Todd Kimmel Saw Profit Where Others Saw Problems; How His Vision Helped Propel Cellulosic to Forefront

Todd Kimmel Saw Profit Where Others Saw Problems; How His Vision Helped Propel Cellulosic to Forefront

By John O'Dell February 18, 2008 By Dale Buss, Contributor

Warrenville, Ill. - Todd Kimmel's field is business, not technology, but it required his risk-taking entrepreneur's eye to see the possibilities in some college researchers' efforts to make bacteria that can dissolve an old tire.

Kimmel, a 32-year-old venture capitalist searching for investments to make, saw the possibilities of using the technology to make cellulosic ethanol economically feasible.� And he conquered the challenge of pulling together a deal to launch a company to develop and manufacture it, linking the academics with automaking behemoth General Motors Corp.

Now, having gotten startup Coskata Inc. to the crucial doorstep of commercialization, Kimmel is returning to the West Coast to develop other clean-technology investments for the venture-capital firm that backed Coskata in the first place.

"Creating companies is something I am passionate about and enjoy," said Kimmel, whose youthful looks belie an impressive early track record as a venture capitalist. Loves Disruption
"I’m eager to find the next disruptive technology. I’ve always been in love with technology.”

Kimmel reached a career pinnacle in January, when GM announced its partnership with Coskata to produce enough cellulosic ethanol by later this year to begin fueling the automaker’s test fleet at its proving grounds in Milford, Mich.

Cellulosic ethanol, made from cellulose rather than plant sugars, is important because it can replace the present method of making ethanol from valuable food crops such as corn. The present process not only can disrupt world food supplies but can wipe out valuable carbon-absorbing natural landscapes as they are converted to cropland for growing corn.

If the initial test program with GM works, Coskata projects that it could be running its first commercial-scale plant, producing 50 million to 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol annually by 2011.

Gas From Garbage
The company says it would take that long because it will take two years to build the plant, where specially cultivated bacteria help transform various waste materials into fuel.

Coskata's hope is that it eventually becomes second nature for Americans to feed its proprietary strains of bacteria with farm waste, wood chips, old tires, landfill plastic and a whole bunch of other organic materials the bugs can convert into ethanol.

It took Kimmel's keen eye for technology and commercialization to make the company a reality.

An Amherst College history graduate, he worked as an investment-banking analyst with Wasserstein Perella & Co. before striking out on his first entrepreneurial venture, in the late 1990s.

Clean Tech Scout
Kimmel gathered a team of Nortel executives to establish Innovance, an optical-switch company – and then the market for the device fizzled.

Advanced Technology Ventures took on Kimmel as a partner in its Waltham, Mass., office, and soon dispatched him to its Palo Alto, Calif., location to scout clean technologies.

Then another VC firm, Great Point Ventures, told Kimmel about the waste-chomping bacteria that were being developed by researchers at the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and Brigham Young University in Utah.

Kimmel's canny intuition about the technology "would have been something to expect from someone more familiar with the art" of gasification, said Bill Rowe, a three-decade veteran of the water-treatment and process-chemical industry whom Kimmel recruited as Coskata’s CEO. "But he has unusual intuition and insights for someone with a non-technical background."

John O'Dell:  is an AutoObserver Senior Editor. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.