Getting out of the startup game

Working on the nuts and bolts of getting an algae farm and processing plant up and running isn't for everyone. The Cleantech Group has learned that John Sheehan has left his position as VP of strategy and sustainable development at Menlo Park, Calif.-based LiveFuels, but he's not leaving the biofuels industry.

Instead, Sheehan, a former analyst and project manager at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, plans to focus more on sustainability issues in the industry.

Sheehan joined LiveFuels last August, about three months after the company announced that it pulled in $10 million in Series A financing (see LiveFuels kicks it up). The round was led by David Gelbaum of the Quercus Trust, with the Gelbaum family contributing most of the funding.

Interest in the green stuff is growing, with a number of other companies working in the space, including Cambridge, Mass.-based GreenFuel Technologies, which closed a $13.9 million Series C round earlier this year from Access Private Equity, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Polaris Venture Partners.

LiveFuels, which has a roster of consulting engineers and scientists and an alliance of DOE labs that it works with, plans to cost-effectively produce large amounts of what it calls biocrude, the oil derived from algae, by the year 2010. The company will then sell the oil to others for refining.

The company won't be filling Sheehan's former VP post, but Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones, founding CEO of LiveFuels, said the company hopes to work with him again.

"If we're lucky, John will continue to consult for us," she told told the Cleantech Group in an e-mail. "But there's a lot of demand for John's time and we'll be glad to get whatever we can." 

Sheehan, a biochemical engineer who served as project manager for the DOE's Biodiesel from Algae Program, spoke with the Cleantech Group today about LiveFuels, sustainability in biofuels, and the future of algae.

Why did you leave LiveFuels?

I've made a choice that the kind of work that I want to be involved in is looking at sustainability issues for biofuels in the broadest terms.

So my interest and focus will be less on helping put the plant in the ground, but on helping the algae industry and biofuels industry look appropriately at sustainability questions that they're going to be facing over the next months and years.

I'm more of an analyst and less of the person who's going just roll up his sleeves and put this stuff in the ground and get it off and running.

Maybe that means I'm less of a startup personality than others. So it's more from that perspective than anything about LiveFuels in particular, about what they're doing.

Will you still have a consulting relationship with LiveFuels?

That's very possible.

Are there any other companies you're working with right now?

No, not at the moment. I'm very much in a little bit of a state of limbo right now.

I'm doing some consulting, actually, and it's an example of the kind of
thing I'm interested in doing. I'm working with the Biotechnology
Industry Organization, BIO, to help with the discussions that are going
on now with EPA [the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] on
establishing minimum sustainability performance criteria for biofuels.

Does that mean making sure the biofuels work when you put them in an engine?

Not so much that, but the bigger issues of are you really producing
a fuel that genuinely reduces greenhouse gases? Are you producing a
fuel that has severe impacts on food production?

Those are becoming very, very important issues. And some countries,
and some groups like the European Union, are already beginning to
question whether certain types of fuels, because of where they're
sourcing their feedstock, should have access to any credits or an
ability to meet mandates for renewable fuels.

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