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

The Wrong Design

Bartek’s isolation from the R&D team while working on the design of the demonstration unit, caused additional damages to KIOR.

The delivered and installed Biomass Convertor/Reactor had the original Pilot plant design, which was inefficient, and produced much lower bio oil yields. Bartek had replaced it with a higher efficiency Convertor/reactor based on a design KiOR had licensed from CPERI.

The damages included, costs of disconnecting/reconnecting, and modifying the already installed inefficient Reactor, plus months of delay in starting the operation of the demonstration unit .

“Management’s policies and actions were to promote deception to the public and investors and punish correctness,” commented Dennis Stamires. “It led to a  loss of trust and caused a serious demoralizing effect on most employees, and so, as is the usual case under such circumstances, the most qualified and experienced Scientists and Engineers have more job opportunities and leave first.”

And on technical grounds, the company was still at what Stamires, in a burst of frustration, expressed as “back at square one” in a January 31st note to Dr. Angelos Lappas, Professor Vasalos and Mike Brady.

“As you have heard thousand times,” he wrote, “we are still looking for a suitable catalyst, hopefully without containing ZSM, or at least a small portion. You can see how frustrated I am , after two or three years and all the work we have done, millions of dollars spent , we are now stuck in a Hole with the ZSM.”