Late in the season, under a slate Oklahoma sky, CVR Energy looked at its cards, and folded.
Like a gambler with a hand gone wrong, the company announced it would stop making renewable diesel at its Wynnewood refinery -- "unfavorable economics of the renewables business," they said -- and switch back to petroleum. Eighty million gallons of renewable capacity, gone. A $51 million quarterly loss in renewables, offset by a $520 million gain in the old petroleum line.
You can't fault a player for folding a bad hand. Feedstock prices high, carbon prices low, innovation stalled. Like a gambler staring down a six-deck shoe that's out of face cards -- nothing but losses ahead and no outs. Out comes the whisky, and the loneliness of losing, nothing but petroleum to ease the pain. Like the Man in Black, you need to find a way before you walk the line.
The relapse
The whole renewables sector has been living the gambler's life -- riding spreads, chasing credits, praying for a lucky turn in the LCFS or RIN market. There was a day, not so long ago, when renewable diesel economics seemed to self-assemble, spoke loud. Then came capacity expansion, margin compression, carbon in a tumble. Faces turning to Father Washington like gamblers doubling down after every loss, not because they believe they'll win, but because they don't know what else to do.
Wynnewood isn't wearing the white hat tonight -- but if it's the black hat, consider why, as Johnny Cash was known to sing:
"Well, there's things that never will be right, I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go.
But 'till we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You'll never see me wear a suit of white."
The conscience
We built carbon markets as scaffolding to bridge the gap between the value of the carbon we had and the value of the carbon we need. Somewhere along the way, the scaffolding became a hammock. I remember Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye talkin' about phonies, phonies, full of gripes. We're like that sometimes, when we've mistaken the hand-out for the hand-up.
CVR's $488 million benefit from small-refinery exemptions, while financially advantageous, is a clear example of this regulatory reliance. We mistook the bailout for a business model; the scaffolding became a hammock.
Holden didn't actually fix anything -- that was part of the tragedy of Catcher in the Rye. Growing up means doing the work after the disillusionment -- finding the line, and walking it.
The fix
Johnny Cash didn't get clean alone, didn't walk the line because it was Wednesday and the air was fine. June Carter showed up, steady and luminous.
For us in the bioeconomy, innovation has to play that role -- we know the mission; we've lost the way.
We need to get back to the work of bypassing feedstocks we can't afford, knocking down carbon intensity if it's lost value, pressing on yield and not just on our good friend Charles K. Grassley.
That's where the latest research from Jay Keasling's group enters the story. In a recent Metabolic Engineering paper, scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute and UC Berkeley reported microbial production systems that separate -- literally decouple -- cellular energy generation from carbon metabolism.
The Keasling pivot
In the old fermenters, every carbon atom pulls double duty. Glucose builds the product but also burns to generate ATP and NAD(P)H -- the energy to keep the cell alive. It's like paying the rent with the floorboards of your own house.
Keasling's team found a way to stop that burn. They re-engineered E. coli to take energy from external electron donors -- hydrogen gas and formate -- instead of cannibalizing its own carbon. One strain, BW-HYD, expressed a hydrogenase from Cupriavidus necator H16; another, BW-FDH, used a formate dehydrogenase from Pseudomonas sp.101. Critically, the researchers designed an NADH-specific mevalonate pathway (using HMG-CoA reductase from Delftia acidovorans) so that the external donors could couple directly to product synthesis.
When fed these donors, the microbes flipped their metabolism:
* Hydrogen supplied 86.6 ± 1.8 % of the electrons needed to replace acetate oxidation. However, H₂ uptake was limited on sugar media, though robust when cells grew on oxidized substrates like acetate, pyruvate, succinate, and malate -- reflecting the enzyme's maturation time of roughly four hours.
* Formate pushed efficiency to 98.4 ± 3.6 %. Formate's superiority stems from its high solubility, membrane permeability, and instantaneous oxidation, requiring no maturation delay.
Label-tracing confirmed the shift. The glyoxylate shunt lit up -- a metabolic bypass that skips the two decarboxylative steps in the TCA cycle, conserving the cell's carbon instead of venting it as CO₂. In the optimized mevalonate strain (CM-FDH-MEV), formate supplementation lifted titers 57.6 %, while 99.0 ± 2.8 % of external energy flowed directly into product synthesis.
The impact
Economically, that's transformative. Feedstock costs dominate most bioprocess budgets; every 10 percent gain in carbon retention can cut variable cost by a similar amount.
In the tightly coupled sugar system, feedstock must serve two masters -- substrate and energy -- a mutually exclusive role that wastes carbon as CO₂. The new system breaks that bond. Nearly all the carbon purchased becomes product.
At roughly $0.70 per kg for glucose and $1.00 per kg for hydrogen, parity is within reach. At full efficiency, hydrogen could climb to $4.67 per kg and still break even with burning sugar for energy.
This isn't subsidy economics. It's thermodynamics rewritten for solvency. By using external electron donors, the microbial factory eliminates the need to oxidize its own carbon feedstock for power -- allowing the carbon we buy to serve exclusively as building blocks. This inherent efficiency, a biochemical act of recovery, is the path to independent economic viability.
The hard way
Walking the line isn't easy. Hydrogenases must be protected from oxygen; formate transport tuned; industrial integration proven. But the direction is honest. It obeys physics, not politics. You can't fake mass balance. You build within it.
That's the bioeconomy's grown-up work now: stop trying to win on a lucky draw and start engineering the deck.
The redemption
Petroleum is still the Man in Black -- steady, scarred, humming the same twelve-bar line. It doesn't need a new mission; it needs a way.
Innovation is June Carter, standing beside the old hand, humming a cleaner chord -- hydrogen and formate as the new rhythm section, energy without combustion.
Because the absence of innovation is stagnation, and the creep of margin compression is just another slow relapse.
The presence of innovation burns, burns, burns like a ring of fire -- but this time, it purifies instead of consumes.
The morning
As dawn breaks over Wynnewood, the stacks glow red, not white. That's all right.
"Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day
And tell the world that everything's okay.
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back.
'Til things are brighter, I'm the Man in Black."
There are still things that need changin'. But now, at least, there's a way -- a biological and physical path to make them right. The Man in Black still stands at the table, waiting for June -- waiting for innovation -- to strike the next clear note. Because in the end, the ring of fire isn't a curse; it's the forge where the next refrain begins.
And if we learn to walk the line together -- between carbon and creation, between faith and physics -- we might just make a few things right.