I heard a presentation recently by Howard Janzen, the CEO of Cool Planet. Often in Colorado entrepreneurs start companies to stay in the state. Much less often people transplant successful enterprises in order to migrate here. Howard's Cool Planet is one of those rare and beautiful stories. Activity like this is great for Colorado and we should applaud and embrace it and do what we can to help make Howard feel at home here and thrive.
The Cool Planet story centers around the production of "carbon negative hydrocarbon fuels". They take various non-food biomass feedstock sources and produce high performance hydrocarbon fuel and a co-product known as CoolTerra. The hydrocarbon fuel is gasoline and diesel - not ethanol - and is virtually indistinguishable from the refined equivalent and extremely price competitive.
CoolTerra is the cool part. It is a co-product of the process and a soil additive that promotes better water and nutrient absorption and dramatically faster crop growth. The overall impact (including the burning of the gasoline for transportation) is carbon negative - that's right - it reduces the overall carbon footprint. Too good to be true - maybe - we are all aware of the enormous sums that have been lost chasing similar clean tech dreams over the past few years. The ultimate success of the concept is dependent on getting the process fine tuned and scalable. Never the less, they have had incredible early testing success with a pilot fractionator built in 2012 and their first plant will be on line in 2015 so we will know shortly how well it works.
They have great investors including, North Bridge, Shea Ventures, ConocoPhillips, Exelon, GE, Google Ventures, and BP and have raised over $150M through a Series D round. They also have great exposure being on the CNBC Disruptor 50 Class of 2014 list, receiving the Frost & Sullivan 2014 Technology Innovation Award, the Global Hot 100 at the World Summit on Innovation & Entrepreneurship, the IHS-CERA Energy Innovation Pioneer list and many more.
You have got to love a guy that went to both Colorado School of Mines and HBS (there aren't many of us) and Howard has an incredible track record of success. He was the CEO of One Communications until it was sold to EarthLink in 2011 and before that he was the President of Sprint Business Solutions (10k employees, and $12B in annual revenue). Before that he was the Chairman of Williams Communications Group. He also has a great track record of giving back. Howard serves as a board member for a number of non-profit organizations including The Colorado School of Mines Foundation, The University of Tulsa, Hillcrest Healthcare System, Morningside Foundation and The Heart of America Boy Scout Council. He also serves on the Governor's Science and Technology Council for the State of Oklahoma and is a Commissioner and Chairman of the Global Information Infrastructure Commission (GIIC).
Their long term plans include building over 400 plants through the US and potentially multiples of that worldwide over the next decade. They also plan to built a fabricating facility possibly right here in Colorado to build components for those plants. What a great story and accomplished business and community contributor in Howard. Please help us in welcoming him to our great state!
