Enerkem has it all: patented technology, public sector backing, global partners, and a flagship project in Quebec. It also has C$350 million in debt and as we reported last week, the company has filed for creditor protection as it reorganizes.
We can only speculate about Enerkem post-reorganization, but informed voices suggest it may be controlled primarily by Repsol and a couple of U.S.-based funds and, if that’s so, Enerkem is entering a new phase. We had a good signal this year on prospects for the future, when Repsol green-lit a 240,000 tonne methanol plant which will be located in El Morell, Spain. There municipal waste will become methanol: a molecule with more ways to play it than PlayStation could contain. It might become SAF, a marine fuel, or a chemical feedstock. That ambiguity is not a bug. It’s a signal.
Enerkem’s transition isn’t a failure—it’s a story about shedding a brittle form to enter one better suited for persistence.
Also not long ago, we had news, amidst many commercial offtake agreements and supply contracts for SAF, that Air Products decided to exit the World Energy partnership at the Paramount Refinery in California, which originally intended to expand Paramount to a capacity of 340 million gallons per year — overall, a $2 billion project. recently, a new CEO arrived at Air Products, and they exited three projects in a review and Paramount was one of them.
All of this raises a question. Usually we report about technologies evolving at comparatively static companies, or new tech evolving at new companies, but the broader picture is a much richer palette of outcomes. Everything is in Motion — companies, sectors, causes, technologies — persistence is something that must be achieved in spite of company exits from deals, sectors, and technologies. What happens when it is the company that evolving faster than the technology?
It’s not an idle question, it happened to cellulosic ethanol. Even though the 2013-2015 phase is remembered for technology fits and starts, the facts do not support the way people remember it. DuPont cracked up, Abengoa collapsed, Ineos focused elsewhere, DSM redefined. So, what about company evolution?
The Success Conundrum
For too long in the bioeconomy, we have looked intently to techno-economics and technical readiness to tell us what to build, what will succeed. Yes, all the wonderful refineries that succeeded, they passed that test. Most of them, however, were iterations of a single plant that passed that test long ago. The first HEFA renewable diesel plant. The first dry-grind corn ethanol or can ethanol plant. The first soy biodiesel plant. And so forth.
Yet, if we look at all the first-of-kind technologies, TEA and TRL give us no better than coin-flip odds of predicting success. Speaking for myself as an observer, the reason is that the analyses are solid, but markets are fluid. It is not that we are looking at the wrong things in looking at feasibility — we are not looking at the whole spectrum, just part of the light, the part we feel most comfortable with. That reminds me of the person who went out shirtless on a cloudy day and wondered how we became badly sunburned; he took the visible light into account, not the infrared, the ultraviolet.
For a long time, I have worked on a way to analyze success not in the instant, but for the long term. Here’s what many people helped me to realize: the bioeconomy will not be built atop the best ideas, or even all of the good ones, but the ones which find a way to stick around. That’s what life is after all — our society is populated by the people and ideas which stuck around.
Turning to Enerkem, the question that captures my interest, even more than “will Enerkem succeed?” is “will Enerkem persist?” It’s a dynamic question that static models find difficult to answer. Ultimately, it’s a thermodynamic question. Enerkem takes in energy (ideas, effort, support, partners, feedstocks, parts, offtakes), just as living beings do. What makes life exist is that it exports entropy faster than it builds up — to persist in fluid markets, you have to be a living, evolving, adapting thing.
Technologies evolve. So do partnerships, investors, boards, and strategic priorities. Systems do not persist by standing still. They persist by adapting faster than entropy breaks them. And when they fracture, it’s often a form of recompression—not collapse.
The New Vectors
So, I’d like to move beyond hype, efficiency, or even early wins—but on whether Enerkem can resist collapse, adapt under pressure, and export entropy while maintaining structure and signal. That means testing Enerkem across four GTESI vectors:
Vector Analysis: Decarbonization Fuel Platforms in Motion
| Vector | GTESI Signal | Commentary |
| IPR – Inverse Persistence Ratio | Medium | Methanol, SAF, and low-carbon fuels hold strong narrative pull—but past underperformance and unclear lifecycle data add symbolic strain. |
| SCD – Symbolic Compression Divergence | High | Partnerships break, plants stall, boards rotate—but stories don’t always adjust. Divergence widens when systems cling to past symbols. |
| TRFI – Trust Ritual Friction Index | Low | Missed filings, strategic reversals, CEO turnovers—ritual breaks cause friction. Repsol’s FID is a trust ritual regained. Air Products’ exit is one dissolved. |
| EED – Entropy Export Delta | Mixed | World Energy, Enerkem, and others are pushing forward—but many platforms still consume more adaptive energy than they export. Those who succeed will flip that balance. |
Diagnostic Summary
We often write as if companies are static and technologies are fluid. But GTESI reminds us: everything is in motion—companies, molecules, contracts, credibility. Enerkem didn’t persist as a fixed form. It survived by transitioning hosts, from Quebec’s ecosystem to Repsol’s capital and industrial scale. The technology remained—but the structure had to change for it to endure. In the same way, Air Products’ departure from Paramount isn’t a loss for SAF. It’s a recompression event: one partner exited, the system survived. This is the GTESI pattern:
- Symbolic drift → narrative friction → structural break → new coherence.
The lesson isn’t about who stayed in the deal. It’s about who can persist through motion.
Takeaway for Practitioners
If you’re building in low-carbon fuels or chemicals, ask yourself the GTESI questions:
- What part of your structure is brittle—legacy debt, symbolic overhang, partner mismatch?
- Are you adapting your story as your system evolves—or clinging to old compression?
- Can your project withstand heat—political, financial, operational—and still perform trust rituals?
- Are your partners thermodynamically aligned—or just narratively convenient?
In this field, persistence doesn’t mean staying the same. It means knowing what to let go of, and what to carry forward—so the molecule survives, even if the form that launched it doesn’t.
The Complete Series
The Series Overview. Here’s to the Crazy Ones: looking at Jobs, Buffett and the Bioeconomy through a new lens
Part 1: The Company Level. Avantium on a roll: It’s PEF’s Big Year, were the visionaries right, the nay-sayers wrong?
Part 2: The Sector Level. The Enerkem Question: When a company evolves, how do its low-carbon platforms remain in motion?
Part 3: The Systems Level. When the Spotlight Moves On, Does Carbon Still Matter? Looking at big news from Pyran, Carbon Clean, HutanBio
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