Welcome to The Chemical Show, the podcast where Chemical means business. I'm your host, Victoria Meyer, bringing you stories and insights from leaders driving innovation and growth across the chemical industry. Each week we explore key trends, real world challenges, and the strategies that make an impact. Let's get started.
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. Also, visit the chemical show.com to get onto our email list.
You can search for past episodes, read our interviews as a blog post and a whole lot more. We're really glad to have you here. So now onto today's episode. I'm really excited to be speaking with Jennifer Holmgren, who is the CEO of Lonza Tech, a very. Innovative company focused on commercial carbon recycling with biology, and I'm sure Jennifer's gonna explain a little bit more about that. Throughout its 20 year history.
Lanza Tech has developed some great products, including Sustainable Aviation Fuel, which is now within Lonza Jet. They have gone public, and they've done a number of great things. So, uh, longtime 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. Right? I was born in Columbia in a Barilla, uh, 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 of Bianca, 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 it, the degrees I have, the education I've gotten is, is an amazing opportunity. And my parents. Home. us that by, by making sacrifices and leaving their home, I became a scientist, in part because I loved the space program. The United Space Program was the highlight of my young life. You know, I followed the NASA program and just loved the idea of going to space of solving big problems and.
It made me wanna be a scientist, and I was really encouraged to do that my high school education here, and, and that's how I ended up here.
Yeah. And that, I mean, that's quite a journey, right? And then you started Lonza Tech. Tell us, tell us a little bit, you didn't, so tell me about the, tell me the Lonza Tech story.
yeah, yeah. So, I, I'm not the founder of Lantech. I'm, its first CEO.
Okay.
And, so Lantech was founded by Sean Simpson and, co-founder Forrester, who together decided they didn't wanna use biological feed stocks sugar, et cetera, to make pro, to make ethanol. Okay, so they had, um, 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. And 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 ksa, and K one W one felt it was time to bring on
Yeah. S So when was that? Jennifer? What year was that?
2010.
Okay, so it,
years.
yeah. You've been on it. So you've been at Bon Tech for 15 years at this point.
Exactly.
Wow.
And I had a great. I was the founding vice president of UOP Honeywell's, renewable Energy business. I think, you know, I made the first drops of drop in aviation fuel and we got at a STM certified. We did all the flight demos. That was 2009 and 2010, showing the world that you. Could fly on a hydrocarbon, a drop in aviation fuel made from a feed stock that was not fossil carbon.
Wow.
that, that work actually got me very excited about alternative feed stocks. But that work also showed me 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, et cetera, can contribute. You're not gonna get to a hundred million barrels of capacity per day.
No.
it just, you can't get there from here. so Lance Tech, to me, was an opportunity to use feed stocks that were widely available Right. Recycled carbon emissions so that you could aggregate to a hundred million. But what I really loved about it that it's an efficiency play because
Hmm.
more of a feed stock if you are using emissions at a petrochemical company, right?
Yeah.
are saying is, I wanna use as much of the carbon that comes in to make product. So you are just making more from the same amount. And so that to me is displacing always, constantly taking carbon outta the ground, using it and throwing it away either in the sky, in the ocean, or in a trash sheep. 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
Yeah.
across everything, right? We're, people are excited about the opportunity for sustainability and it really seemed like in the early part of the 2020s, right?
Everybody was deep on the sustainability bandwagon, making promises, making commitments, et cetera, and then figuring out how hard it really, I. Is, and how challenging it is to scale with new technologies to meet technologies that have been, you know, when you talk about refining products or chemical products, they've been around for a hundred years. It's, and so this, there's this 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. And when you're trying to do something disruptive, it is a bigger, much bigger deal. However, we have done this. We have done this as a company, Lanza Tech. The world has done it. With solar and wind, right. 10 years ago, everybody was like, oh, solar is still 10 years out. It'll
Yeah,
years out. Now you can't even turn around without seeing a solar installation. Right.
true.
and I really, right. So, 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.
Hmm.
what scares me the most right, is, everybody wants to see a home run. We
Yeah.
that really easy thing because you know that holy grail, we know it's there and we're gonna get there, and then we'll be done. Then we'll be done. It's
Right.
right? We love magic. We
We love magic.
Exactly. And I just think that those are a distraction in a mission of creating. different trajectory for carbon.
Yeah.
you know, if we fall in love with notions, we actually stop ourselves from making progress.
So I, I think that's such a great point. many of the big oil companies, shell and bp, made these great commitments, you know, started selling off their traditional assets. And then I know just recently, the CEO of BP at, Sierra Week, which happened in the early part of March, was talking about how they've gone back to away from renewable, and green energy and back to traditional oil and gas. It's hard. How does this affect you and Lanza Tech and what you guys are doing? How do you balance this?
What do you, what strikes you with that?
I, I do believe the pendulum swing is very
Hmm.
For us because we need people to be committed to what I would call a transition. And I, 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
Hmm.
need to properly utilize and take as much advantage of, I think it's nearsighted to consider it a massive opportunity, right, because just like energy efficiency is a massive opportunity. You reduce costs, you pay less, but you get the same output or even more. That's energy efficiency, right? What's carbon efficiency? It's the same thing. You make more from less, you know, you make more money because the feed stock is what drives economics, right? What you put in is what drives the economics.
So if you can get more from the same input, that's a big. and
Yeah.
more profitable. But people are missing the point, and me it's about local manufacturing. From local feed stocks. It's about making more profit from the same input. It's about jobs and it's about 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 what, 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. And I think 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. Okay? When you're doing something new, you've got to accept when you are going to be successful, right? You can't always assume you'll 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. 'cause every time they import something, their money goes out of the country.
Yeah.
as they're growing the economy. cannot afford to grow it quickly if all the money that 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 feed stocks, find every 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.
Yeah, absolutely. And I love your point about localization, and I hadn't fully appreciated that as part of, Lonza tech's value proposition and what you're, you're doing. 'cause certainly in the business environment that we're in today, there's, you know, with tariffs and geopolitical tensions, there does seem to be this whole trend towards regionalization and localization and, the simplest part of me says, well, yes, 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, uh, is creating the, the local opportunities with local feedstocks for local supply points.
Yep, 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.
Yes.
if you think about it, if you can use local feed stocks and not just export them, but make local feed stocks into more value add products, you are actually exporting something that has more value so that
Hmm.
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 Lonza Tech has been 20 years in the making. which, you know, it's, it's funny because everybody assumes, uh, oh, you know, I just heard about Lonza Tech. That's an overnight success story. And it's like, eh, 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. Um, and yet you are.
LensTech Global is 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 Lonza Tech trying to do and could you imagine, uh, the company that it is today?
I don't know that it was clear that this is where
I.
headed, but, but you know, it got started as a company to take, waste gas to, 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 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 is saying, look, this waste is very hard to move. I'm not gonna move trash around all over the world
Yeah.
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, right? 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 ethanol. That we move around?
Hmm. Makes sense. And, and I think you're right. I mean, I think we've often across the chemical industry called, polyethylene, for instance, solid ethylene, nobody's moving ethylene.
Yeah.
now they are like that, that's a whole different story. Um, but you know, historically you, you move the products because it's the most efficient way to do it. So I think that's. You know, and the ethanol piece is absolutely the same because an ethanol becomes a feedstock to other things. Your role today, I would imagine. Is very different, right? You've got, 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 Lonza tech umbrella that you are running. How do you ready yourself to be ready for that, um, such a different company than where you started?
I think it's really important to commit to change at the team level as well, you know, and, and how do you transition from the very entrepreneurial engineering team, right 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 talent and a progression of talent that is different than, than what you start with.
Hmm.
and, and you know that that includes everybody from a scientist, an engineer to a leader, to the CEO, right? 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, right? If, if sometimes you, you, you are a person who wants to start a company. You're a person that wants to do the first ever prototype. And you always, if you are mentally prepared for transition, self-select right And
Hmm.
Hmm. This isn't what I wanna be doing now, so you always have to be dynamic and bringing in new people. To me, about creating that transition mental state.
Yeah. And that growth mindset where you started. And I think, um, I've had the opportunity to, to work with and advise a number of, early stage startups as they move into commercialization, et cetera. And I think one of the hardest piece, and you talked about how, for instance, your engineering team goes from creation to efficiency. And, 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 and that part of this is, you know, to a traditional chemical company, right? I worked for Shell for a very long time. Many, many of my friends started at Shell and retired from Shell.
Yeah.
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, and startup ecosystem.
Absolutely. I think that's right. I think you have to think about the world
Yeah.
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, and to be honest, sometimes that's why the large company, small company partnerships work so well because they each have to bring. Different things. They each bring different things. And, have lots of large partners who have brought a lot to what we do, whether
Yeah.
thinking or something else. I just think that we need to be open to that. I think a lot of people say, oh, I, I worry about working with a big company, but I, 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, right? You say 20 years. Oh my gosh. That's a lot. That's a drop in the bucket with
Yeah.
chemical companies, right? Who, who have taught us how to make all these things that we use today.
Absolutely. And I think you're right. Those partnerships are critical, right? Because, inside of a big company, the innovations that a company like Lonza Tech is bringing in, in some ways they don't move the needle, right? 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 Lonza Tech 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. The successful startups and partnerships we're seeing that happen regularly, I think, across the industry.
Yep.
Yeah.
I, I
Yeah.
become more pervasive. There's an understanding across both sides of this aisle that it is important to partner and that that is how success will be created. And I think people are very open minded now to how to work together.
Yeah, I love that. 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 that the only advice that I think makes sense is to follow your passions, follow what you love. Don't, don't overplan 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 you know if you do it because you love what you do, if you love it because you love the people you work with, if you, if you wanna get up in the morning and do it again, that's my only advice. Don't, don't go down a road that isn't one that you can make your own.
That's what I would say.
I love it. 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.
Thanks for joining us today on The Chemical Show. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and most importantly, share it with your friends and colleagues. For more insights, visit the Chemical show.com and connect with us on LinkedIn. You can find me at Victoria King Meyer on LinkedIn, and you can also find us at The Chemical Show Podcast. Join us next time for more conversations and strategies shaping the future of the industry. We'll see you soon.