KiOR: The inside true story of a company gone wrong

A crisis of design

By this stage, and independent of any testing that would take place with the KBR-designed pilot unit, a quiet war of ideas had erupted within KiOR regarding the design of KiOR’s reactor. Specifically, hope was fading among technical staff and consultants that a “one-pot reactor” would work as originally hoped.

A fundamental concept that Paul O’Connor and Dennis Stamires formed was combining the two reactions of pyrolysis and catalysis in one reactor, occurring simultaneously. Consolidated bioprocessing had been described as “the Holy Grail of biofuels” by Dartmouth’s Lee Lynd, and “one-pot reactors” were very much in vogue at the time.

On the fermentation side, companies like Mascoma and Qteros were developing bugs that could accomplish extract sugars from cellulose and ferment them, simultaneously.

It was rare but not unheard of. Combining pyrolysis and catalysis had been explored as early as 1998 by a research team led by Vasalos and reported in the Journal of Applied Catalysis, where a typical FCC Pilot Plant and a commercial FCC catalyst was used.

Proving the soundness of the technology was critical to KiOR’s pathway to success.