In 2007, I had back surgery to repair a spondylolisthesis that had caused my spine to become unmoored from my sacrum and created endless pain. The condition had been caused by some bad surgery I’d had at Stanford some years before that had reduced my life to five-minute intervals. If I could just make it through this five minutes, then I thought that I could probably make it through the next five.
Based on the butchery that had already been performed on me, I was wary about having more back surgery. It took me a long time to conclude that it was just going to have to be repaired. When I met with my surgeon, Dr. Sig Berven, he looked at my back and said, “This is a very severe situation. Repairing it would mean a non-zero chance of fatality.” And I said, “There is a non-zero chance of fatality when I jaywalk.” He said, “Oh, it’s a much higher number than that.”
I asked him what would happen if I didn’t get the surgery. He looked at me clear and hard and said, “Eventually, your spine will fall through your asshole.” I said, “Then let’s schedule surgery.”
The surgery was long and scary, but it worked. Shortly afterward, I sent out a Barlow Spam with pictures of the upright and glowing new me, and among the responses I got was one from Alan Alda, who said, “For years, I have been watching you curl in your pain like a drying fruit. Now you seem full of juice. That must be intimidating.”
In fact, he had nailed it. It was amazingly intimidating. Suddenly, I had a future that was longer than five minutes. In fact, I probably had enough time left for yet another reincarnation. But to what end? I knew I had secured my legacy as an early guardian of the Internet, but now I wanted to do something completely different. I had no idea what that would be.
I kept thinking about what Mardy Murie had said to me one day. Mardy was regarded as the “grandmother of the conservation movement” and had lived to the age of a hundred and one. She had told me, “Environmentalists can be a pain in the ass. But they make great ancestors.” And so I decided that I wanted to be a great ancestor as well.
But what did my descendants really need? After thinking about it for a while, I identified three problems to attack. One of them was that most of the drinking water in the world was dangerous to the children who drank it. Moreover, their mothers were often required to carry it long distances from the source. The number of woman hours spent carrying water in Africa every day was beyond calculation.
I also did not believe that climate change was a myth. I didn’t necessarily believe in global warming, but I did believe in global weird-ing because, as a consequence of human activity, the weather was getting more and more violent and unpredictable. Something needed to be done about it that would not load additional CO2 into the atmosphere.
A whip-smart chemist and entrepreneur named Matt Atwood who I had camped with at Burning Man earlier that year took me down to the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, where a charismatic scientist named Jonathan Trent gave us a presentation on something called the OMEGA project, an acronym for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae. After looking at a set of PowerPoint slides, Matt and I could not believe how great this project was. Of course the devil was in the details but we were both convinced we had just seen the future. Now we had to go build it.
The OMEGA project was essentially a system to put raw sewage into large plastic bags floating offshore so algae could clean the water. The resulting biomass could then be converted into a carbon-negative fuel by some means yet to be devised.
We spent about four months negotiating a license for the OMEGA technology, which got resolved only when we realized the lawyers who were negotiating with us didn’t actually have a goal: They got paid whether we reached a deal or not. Which was one reason NASA generates thousands of patents every year but only ever licenses a dozen or so.
When we finally succeeded in getting the license, we realized the system didn’t work as designed. But Matt discovered that another company called GreenFuel Technologies had already spent about $70 million on related research and development. They had since gone belly-up but still held a key patent on floating bioreactors that gave us the ability to move forward with the project.
We were able to get Edgar Bronfman, Jr.—with whom I used to have public debates over copyrights in the music industry, because he took all that shit personally—to give us enough money to buy GreenFuel’s intellectual property. We acquired all their research and patents for $350,000. Not bad when you consider they had put $70 million into it.
Over the course of the next six years, Matt, Andrew Septimus, our young chief financial officer who had a lot of experience in raising capital, and I assembled a magical crew of geniuses who helped us design and build an industrial-scale model of the first bio transformer that could create pure water, fuel, pure carbon, pure nitrogen, and pure phosphorous from sewage.
The total cost was around $19 million; we got the money from the IHI Corporation, the oldest heavy industry company in Japan, which had been started by samurai upon the arrival of Commodore Perry in Tokyo Bay in 1853. Even though IHI had six or seven different bio-fuel start-ups they were looking at in America, they got more and more interested in what we wanted to do.
From its samurai beginnings, IHI had developed a Bushido-based culture that was not exactly a perfect fit for wild lads like us. Matt and I walked into our first meeting with IHI in New York wearing jeans. Sitting across the table from us were about eight absolutely immaculate Japanese salarymen in suits. Matt and I suddenly realized we had better step it up a notch if we really wanted to be in business with them, and we then spent the next nine months undergoing the most penetrating due diligence process since the Spanish Inquisition.
We called our company Algae Systems, a name I was always opposed to because at the time everyone and their idiot nephew had an algae project. What was special about our project was the attempt to take raw sewage and convert it into fresh water, fuel, and soil stabilizer.
We set up a working industrial plant in Daphne, Alabama, that proved itself by creating pure water as well as a light crude oil that was indistinguishable from the stuff that comes out of the ground. As we proceeded, we solved a lot of hard problems through simple resourcefulness, such as sterilizing sewage at low cost without making it uninhabitable for the algae we were going to inject into it. We also created what I believe remains the world’s largest hydrothermal liquefaction converter, which can take biomass such as algae or waste water and produce light, sweet crude oil from it in sixty seconds. Within the earth, the same process takes sixty million years.
Our system began processing twenty thousand gallons of sewage and producing from it clean water, carbon-negative energy, and biochar that was enriched with nitrogen and phosphorous, thereby making it more attractive to farmers who were reluctant to use simple biochar to renew soil.
Everything was working according to plan, but then our champion at IHI was suddenly forced to relocate back to Japan and the new overseers demanded instant profits, which had never been the plan. We spent the better part of the year going back and forth with IHI and then desperately started looking elsewhere for funding to enable us to continue the project, but people laughed out loud at us because up to that point investments in biofuel had been uniformly unsuccessful. All the investors we approached had no real stomach for doing anything that required starting and running a business as opposed to simply selling an idea for a lot of money.
In 2015, IHI informed us they were not going to continue funding the company, and we were forced to shut down the plant and fire the entire staff. In return for cleaning up the site in Alabama, we were, however, able to persude IHI to let us keep our rights to the project.
To this point in time, there have been more days than I can count when I thought the project was dead. No matter how hard we tried, Matt and I could not find the money to turn it around, which was not all that surprising because, for one thing, our company name had the word algae in it. No way in hell would I ever invest in something with that name. And while what we were doing also sounded much too good to be true, it wasn’t.
I have worked tirelessly on this project, and one of things that makes me sad is I think we could have gotten the money by now if I hadn’t gotten sick. I still really hope it happens, because while I don’t much care about making a fortune, I do think it is important to leave the world with technology that could improve water, sanitation, the delivery of carbon-negative fuel, and soil stabilization.
I always like to have a mission in life and feel like I am doing something that will allow some significant percentage of my descendants to feel they are leading better lives because of the life I led. Whether or not I would be remembered as the one who had done it was irrelevant. Every year, millions of children still die from drinking toxic water, and I was hoping to use my last go-round to create a system that would produce a lot more water that isn’t fatal to drink. Whether this will ever happen, I have no idea. But I am not about to stop trying.