The Next DuPont or Exxon

Hopefully, without the legacy of pollution

This usually goes out Tuesday morning. It’s currently Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve been kind of swamped lately with just life. I’ve got some vacation planned though and my last sponsorship has run it’s course. It just feels like summer here now too. It’s hard to write when it’s so nice outside and when you make progress in the lab, but it’s better to be late than to never arrive I guess. Welcome to all the new readers!

Chemistry and chemical engineering at the technical disciplines of climate change. They have both enabled technologies and products that are contributing to climate change and they also hold the solution to fixing the very same problems we have created. Just stopping everything would stop the issue of climate change, but at the price of our modern economy. Some people do just want to watch the world burn.

If we are serious about mitigating climate change we need to completely overhaul the way our economy is structured. Right now, it is wholly dependent on extracting petroleum, refining it, and either making fuel or chemicals. It doesn’t have to be this way though and electric vehicles do present a viable alternative to some modes of transportation. Chemicals and polymers are primarily made from petroleum and the massive infrastructure around petroleum extraction and refinement benefit chemicals from having abundant and relatively cheap raw materials. This is why we see a lot of chemical companies concentrated near oil refineries.

If we want cleaner, more efficient, and sustainable advances to take place in our economy then we need more research focused on bringing new technologies to market. Academia has been focused for decades on fundamental research, which is a great way to train scientists and engineers, but when it comes to solving world scale problems it’s like trying to use a flathead screwdriver on a hex screw. More research focused on solving problems is only half the battle though.

Having a technical solution to a problem is meaningless if there is no investment to bring these technologies to market. There are plenty of amazing things being done in labs now, but graduate students and post-doctoral researchers often have no clue on how to found companies, much less on how and why to raise capital. Further, solutions to some problems might exist in collaborations that don’t yet exist. 

Recently, John Doerr donated $1.1 billion to Stanford to establish a climate school, and it’s unclear if the academic model will work, but chemistry should be a pillar of the school’s teachings. If it’s not then we run the risk of producing more students who can articulate a problem, but not actually solve it.

Our climate change problem is one we created because of how chemists and chemical engineers figure out how to utilize the form of carbon known as petroleum. We figured out how to crack it into high octane gasoline and we figured out how to make ethylene, propylene, xylenes, butadiene, and other commodity chemicals that we have been using to build our physical world. Our infrastructure is 100% reliant on petrochemicals for anti-corrosion coatings, fireproofing, insulation, and building roads.

There are a few companies out there trying to change this dependence that I’ve written about here in the newsletter. What a company might look like in this space could range from a synthetic biology company to an enzymatic catalysis company to a company doing chemical transformations to biomass. Chemistry and biology are getting closer together than ever and the scientists and engineers need the right collaborators to build the companies that will propel us into the thirty years of decarbonization.   

If you are in school now or considering a reason to go back I think the area around climate change and ending our dependence on fossilized carbon is critical. There aren’t anymore “Uber of X” or “Instagram of Y” companies out there (at least I hope not), but maybe there is the next DuPont, Dow or Exxon waiting to be started. We need more than just scientists and engineers too.

If you are an investor or a graduate student working on problems related to climate change you should let us all know in the comments. I’d love it if this newsletter could help spark collaboration. 

Tony