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

Dead Man Walking

While the management crisis was unfolding, the Stealth Team had outlined new catalysts and had made the request to test these, and to calibrate the KiOR pilot plant with sand. The request ultimately would have to be made to Ron Cordle, the Pilot Plant supervisor, as a confidential, weekend test. The backup plan was to have CPERI run the tests in their pilot in Greece.

“It was like the blind leading the blind,” Stamires recalled. “The KiOR pilot plant reactor was deficient and underperforming and not capable of producing optimum bio-oil yields. Adding to this structural Reactor problem, and [later] the additional problem of the data manipulation of John Hacskaylo. The combination of these problems resulted in a general situation where nobody knew what we were actually doing, what oil yield numbers to believe.”

As Robert Bartek would express in a March 28th memo:

“You had already been hounding me to get sand in the Unit. At that time the three of us started on this, I had already accepted the fact that I was a “Dead Man Walking” in Fred’s organization and my time at KiOR would be short. So why not one final act of defiance? If you are going to be let go, let’s do it for a noble project reason rather than politics. May be we could rescue this thing and snatch victory out of defeat we [are] heading into.” 

Ultimately, the sand test was carried out, using sand obtained from CPERI, and confirmed that higher oil yield was produced at the Pilot Plant at CPERI  in Greece. That finding prompted Bartek and Stamires with further discussions with Lappas and Vasalos, to arrange a meeting with Cannon and Vasalos in Houston. And an agreement was made with Cannon that CPERI would license the design of their Reactor to KIOR

With this, the Reactor at KiOR’s Pilot was replaced with a new Reactor constructed  according  to the design of the CPERI Pilot Plant. With some process variables optimizations, the KiOR Pilot Plant was able to produce higher Bio Oil yields.

Work on catalysts also continued. The Stealth Team was convinced by that time that the BCC Catalyst (the synthetic  clay) was a very poor heat conductor, and incapable of transferring a sufficient amount  of heat to the Biomass fast enough. They thought that a new material with high bulk density, low porosity microspheres, with a low catalytic activity, would be much more suitable.

By March 9th, the Stealth Team had obtained, via “a friend at BASF”, 5 gallons of high temperature calcined clay microspheres, which were tested secretly at the KiOR Pilot Plant. In a memo on March 27th, Bartek reported to O’Connor, Yanik and Stamires an overall substantially improved performance over the BCC Technology and  its Catalyst. Oil yields were higher, there was less coke, and a reasonably low oxygen content in the oil. The Stealth Team began to make arrangements to purchase a Spray Drier and a Calciner to be able to make calcined clay microspheres.

Meanwhile, a March 13th 2009 report from Peter Loezos entitled Mass Balance Data “validated again that BCC technology was not working for KiOR,” an observer reported. Dennis Stamires added, “It was mainly due to the very low bio-oil yields.”

Stamires also pointed The Digest to an independent validation of the performance of the HTC catalyst (i.e. the Hydrotalcite, HTC), published in 2013 in the Defect and Diffusion Forum by F. L. Mendes, A.R. Pinho, and M.A.G Figueiredo. That report concluded:

“The use of either the FCC catalyst or hydrotalcite are not suitable for intermediate pyrolysis reactors, generating a product with high water content and low content of organic compounds in bio-oil and produce more coke. None of the materials tested produced bio-oils with considerable hydrocarbons yields and presented high amounts of phenolic compounds. In general, silica had the best results in terms of yield and quality of bio-oil.”

Both Mendes and Pinho were working for Petrobras in Brazil, and during this period it has been asserted to The Digest that KiOR was involved in negotiations with Petrobras, regarding forming a joint venture, or licensing KiOR’s BCC Technology. Suggesting though not proving that the journal results reported were related to KiOR story.