Every successful company has a “secret sauce,” and Genomatica, a California-based sustainable chemicals producer, certainly has one. By the company’s own accounts, it doesn’t make 1, 4 Butandiol (or BDO as its called) through costly brute force or trial-and-error techniques. “We’ve got a unique technology platform,” says Christophe Schilling, founder and CEO of Genomatica. “That has allowed us to come up with the best ways to produce many of the intermediate chemicals that are used for the core of the chemical industry.” And what is Genomatica’s approach to making biobased chemicals? The answer is computer modeling.

Nearly all of the company’s early success has come via predictive computer modeling for living organisms and their respective metabolic rates. The computational approach “has allowed us to figure out all the ways we want to make the chemicals,” Schilling says, and for BDO, “we can figure out every way possible to turn sugar into BDO.” Today, the company is using a tried-and-true industrial organism, E.coli, and a readily available feedstock, dextrose from corn wet mills and sucrose from sugar mills, to produce what the company says is the first of many products. Don’t expect Genomatica’s predictive modeling approach to pump out any novel chemicals for new and future markets, however.

Schilling says the company is focused only on the core chemical industry. “We think it is the perfect combination of volume in the market with margin,” he says. “We think that specialty chemicals are nice in terms of greater dollar per pound, but the markets are relatively small.” From Schilling’s standpoint, venture-capital-type returns just can’t happen in those markets. And, on the other end of the spectrum is the enormous biofuels market, an “alluringly large market,” Schilling says, which requires massive productions levels in relatively thin margins. “We think the sweet spot is right in the middle.”

That rationale is based on two pounds—from two pounds of sugar, Schilling says, a person can make roughly the same amount of both BDO and ethanol. BDO, he points out, sells for about two to four times as much as ethanol, a margin that makes up for the difference in market size. That market opportunity doesn’t mean Schilling and his team aren’t keeping an eye on the ethanol industry, especially developments in cellulosic. Because the company is determined to take a feedstock-flexible approach, Schilling says Genomatica is constantly monitoring progress in the field and looking for companies to partner with on pretreatment technologies before it reaches its ultimate goal, syngas utilization to produce sugars. 

—Luke Geiver