Listen to Victoria and Jennifer’s Conversation Here:
Journey into the world of commercial carbon recycling with Victoria Meyer and Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, a groundbreaking company developing sustainable products from waste emissions. Discover how LanzaTech is leading the charge in turning industrial waste into valuable resources, focusing on carbon-smart ethanol and sustainable aviation fuel. Jennifer shares her fascinating personal journey from Colombia to the U.S. and her transition from working at Honeywell UOP to leading LanzaTech as its first CEO.
Victoria and Jennifer engage in a discussion about the challenges faced by startups in scaling up new technologies and the importance of partnering with established industry giants. They delve into the global trend towards regionalization and localization and how LanzaTech’s innovative approach is transforming the industry by using local resources to produce high-value products. Jennifer passionately advocates for following one’s passion and maintaining a dynamic mindset, providing valuable advice for young professionals aspiring to make a significant impact in the chemical industry.
On this week’s show, we take a detailed look at:
- Carbon Recycling: Transforming waste emissions into sustainable products
- LanzaTech’s technological innovation: Overcoming challenges in scaling disruptive technologies
- Creating value through local resource utilization
- Evolving startup leadership and talent management
- Leveraging partnerships between startups and established companies
Killer Quote: “Don’t over plan. The road will get you there. Love what you do, given the long hours. If you love the work, the people, and want to do it again tomorrow, that’s my advice. Don’t take a path you can’t make your own.” – Jennifer Holmgren
Other links:
Episode 60: Jennifer Holmgren on Carbon Capture and Transformation with LanzaTech
Watch Victoria and Jennifer’s Conversation on Youtube Here:
Why Localization Matters in Global Sustainability with Jennifer Holmgren of LanzaTech
Welcome back to The Chemical Show. As we enter the month of April, things are getting green, and we are focusing on sustainability and innovation throughout the month. So you’re gonna be hearing from a lot of great innovative guests, including today’s guest. So before we get started, just a reminder, if you are new to The Chemical Show, make sure you follow and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
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So now on to today’s episode. I’m really excited to be speaking with Jennifer Holmgren, who is the CEO of LanzaTech, a very innovative company focused on commercial carbon recycling with biology. I’m sure Jennifer is gonna explain a little bit more about that. Throughout its twenty year history, LanzaTech has developed some great products, including sustainable aviation fuel, which is now within Lanza Jet. They have gone public, and they’ve done a number of great things.
So, long time listeners of The Chemical Show will know that Jennifer was featured on Episode 60. We’ll link to that in the show notes so you can find that episode and hear a bit of the earlier part of the journey. I’m really excited to have this updated conversation as the company continues to grow and progress and Jennifer, of course, is leading the way. So Jennifer, thank you for joining me on The Chemical Show.
Thank you, Victoria. It’s a real pleasure.
Absolutely. Let’s start a little bit with your origin story. How did you get here?
In a very circuitous way. I was born in Colombia in Barranquilla, the home of Shakira. So I just want you to know that’s the history for what it’s worth. From there, I had the opportunity to move to The United States when I was nine because my father, his company Avianca, the Colombian airline, had a base there and they wanted him to to be part of that. And it gave us the opportunity to come to The US, learn English, and that’s how I ended up here. The ability to grow in the public school systems, to get the degrees I have, the education I’ve gotten is an amazing opportunity. And my parents gave us that by making sacrifices and leaving their home. I became a scientist in part because I love the space program.
The United Space Program was the highlight of my young life. I followed the NASA program, and I just love the idea of going to space, of solving big problems, and that made me wanna be a scientist. And I was really encouraged to do that throughout my high school education here, and and that’s how I ended up here.
I mean, that’s quite a journey. So tell me about the LanzaTech story.
So I’m not the founder of LanzaTech. I’m its first CEO. LanzaTech was founded by Sean Simpson and cofounder Forrester who together decided they didn’t wanna use biological feedstocks like sugar to make ethanol. So they started the company. They knew there was something called gas fermentation, and they thought they’d give it a whirl, see if they could make ethanol from that.
When they were ready to pilot, that’s when I came to the company, when it was ready to scale. The lead investor was Vinod Khosla and K1W1 felt it was time to bring on a CEO.
So when was that, Jennifer? What year was that?
2010.
You’ve been at LanzaTech for fifteen years at this point?
Exactly. And I had a great job. I was the founding vice president of UOP Honeywell’s renewable energy business. I think, you know, I made the first drop in aviation fuel, and we got it ASTM certified. We did all the flight demos. That was 2009 and 2010 showing the world that you could fly on a hydrocarbon drop in aviation fuel made from a feedstock that was not fossil carbon. That work actually got me very excited about alternative feedstocks, but that work also showed me that if you really think about the petroleum industry and the scale of the petroleum industry and the fact that everything in our daily lives comes from fossil carbon, you realize that while biological feedstocks as we know them, sugar, corn, etcetera, can contribute, you’re not gonna get to a hundred million barrels of capacity per day.
You can’t get there from here. LanzaTech, to me, was an opportunity to use feedstocks that were widely available, trash. Recycle carbon emissions so that you could aggregate to a hundred million. But what I really loved about it is that it’s an efficiency play because you’re using more of a feedstock. If you’re using emissions at a petrochemical company, what you’re saying is I wanna use as much of the carbon that comes in to make product. So you’re just making more from the same amount. And so that to me is displacing, always constantly taking carbon out of the ground, using it, and throwing it away either in the sky, in the ocean, or in a trash heap.
It’s just so exciting to think about making more.
Yeah. And yet, I don’t know your numbers, but it’s still small scale compared to across everything. People are excited about the opportunity for sustainability, and it really seemed like in the early part of the 2020s everybody was deep on the sustainability bandwagon, making promises, making commitments, and then figuring out how hard it really is and how challenging it is to scale with new technologies, to meet technologies that have been around. When you talk about refining products or chemical products, they’ve been around for a hundred years. So there’s a certain view of it’s not so easy to scale.
Yeah. It’s not so easy to scale. You have the background that tells you just how hard it is to scale even a known process or even an incremental improvement to a known process, a small modification. When you’re trying to do something disruptive, it is a much bigger deal. However, we have done this. We have done this as a company, LanzaTech. The world has done it with solar and wind. Ten years ago, everybody was like, oh, solar is still ten years out.
It’ll always be ten years out. Now you can’t even turn around without seeing a solar installation. So to me, it is possible to change. It is possible to disrupt, and we just have to be committed to being on a journey that takes the right steps and doesn’t get distracted by promises. Because what scares me the most, is everybody wants to see a home run. Right? We want to see that really easy thing because you know that holy grail is there, and we’re gonna get there, and then we’ll be done.
It’s magic. Right? We love magic.
We love magic.
Exactly. And I just think that those are a distraction in a mission of creating a different trajectory for carbon. If we fall in love with notions, we actually stop ourselves from making progress.
So I think that’s such a great point. Many of the big oil companies, Shell and BP, made these great commitments, and started selling off their traditional assets. And then I know just recently, the CEO of BP at CERAWeek, which happened in March, was talking about how they’ve gone away from renewable and green energy and back to traditional oil and gas. It’s hard. How does this affect you and LanzaTech and what you guys are doing? How do you balance this? What strikes you with that?
I do believe the pendulum swing is very difficult for us because we need people to be committed to what I would call a transition. I think of a transition not simply as carbon abatement, but at a different way of making products where we actually think of carbon, whether it comes from fossil or trash or emissions as something that’s precious. And something that we need to take advantage of. I think it’s nearsighted not to consider it a massive opportunity, because just like energy efficiency is a massive opportunity. You reduce cost, you pay less, but you get the same output or even more. That’s energy efficiency. What’s carbon efficiency? It’s the same thing.
You make more from less. You make more money because the feedstock is what drives economics. What you put in is what drives the economics. So if you can get more from the same input, that’s a big win, and it makes you more profitable. But people are missing the point and for me, it’s about local manufacturing from local feedstocks. It’s about making more profit from the same input. It’s about jobs and security of supply because if you make products that you don’t always have to import, there’s more security. And so all these things are important and I think to just swing back kinda misses the point.
Yeah. How does this change with how you guys are approaching both customers and business partners? Because you’ve partnered with many big companies to help get your technology in place and commercialized and utilized.
Absolutely. The way I think about it is there’s always been the ones that you’re not gonna be able to get across the line. When you’re doing something new, you’ve got to accept when you are going to be successful. You can’t always assume you will always be successful. And you go after the people that have the same views of the world as you do. So we have projects in India. If you listen to the minister of petroleum there and even the prime minister speak, what are they trying to do? They wanna use local resources because every time they import something, their money goes out of the country.
So as they’re growing the economy, they cannot afford to grow it quickly if all the money that growth brings goes out of the country to buy feedstock. So they get it. They get that what they wanna do is use more of their local resources. Using more local resources means one thing. Find different feedstocks. Find carbon wherever it is and use it. And so while some folks are going in a direction that is different than the direction we wanna go in, others are not. So for a company that’s small, you go to where the opportunity is.
That’s the only choice you have.
Absolutely. I love your point about localization, and I hadn’t fully appreciated that as part of LanzaTech’s value proposition and what you’re doing. Because certainly, in the business environment that we’re in today, with tariffs and geopolitical tensions, there does seem to be this whole trend towards regionalization and localization. And the simplest part of me says, if you can ship anything less, that’s better. Although the economics may not always tie together in other places. So I just think that’s really an interesting part of your value, is creating the local opportunities with local feedstocks for local supply points.
Yep, and I would add one more thing that is quite interesting if you stop and think about it. The further down the value chain you get in manufacturing, the higher value that product is. So if you think about it, if you can use local feedstocks and not just export them, but make local feedstocks into more value add products, you are actually exporting something that has more value. So that manufacturing component and the local jobs component and the capturing value at a community level is important too.
Yeah, really critical. So let’s dial it back a little bit. So success for LanzaTech has been twenty years in the making, which it’s funny because everybody assumes, I just heard about LanzaTech. That’s an overnight success story. And I was like, no. There was a lot of work going on in the background that people didn’t see, obviously. The company started small as all innovative companies do.
You’re still relatively small today, and yet you are LanzaTech Global, listed on the Nasdaq. You’ve got several businesses that are their own entities. And I know that recently I’ve seen some news that you’ve received your first shipments of carbon smart ethanol, which is exciting. Is this part of your vision? When you started, what was LanzaTech trying to do and could you imagine, the company that it is today?
I don’t know that it was clear that this is where we were headed. But it got started as a company to take waste gas to ethanol. Right? And we’ve now really been able to understand the power of the platform, not just to take waste steel mill emissions, but municipal solid waste and biomass and CO2. That’s all the value of the platform as an input. And then I think there is a transition to ethanol, not as the product, but an intermediate. Ethanol as a way to make the feedstock for making sustainable aviation fuel, ethanol as the way to get to ethylene so that you can make polyester. So really saying, look, this waste is very hard to move.
I’m not gonna move trash around all over the world necessarily to use it as a feedstock. But if I can take that trash and turn it into ethanol, I can move the ethanol around and make all the other products. So it’s almost like a way to create a movable intermediate. And you know this from the oil sector. Petroleum is the densest liquid known to man, and so it’s easy to move around, and that’s what we do. But this time, maybe we have to take the plants to the feedstock, and it’s the product, the ethanol, that we move around.
Makes sense. And I think you’re right. I mean, we’ve often across the chemical industry called polyethylene, for instance, solid ethylene. Nobody’s moving ethylene. Well, now they are. That’s a whole different story. But, you know, historically you move the products because it’s the most efficient way to do it. The ethanol piece is absolutely the same because the ethanol becomes a feedstock to other things.
Your role today, I would imagine, is very different. The company itself is very different. You’re a public company. You’ve got investors, public private, what have you. You’ve got an a variety of entities inside of the LanzaTech umbrella that you are running. How do you ready yourself to be ready for that, such a different company than where you started?
I think it’s really important to commit to change at the team level as well, and how do you transition from the very entrepreneurial engineering team, to the I’m going to be replicating and reducing cost engineering team. You have to accept that there is a dynamic inside the company of talent and a progression of talent that is different than what you started with. That includes everybody from a scientist, an engineer, to a leader, to the CEO, that you always gotta be thinking, am I in the right place at the right time? And in some ways, you can tell by how happy you are. If you’re a person who wants to start a company. You’re a person that wants to do the first ever prototype, and if you are mentally prepared for transition, self select. And say, this isn’t what I wanna be doing now. So you always have to be dynamic and bringing in new people. To me, it’s about creating that transition.
I’ve had the opportunity to advise and work with many early stage start ups as they move into commercialization, and you talked about how, for instance, your engineering team goes from creation to efficiency, and I think that’s one of the hardest things for people not working in a startup ecosystem to understand and appreciate that it’s skill based. To a traditional chemical company, I worked for Shell for a very long time. Many of my friends started at Shell and retired from Shell.
And so the idea of going into an environment where you know that, hey, my journey may only be five years because that’s the scope of work that’s interesting and exciting and fits me. And then I have to move on to something else because the company and the business is in a different phase of its journey. And I think people that work with mature companies don’t always appreciate the dynamic of an immature startup company and startup ecosystem.
Absolutely. I think you have to think about the world very differently. And I think it’s also quite tiring in some ways. There’s an exciting element, but there’s also the I need to build better infrastructure because I need to grow. And to be honest, sometimes that’s why the large company-small company partnerships work so well because they each bring different things. We have lots of large partners who have brought a lot to what we do, whether it’s thinking or something else.
I just think that we need to be open to that. I think a lot of people say, oh, I worry about working with a big company, but I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it. I think the question is what can I help that big company do, and what can they help me do? What can they teach me? Because there is a lot to be learned from people that have been around for 200 years. You say twenty years. Oh my gosh. That’s a lot. That’s a drop in the bucket with the large chemical companies who have taught us how to make all these things that we use today.
Those partnerships are critical, because inside of a big company, the innovations that a company like LanzaTech is bringing, in some ways, they don’t move the needle. They get cut because they don’t fit the innovation profile when you say, well, we need something that becomes a business of x billion dollars. Well, we don’t know when a new innovation is gonna get to that point. So the opportunity for companies like LanzaTech to be innovating, bringing solutions and products to market, and then pairing with the big companies who have the ability to standardize it, to really take it to market, to take it to customers is really critical. And I think we’re seeing that with successful startups and partnerships, we’re seeing that happen regularly across the industry.
Yep. I think it’s become more pervasive. There’s an understanding across both sides of this aisle that it is important to partner and that that’s how success will be created. And I think people are very open minded now on how to work together.
So Jennifer, you have had a really successful career for many, many years. What advice do you have for businesses and for young professionals, maybe that are in the early stages of their career that look at this and say, I wanna be leading an innovative company. I wanna be CEO. I wanna achieve this kind of success. What advice do you have for for people early in their careers?
I think the only advice that I think makes sense is to follow your passions. Follow what you love. Don’t don’t over plan it. The road will get you there. It’s just that you have to love what you do. We work so many hours a day. And if you do it because you love what you do, if you love it because you love the people you work with, if you wanna get up in the morning and do it again, that’s my only advice. Don’t go down a road that isn’t one that you can make your own.
That’s what I would say.
That’s great advice. Well, Jennifer, thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and to speak with The Chemical Show audience.
Thank you for having me. It really is a pleasure and an honor to see you again, Victoria.
Thank you. And thank you everyone for joining us today. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.
About Jennifer Holmgren:
Dr. Jennifer Holmgren is Chair & CEO of LanzaTech. Under Jennifer’s guidance, LanzaTech is developing a variety of platform chemicals and fuels, including the world’s first alternative jet fuel derived from industrial waste gases. She is also Chair of the LanzaJet Board of Directors. Prior to LanzaTech, Jennifer was the founding VP and General Manager of the Renewable Energy and Chemicals business unit at UOP, a Honeywell Company.
Jennifer is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). She sits on the Board of Directors of Nature’s Fynd and the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF), the Advisory Council for the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment at Princeton University, the National Academies’ Board on Energy and Environmental Systems (BEES), the Halliburton Labs Advisory Board, and the Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS International Advisory Council.
Jennifer holds a B.Sc. degree from Harvey Mudd College, a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a MBA from the University of Chicago.