KiOR: The Inside True Story of a Company Gone Wrong. Part 5, The Collapse 

Our story so far

In 2011, KiOR raised $150 million in its June IPO, claiming that it was generating yields of 67 gallons per ton in its Demo unit operations. But it was miles short of that.

In our previous installments, we have charted how KiOR moved from a promising early-stage technology to a public company with serious technological flaws that could have been fixed, but were ignored in what a senior team member speaking for the record, Dennis Stamires, characterized as a “reckless rush to commercial”.

By 2012, numerous KiOR staffers of the time believed that the company had a management problem more than a technology problem. No matter how dire the technological challenges seemed. As Paul O’Connor observed, “no one [in power] analyzed the pilot plant data. Andre [Ditsch] would say ‘oh, go out and hire MIT PhDs.’ But they are not the ones who are going to scale up a process. Fred let Andre go his way, and they hired too many people from Albemarle across the street. Catalysts are important; you need a few people. But you need a lot of process people, and that balance went wrong.” The right people? “KiOR forced them out or fired them or they left because of the poor professional working environment,” said one team member of the time.

The balance was precarious, as 2012 dawned. Everything was riding on the performance in the first commercial plant.

If 2012 was another year of private failure and public bravado, a year of living disingenuously, 2013 would be the year in which the multiple streams of fiction and non-fiction would merge into a river of raw data that would make the truth clear. The company had reached scale, but was still in the slow process of commissioning, so there was still room for doubt, or hope.

Skeptics, promoters, innovators — who would be proven right?

Read the previous Parts in this Series

KiOR: The inside true story of a company gone wrong, Part 1

KiOR: the inside true story of a company gone wrong, Part 2

KiOR: The inside true story of a company gone wrong. Part 3, “You’ve Cooked the Books”

KiOR: The inside true story of a company gone wrong. Part 4, the Year of Living Disingenuously

Our story continues

In February 2013, the Columbus facility came online, and the State of Mississippi and KiOR insiders agreed: the yields were worse than hoped. Far worse.

The stock was in freefall.