You built Ample to convert coal plants into power facilities using bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). What prompted that idea?

Neil Renninger: My first company, Amyris, was turning sugars into fuels and chemicals, so I spent a lot of time at sugar mills in Brazil.

What’s left after processing sugarcane is bagasse, and in Brazil it gets fed to boilers where they generate heat and power. You’re burning biomass, creating a biogenic CO2 stream and generating biogenic power. It wasn’t too far of a step to say: If you capture that CO2 and stick it in the ground, you’d actually be creating carbon-negative power.

At the time, the technologies weren’t really commercialized, so I stuck it in the back of my head.

A few years after you launched Ample, the market looks very different. What changed?

Neil Renninger: There were three things that made Ample feel possible in 2023: a robust carbon market, the potential for government-backed debt to ease the cost of capital, and a bunch of coal plants being retired.

Those three things don’t exist right now.

Coal plant retirements are getting pushed out. It’s load growth from data centers making reliability really important to utilities, but it’s also federal government support. DOE is forcing these coal plants to stay open.

Then you have carbon markets. We had Microsoft really being the thousand-pound gorilla supporting a lot of projects, mostly BECCS projects like ours. Earlier this year they stepped back and said, “We’re going to take stock of where we are.”

None of this is, “Hey, this is a bad idea. This will never work.” This is just a timing problem.

Biomass can be controversial in the carbon-removal world. How do you think about its role?

Neil Renninger: We're almost still at the brainstorming stage of solving climate, and when you brainstorm, there are no bad ideas.

I think biomass has so much damn potential. We’ve invested billions of dollars to invent processes to directly capture carbon, yet we’re surrounded by plants that do it more effectively every second of every day. So to say that we're not going to use this asset, to me is mindboggling.

Biomass has been controversial because of unintended impacts. U.S. corn ethanol policies in the 90’s and 2000’s led indirectly to planting row crops in places like Brazil, and UK biopower policy has led to wood pellets made from primary and old growth forests in North America.

The dynamics have changed over the past two decades, though, as the marginal acre of corn now goes directly into the fuel supply rather than competing with food and feed. Carbon-removal buyers also know how to source biomass to protect against these indirect impacts.

What did working with utilities teach you?

Neil Renninger: With utilities, they have to keep the lights on and reliability is everything. That necessitates them being very, very conservative, particularly when the market’s tight like it is right now.

I thought I knew what a conservative partner looked like until I started working with utilities. But it makes sense. If a project fails, their ratepayers are on the hook for something that isn’t producing electricity.

What are people getting wrong about this moment?

Neil Renninger: Everybody always overreacts. Vinod Khosla says startups are like driving a Formula 1 car: heavy on the gas, then heavy on the brake, then heavy on the gas again.

We are in the heavy-on-the-brakes part of the cycle, and it will turn around. Right now is the time to plan and be ready for the opportunity when it changes.

What would tell you it’s time to hit the accelerator again?

Neil Renninger: It’s three things: carbon markets, coal plants and access to capital.

Microsoft stepping back in will be important for removal companies across the board, as will increasing public sector support like what is happening in Europe. When coal plant decommissionings start to come forward — when grid reliability becomes not the primary concern of utilities — those retirement dates will start to come back in.

What other areas do you have your eyes on?

Neil Renninger: Energy needs will be primary for a long time to come. VPPs, vehicle-to-grid, longer-term storage and low-power compute are all fascinating to me because we’re going to need them.

Anything involved in the grid is interesting to me. It’s a lot like our food system. We don’t have a food scarcity problem anymore. We have trouble getting food to the right places on the globe sometimes.

That’s a lot of what I see in power generation as well. It’s these temporary places where we can’t get electrons to a certain place on the grid that cause a lot of the issues and cause us to overbuild.

Given everything you’ve seen, are you still optimistic?

Neil Renninger: Yeah. It’s one step back before you take two steps forward.

The thing that’s been most depressing has been seeing coal use in the United States. It’s like a punch in the gut.

But you’ve got companies like Fervo doing good work. You’ve got solar generation growing. And battery deployment is growing exponentially. So yeah, it’s just a blip. All that coal is going to come back offline.

It may get a little worse before it gets better, but it is temporary.