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

Never, never land

The bottom line? For KiOR, there were the three nevers.

The first never. The 67 gallon per ton claim in the IPO. We asked Denis Stamires, point-blank: was there any result, ever, using KiOR technology, with refinery-compatible oxygen levels — in the 67 gallon per ton range, or even in the 50s?

Stamires was emphatic. “No. Never.”

Was it a complete fabrication? “It is. It has to be.” Stamires said. “I was the top scientist, and I had no idea that the [S-1] had even been written for the SEC.”

The second never. We asked Stamires. Did you ever have a chance to review the yield claims prior to the IPO?

“Never. And they even put my name on it. How did I found out? After it had gone out into the public,  my son who is a business executive, found it from his Wall Street friends. I got a copy from Wall Street, and I was at KiOR. It blows your mind. When I saw the 67, I said ‘where the hell does this come from’? But what killed me was the $1.80 per gallon. We’re talking about a few dollars, but not $1.80.”

The third never. Had 67 gallons per ton been achieved, could $1.80 been achieved?

“Absolutely not. Not even close,” said Stamires. The problem there?

“The cost of the catalyst. It wasn’t lasting long. But you are using a catalyst that costs between $5 and $10 a pound. You’re not making pharmaceuticals, you’re making bio-oil.”

The catalyst design was fatal to the technology’s cost objective?  “Absolutely. High use of a catalyst at a high price? You don’t have anything.”

What about catalyst loss? “You might lose up to 1% in a normal operation,” Stamires told The Digest. “But KiOR was losing over 10%. The whole thing was becoming academic. The process had a lot of metals, and was severe, and the biomass contains metals, and the process, the velocities and the contact time. It was the process time. It deactivated pretty fast. You get plugged pores. But it was the metals in the biomass. We were not removing them, we were adding them, in pre-treatment with salts.”

Never, never, never. That’s the story of KiOR.

For the public and investors, the focus may better be placed on “never again”.