spots where you think would be a good spot for someone else to boot something else up that can hit a different area of the chemicals industry. From my perspective, fuels is clearly an area we've got to focus. Ethanol is a good place to start with fuels because one, we can make it in the kinds of volumes we need to make. And there's no doubt that going forward through the introduction of electric vehicles, the demand for gasoline will go down, certainly in regions like the US, but globally, absolutely. So as the ownership of cars rolls out from this day forward, people are increasingly going to own as their first ever car an electric vehicle. So if you look in China, the vast majority of vehicles being bought are bought by people who are buying their first ever car, and they're highly likely to be buying an electric vehicle as their first ever car. And so that mindset is going to roll out throughout the world, I think, very, very rapidly now. So that will mean that gasoline sales over time, of course, dramatically diminish. And so the demand for ethanol as a displacement for gasoline, thankfully. But we still require solutions for heavy goods vehicles that generally run on diesel. But those are more challenging to resolve, or the fueling of those more challenging to resolve with batteries. Just given the scale of the battery technology that we have today, it's difficult to see a line of sight to batteries being a completely viable solution, partly because of the weight of the batteries, partly also because of the logistics of charging, et cetera, et cetera. And then, of course, aviation. And hydrocarbons are going to play a role in fueling aviation for the next few decades here. And so we need sustainable aviation. And ethanol can be a base for, as we've shown, ethanol can be a base for making diesel and making sustainable aviation fuel. So you can dehydrate and polymerize ethanol to chain lengths that are appropriate for diesel and gasoline. So diesel and aviation fuel. But then the other piece that we've really got to address, and hasn't been very well addressed to date, is the chemicals piece. How do we make sustainable polymers? How do we make sustainable chemical intermediates that we can use throughout society? And that is the place where I think ethanol, in the first instance, can play a great role. We can, as I've already mentioned, access the ethylene value chain. But then we've got to get into, we've got to really look at the full spectrum of chemistries that come out of that barrel of oil and start to understand how each one of them can be replaced and a pathway for each one. I worry about, for example, nitrogen-rich molecules, for example. Where are we going to get those from? Where are we going to get certain lubricants? We're not seeing biological pathways to those. How do we replace those synthetic oils and so on and so forth? So I think there's a lot of opportunity for innovation. But I think that we've just got to systematically address that barrel of oil and what comes out of it, and systematically approach each product stream and try and plot a route, not just biological route, but through sustainable chemistry to displace that product with something that comes from a carbon source that's above the ground, essentially. We're wondering, you talked a bit about this, but what role synthetic biology will play in the future of Lonsotec? And do you think it's possible to make a true circular carbon economy using some of these tools? Yeah, I mean, so firstly, synthetic biology. Synthetic biology will play a critical role in the future of Lonsotec. So in our ability to offer true variety in terms of the chemical outputs, of course, synthetic biology. I think that's an absolute given, and I think that going forward, the vision would be, if you're an owner of a gas fermentation facility that's attached to, say, let's say a steel mill or a gasification unit, that actually you can decide how to run your plant on a campaign by campaign basis based on almost like a battery of different organisms that each produce a different product. And so as we see commodity prices vary in the marketplace, these plants can be extremely reactive to those fluctuations and actually maximize the economics of each plant by switching products out on a campaign by campaign basis. If one campaign is three months, and over the course of the year, you can have four different products coming out of a plant, which address kind of differently valued markets. That's a pretty exciting place to be, and I think a very compelling place to be from an economic perspective. Then from a truly circular carbon economy, I think we've really, really got to recognize that the largest source of sustainable carbon we have is unfortunately currently sitting in our atmosphere. And so we've got to get to the point where we're converting CO2 whole scale into products that displace products that we today make from oil. That has to be the goal. That has to be the place we end up, because that allows us to truly live sustainably. So I'm extremely bullish about the prospects for us implementing a circular carbon economy. I think there's all the technologies to do that are there. The only thing we really lack is the kind of economic will to implement these at a scale that will really move the dial. But everything we need to do is kind of fundamentally there today and to be built upon, of course, and improved going forward. I think I want to switch gears here just a little bit and talk about Lonza Tech's just general success scaling. I think there's been a good number of synthetic biology companies, but not a lot that have had the same level of success taking their process from lab scale, bench scale, all the way up to commercial scale. So could you tell us a little bit about the steps involved in scaling and maybe things that were particularly challenging or surprising to you as you overcame them? Yeah, I mean, and I'm a biologist, yeah. So scaling inherently to me is quite surprising. Yeah, like the scale of scaling is quite surprising. You know, I mean, I don't know, I think for most biologists haven't necessarily been to Jamnagar refinery, the largest single kind of petrochemical complex in the world and realize that the only way to get around that thing is in a car because it's so big, you can't walk around this part. It's massive. It's kilometers long in all directions. If you go to a 10 million tonne per annum steel mill, that again is just a vast, vast facility. So an understanding of what scale actually looks like. And so Jamnagar refinery, I think processes a million barrels a day, maybe just over a 10 tonne per annum steel mill, transports large vats of molten iron around in cruciples on the back of trains. Huge, huge, huge things. And so just understanding what scale is, is in itself very surprising. And so when someone said to me, I mean, I remember when someone said to me, so we're going to need reactors that stand 100 feet tall, that are going to be 30 feet in diameter, and we're going to be processing kind of swimming pools worth of water every hour. And I'm like, are you sure? Are you sure that's what we're going to do? That's like a lot. And when you start to do the numbers and you start to kind of appreciate what scale is, that's kind of terrifying. And so for us, it was really, I suppose, scaling. How do we eat the elephant? You sort of eat it one bite at a time. So we start in the lab, but we started our scaling journey not just from the perspective of volume, but from the perspective of placing ourselves in the reality of the industrial environment that we wanted to be in. So what does that mean from our perspective? It meant that actually we would go to the local steel mill in New Zealand. There was a steel mill just south of the largest city in New Zealand, Auckland. And we would actually bottle gas that would come out of that steel mill and would bring that gas back to the lab. And we'd run the lab off that gas. Now, of course, that's because we were cheap and we weren't paying for that gas. So we ran the entire lab off steel mill gas. And that was part of this sort of selection process. So by the time the organism, we actually operated a pilot plant at that steel mill on that gas, our organisms have been growing on that gas for a couple of years. So there was no surprises there. And then it's about getting up in scale, in volume. And there again, you go through several iterations of getting that piece right. We then went to, so our first pilot plant was a small steel mill in New Zealand. We then built a pre-commercial demonstration facility. We actually built two of them in China at steel mills in China. And there again, it was about kind of operating in a real world environment with real customers and understanding their world and their kind of drivers. And so as much as it was about getting the technology right, it was also about really kind of embedding ourselves in the reality of the industrial environment we wanted to be in, in order to implement our solution. And that was incredibly interesting, you know, to understand how they think, what terms they use, what is the jargon of their world. That was critical. And then, of course, our first commercial plant, 2018, we built in China. And I can tell you, you know, like you're walking around this thing with this sort of six enormous bioreactors that, as I said, stand 100 feet tall. And they each contain 500 cubic meters of liquid at a single time. And, you know, just thinking about, okay, so let's see if this works. That's like, you know, it's kind of a, that's a really terrifying moment. You have to kind of take yourself back to the fundamentals of the process and ground yourself in the knowledge that fundamentally, you know, in that lab scale, in those hungate tubes, this thing did work. And we've just got to create whatever biochemical ground they existed in that hungate tube, we've got to recreate that in this massive vat that's being fed with gas. And then as to things that surprise me, I mean, it's just, it's surprising to me just how variable the gas streams coming out of the steel mills. It's all over the map. But you have to deal with that. And then it's surprising how, you know, how the variety of contaminants you get in a syngas produced from trash, that's, you know, we operated pile plants in, in Japan from gasified municipal solid waste. And one day it would be waste coming from the local fish market. And the next day it would be trash coming from the local manufacturing plant. And it would also be household waste is all in there. And it was yeah, so yeah, lots of surprises. Sounds really cool, though. I think one of the things I've heard about with companies is just so important to hit the ground running and try and get to customers as quickly as possible, basically, which isn't quite what you've just said, but it's basically just like, go and get to the real world process as soon as you possibly can. Because it's, it's going to be really challenging. And so using the actual conditions you care about are extremely important. Exactly. And understand what your customer cares about. What do they care about? And how do they work? How do they operate? What's their, what's their perspective on the world? When we first spoke to, I'll never forget, we first spoke to a guy in a steel mill, the CEO of the steel mill in New Zealand. And, and he's like, so what is it you want to do again? And I was like, we want, we would love a little area of land, maybe 10 meters by 10 meters at first, and you know, it ends up being much bigger, but 10 meters by 10 meters. And we're going to put a little pilot plant there and we're going to operate like a, like a little brewery next to your steel mill using the gas from your steel mill and our special bugs. And we're going to make ethanol. And this guy looked at me in absolute horror. And he's like, you want to bring bacteria onto my steel mill? And he goes, I don't think we allow bacteria on the steel mill. And so I had to break it to him that he was mostly bacteria. Numerically, you are more bacteria than you are person. Which was a surprise to him. Wow. Yeah. Related to that, we were wondering, what are some of the maybe like non-technical, but like entrepreneurial or business development or economic challenges that you faced at various stages while building Landsatec? Yeah. I mean, the biggest challenge is always raising money. So how do you raise money? And how do you raise money at the various stages of the growth of a company? So, you know, the reality of a company like Landsatec is you start off as a kind of skunk worksie project in a basement and you end up and your goal, our goal is to end up a massive corporation that distributes plants all around the world and operates and produces billions of gallons of sustainable products from these above ground waste streams. That's the success and the journey between the basement and the billion dollar corporation is a measure of every single change you have to make in order to transform the company into that company. You've got to raise a lot of money to do these things. You know, the science is really expensive. Getting the best people is really expensive. And so you spend a lot of time just really thinking in detail about how you're going to approach investors, who you can attract to help finance and come along this journey with you. You have to get very used to people telling you no and very used to those kickbacks. I think those are skills that scientists are kind of challenging. In order to sell something, the person you're selling it to has to understand what you're doing in a way that they are empowered by that knowledge. No one wants to hear a science story. They want to hear a story that makes sense to them in their world and their language. So this has to make sense as a financial story. This has to make sense from a business strategy story. This has to make sense from a kind of technical logistical rollout story. It has to make sense at every level. And I think as scientists, we're fascinated by the question, but we're often less interested in all of the ramifications of all of the answers that can come from that question or come as a result of that question. Those were the entrepreneurial skills that I felt I had to learn along the way, which was how to break this down, how to talk about this in a way that's not dumbing anything down. It's actually just making this accessible and approachable and understandable to people with a finance background, with an engineering background, with a logistics background, with an oil company executive background. This has to make sense to all of these people equally and honestly. This might be hard to answer, but is there any particular part of your explanation that you found useful? I think referring to it as something like a brewery is kind of nice because people aren't scared of breweries. They're fun places to hang out and ethanol is produced there in bioreactors. I don't know. Is that an example? And are there other things where you're just like, this is the appropriate language? Yeah, it's kind of that. But also, scientists were really sloppy. I think even in this podcast, I've talked about bacteria, microbes, and bugs. We all know those three things are the same thing. That's one thing. But to someone, to a banker, they're like, what is this thing? Over here, you've got the microbe and then you've got the bug and then there's a bacteria here somewhere. What's going on here? And just getting a little precision around the language and building into the story from a place that someone feels safe to take them to a place where things are new. And so don't start straight away with the origin of life. Start with, wouldn't it be good? And the vision, wouldn't it be good if we could turn this into that and then build into the how as part of that discussion? But get people sold on the bigger picture and understand the bigger picture straight off the bat. Yeah, that's really cool. So pivoting a little bit, I think a big part of enabling sustainable manufacturing is not just technology and commercialization. There's a lot of other parts, particularly the government policy and regulation that makes it more feasible to do these things. So I'm curious, maybe what policies, regulations you'd like to see in this space to support companies like Lonsotec? Yeah, when I read the questions, I love this question. And actually, in some ways with the answer to the previous question, some of that should have reflected government policy observations and insights. Because honestly, the process of starting Lonsotec, developing, discovering, innovating technology, scaling a capability, scaling a technology and implementing it, commercializing it, those are all really, really hard things to do. Extremely hard things to do. But then dealing with policy, I did not anticipate being a hard thing to do. And it's probably harder, because it's so irrational to me. And it's so frustrating at times. And it has such a bearing on the outcomes that you can strive for. To give an example, the renewable fuel standard in the US seeks to incentivize the rollout of sustainable fuels into the marketplace. So specifically, it seeks to incentivize the rollout of biofuels. So there we have this unfortunate term of biofuel. Why is it an unfortunate term? It's because people think about biofuels or in the policy, biofuels are defined as fuels that are made from biological materials. Question. Why do we care what the fuel is made of? We care what the outcome of combusting the fuel is. That's what we care about. The nature of the CO2 being released or whatever. We don't care about how it's made. If I had a magical process to magically produce a fuel out of magic and using CO2 and some philosopher's stone, then I should be able to do that. Because the outcome would be just the CO2 going back in the atmosphere. I haven't taken anything out of the ground. But the RFS would prevent that fuel being distributed. So with the fact that we've come along and said, you know what, we can use the emission that's currently coming out of the steel mills of Gary, Indiana or elsewhere, and we can turn that emission that today is flowing into our atmosphere, we can use that as a way to produce, as a carbon source to produce a fuel that displaces a fuel made from oil, therefore massively reducing the overall carbon footprint. Not allowed. Source is not biological. And so you have this policy environment that doesn't dictate, is not aspirational in dictating what we would like as outcomes. It's actually directional in that it dictates how we must do something. And that robs the natural kind of inventiveness of scientists to find different mechanisms to achieve an outcome. It robs us of that opportunity and puts the direction we must travel in the hands of policy makers, which makes no sense. What I would like to see is real policy around real outcomes that are aspirational. And to get those policies that are aspirational, that define the outcomes we want, we absolutely, fundamentally need a carbon tax. We need to find a way of getting people to agree that we're going to tax carbon universally to reduce emissions. In my view, it's the thing that will really work. It's the thing that will drive behaviors quicker than anything else. And we know it works because we see the number of people smoking going down as a function of the amount of tax we put on cigarettes. We put that tax on a cigarette to reflect the external cost of this product on society. There's a cost on human health, there's a cost on the rest of us in terms of productivity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And CO2 emissions are the same. They have a massive external cost, that cost that we're seeing every day in the news today. We're seeing continuous extreme weather events. We're in a place that we predicted we would be in. We're not in a place that should be a surprise to anyone. People have been talking about this for 40 years. We're exactly where we thought we'd be. And yet we have not taxed the underlying driver for this environmental catastrophe. We have not sought to penalize those that emit the greatest amount of this molecule that's damaging the entire world. And so that's what I think needs to change from a policy environment. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's really interesting. I never really heard it conceptualized that way before as sort of policy being too prescriptive and not aspirational. And I think that's a really nice framing and would also love to see that change. I mean, related to that, it's clear that environmental sustainability is like a huge concern for you, I think all of us here, and Lanzatec. And maybe this is a little bit prescriptive, but how else would you like to see biology being used to address some of these global environmental challenges? Yeah, I would like to see biology used wherever it makes sense. I mean, I look at food, for example. If we look at how food is produced today, we can produce proteins far more efficiently than we produce today. I think that the measure is 33% of all greenhouse gas emissions is related to agriculture. And most of that is related to producing stuff from animals, because we've decided we want to convert plant protein or plant energy in plants incredibly inefficiently into energy in an animal before we'll eat it. It's like, what are we going to do over there? We're going to wait till it's been really inefficiently turned into a different kind of color of protein, and then we'll perhaps consume it. And so I think that biology can play a great role in all of these areas. To greatly improve the efficiency with which we operate to greatly reduce our emissions. And as we've already said, we have this inherent ability with biological tools to produce things that are very complicated from things that are very simple. That's biology. That's something that we've got to kind of actualize, I think, increasingly. But then I also think that more people need to not just focus on the excitement of being able to make something biologically, we have to focus on getting that thing produced at an enormous scale. It's almost like we like to face the problem that we're comfortable with, which is the lab-based problem. We like that. We're all very comfortable there, and we can talk to each other about how great it is that we could do this. But the problem that we don't talk about enough is the challenge of getting whatever we've done in that lab straight out into the field and produced in a vat that's 500,000 liters. And that's what we have to do. On a probable scale, definitely. And I like your point as well that I think biology does feel like magic in the way you can from simple things produce complex things, it reproduces itself. It seems to have all these properties that other types of materials don't have, but it doesn't always mean it's the right solution, or it can be quite hard to implement something in a cell. I'm a complete believer that if you can do things catalytically, like with a chemical catalyst, you should. You absolutely should. But biology does offer a way to produce things that you simply cannot produce catalytically or from materials that are impossible to feed to a catalyst without enormous investment. And so it's understanding those enormous areas that biology can play this tremendous role. So on this topic a little bit, do you have any advice for other researchers that are maybe looking to translate their work into a company? The only advice I have is have an idea and then find an engineer and explain it to them. Engineers are awful people in many ways because they're grounded in reality. I remember the first chemical engineer I spoke to about the Landsatec process. I was like, they said, oh, they must have a tremendous exotherm, this process must have a tremendous exotherm. And of course, this person is thinking about this operating in a final huge scale. And I was still thinking about operating in the lab. And I was like, no, we still have to put it in an incubator. But of course, and it's kind of bridging that reality gap between what you make and what someone with a very different lens thinks of it and thinks the challenges are. So I think that it's all too easy to go to the synthetic biologist in the lab next door and tell them how brilliant your insight has been or your idea is. But actually, it's much more useful to go and tell someone in a completely different field. And get them to challenge you, particularly if they're like a process engineer or someone who's thought about how something translates, not just from a point of production, but then purification and productization. Yeah. Wonderful. Find different friends, I would say. Wow. Okay. That'd be a whole other podcast. Sean's advice on how to get friends. Yeah. Thank you so much for spending time chatting with us today. It's been really enjoyable. I've learned a bunch. And yeah, I guess before we finish, we'd like to ask, is there anything that you would like to promote? No, I don't have a book out. Yep. All good. Wonderful. This has been another episode of EBRC in Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association. For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you're a student or postdoc and are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application linked in the episode description. A big thank you to the entire EBRC SPA podcast team, Andrew Hunt, Ross Jones, David Mai, Heidi Klumpa, and Rana Saeed. Thanks again to EBRC for their support, and of course to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.