KiOR: The inside true story of a company gone wrong

What was the goal of the process and the catalysts, anyway?

Simply put, the chosen route was catalytic pyrolysis. In this approach, the goal is to crack the biomass molecules arriving at the front end of the reactor (composed of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen) under the right combination of pressure and temperature. To give an everyday example, cooking food is a high-temperature, ambient pressure form of pyrolysis.

Using sufficiently active, selective and robust catalysts, the hope is to produce at the end of the reaction a high yield of hydrocarbons that can be upgraded into transportation fuels.

Here’s the good and bad news. Good? Biomass pyrolysis has been known for a long time to produce gas, coke, char and some bio-oil. Bad? As of 2007 — however, not enough oil, and of insufficient quality to be economically upgraded into transport fuel.

The purpose of KiOR’s technology was to shift the balance radically towards bio-oil and away from gas, coke and char, and to bring down the levels of oxygen in the bio-oil.

The state of Mississippi summarized the goals in their lawsuit:

Pyrolysis oil retains approximately the same amount of oxygen content as the biomass used to create it. This amount is typically in the 40-45% range, which is far too high to be refined within the existing infrastructure of today’s oil refineries. The primary and essential goal of KiOR’s catalytic process was to reduce the oxygen and acid content of its biocrude to a level that could be successfully refined by oil companies in their existing infrastructure, while still maintaining biocrude yields that were high enough to render the Company profitable. 

The KiOR process, from a industry presentation in 2013.

The formation of BioECON

To explore the use of biomass in a FCC reactor, among other concepts, Paul O’Connor and associates founded BIOeCON BV in the Netherlands and Dutch Antilles. O’Connor was President and Technical Director, Armand Rosheuvel was Financial Director, Rob van der Meij was Commercial Development Director, and scientist Dennis Stamires was retained as Scientific Advisor and Consultant.

It was a world-class team. Stamires had been conducting R&D work in the area of Heterogeneous Catalysis using natural, synthetic and modified forms of Clays and Zeolites since 1955. He was a member of the team working at Linde, a division of Union Carbide, which in 1960 first announced these mind-bending zeolite catalysts at the International Congress of Catalysis in Paris. And O’Connor was already working at AKZO NOBEL’s Catalyst Division on a project involving the conversion of Biomass to liquid transportation fuels, using a Hydrothermal process and a synthetic clay (Hydrotalcite) type catalyst. Stamires and O’Connor had worked closely together at what had become Albemarle.

Their cooperation resulted in several new inventions; one focused on new anonic clay catalysts for use in the transformation of biomass to Bio-oil, as filed with the US Patent Office in April 2005, as “Process for Producing Liquid Hydrocarbons from Biomass”.

In the end, sources told The Digest that Rosheuvel arranged for the original funds to operate the Company, which were reported in Harvard Business Review in 2009 to have totaled €1 million.

A modified FCC reactor design and a catalyst suitable to biomass — these were the primary needs.