The Rocket’s Glare: Impossible Foods, Moderna, Phillips are three strands of a single, driving braid of opportunity

There’s great news in the advanced bioeconomy this month. Impossible Foods has secured $200 million in its latest funding round, led by new investor Coatue.

Wonder Food

The industry-leading food-tech startup has raised about $1.5 billion since its founding in 2011. Impossible Foods will use the funds in part to expand its research and development programs and accelerate manufacturing and commercialization and the development of Impossible Pork, milk, steak and other foods. Series G closely follows the launch of Impossible Sausage, the first all-new product from Impossible Foods since the 2016 launch of Impossible Burger. After debuting at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show in January, Impossible Sausage became available in more than 22,000 restaurants in just six months.

And Impossible is now available in 8000 retail stores, up from 150 in March. One of the reasons why the company’s previous investment round — a $500 million “Series F” announced mid-March, was one of the largest investment rounds for a food tech startup and was oversubscribed.

The trajectory has been astounding this year, and food has become a third companion to fuels and pharma at the apex of advanced bioeconomy momentum.

Wonder Pharm

In pharma, all the excitement has been focused in a search for a COVD vaccine. This month, Moderna which focuses on messenger RNA therapeutics and vaccines announced that the U.S. government has secured 100 million doses of mRNA-1273 for up to $1.525 billion for the manufacturing and delivery. With a previous award of up to $955 million from BARDA for the development of mRNA-1273 to licensure, today’s announcement brings the U.S. government commitments for early access to mRNA-1273 to up to $2.48 billion. The U.S. government, as a part of Operation Warp Speed, will also have the option to purchase up to an additional 400 million doses of mRNA-1273 from Moderna.

Wonder Fuel

In the fuels space, the big news has been in renewable diesel, most lately the astounding announcement by Phillips 66 that they are expanding their proposed renewable diesel project to 800 million gallons.

Big Things Comes in Many Packages

These projects couldn’t be more different in terms of product goals — energy, health, food. And scale, too.

Moderna’s product is based on a dosage measured in milliliters or fractions thereof, and sells for around $120,000 a gallon. Maximum worldwide demand for vaccines would top out at something like 2 million gallons per year. Impossible’s product sells for something like $8 a pound and a daily dosage is something like 4-8 ounces and you wouldn’t have it every day, and maximum demand for meats top out at something like 350 million tons (today’s population), or around 10 billion gallons if you measured it by volume. Phillips 66’s product sells for something like $4 per gallon, maximum worldwide demand for oil tops out at more than 1.5 trillion gallons per year.

In each case, huge margins — even renewable diesel has a profit in today’s market approaching $2 per gallon, according to Digest sources, and Impossible’s gross margins and Moderna’s leave that figure in the dust.

Yet, they share quite a bit of technology — fuels for renewable diesel, nutrition and health.

All you have to do is look at a company like Amyris. Quite a number of the people at Impossible came from Amyris or its affiliates, the company’s technology was originally employed as a low-cost treatment for malaria, and the company’s first product set aimed at renewable fuels including diesel and jet. And they all use a common set of organic, natural feedstocks. These days, the higher-value feedstocks go more towards pharma and food and the lower-value organic wastes go towards fuels, but they’re all organic. And they’re all growing, fast.

Goodbye, Hunter Gatherer

For those who had faith, vindication. For those who made investments, rewards. For those who were more skeptical, it’s more data to digest as the world continues its industrial transformation from the last ancient practices of the hunter and gatherer that are still with us — hunting animals, gathering petroleum and gas. The 21st century will be remembered for many things — not all of them wonderful days — but the final transition from the hunter/gatherer society to the agricultural model of using the sun’s energy on a more and more direct basis, that’s a theme of our times.

Solar energy is just one example. There is the transition to harvesting plants instead of harvesting the animals that eat plants. There is the transition to using the information inside plants and animals, extracted from them without killing them. There is the use of circular energy and re-circulating carbon instead of piling up waste carbon in the sky like it is a free sewer.

Sure, the first person to the river can use it, for a while, as a dumping ground for waste and for washing, for drinking water, for irrigation. The first of our ancestors had no thought for the safety of water or the husbandry of it, the protection and preservation. Re-use, reduce, re-cycle would have puzzled them as a slogan.

Then, the odious consequences of thinking that way became more and more obvious to them. It is free to dump sewage into the river, unless you count the costs of typhoid and cholera in money and misery. Eventually, we began to self-manage the water, like a farmer rather than a user. We could do better, but we’re miles better than we were in 1500, and we live longer, better and less foul-smelling lives because of how we have changed our use of this resource.

The Rocket’s Invisible Glare

We don’t see it, sometimes. One of the most astute observers on the energy scene, Tammy Klein, wrote earlier this summer:

There has been a high degree of focus by policymakers, the media, NGOs and others on technologies such as electrification as a means, perhaps the only means in some cases, to decarbonizing transport. However, it is becoming clearer that advanced biofuels and advanced alternative fuels will have to play a critical role as well to achieve GHG reduction targets in line with the Paris Agreement. Indeed, the consensus from organizations such as IEA and others is that decarbonization cannot be achieved without advanced fuels. So, what is it going to take to bring these fuels to market? What is the tipping point? What series of events/actions have to happen to make that tipping point happen?

The tipping point has been reached, though it is difficult to see because it is like a skyrocket which has burst in a thousand points of light and it is difficult to connect all these streaks and sparks back to the original source. It is the rocket’s dark glare we are experiencing, when we were looking for the bombs bursting in air to make it vivid to all.

It is not three stories, of three thousand, it is one big story.

New Thinking for a Big Inning

We have a new way of thinking — carbon value as well as energy value and performance value — our value chair now has three legs and will be all the more sturdy because of it. This is not to say that we have reached the end of petroleum and the defiant desire for free sewers and prices that do not account for consequences, nor are we at the beginning of the end or even the end of the beginning. But we have reached the Big Inning, there’s a game to be won, and we have learned how to swing the bat.

We are changing, we are learning to make do with resources at hand, and treat them as the precious things they are, not to be sent to the sky because it is cheaper to foul the air than protect it. We have become users of waste as scarcity increases, as we should.

As was observed in Psalm 118:22:

The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the LORD’S doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.