Fossil chemistry has no monopoly on carbon.

Microbiology can replace a lot of what fossil chemistry still owns. The work is bringing more of it from flask to industrial scale, and that is harder than the science makes it look: bio-based processes seldom fail because the biology was wrong; they usually fail earlier than that. The right people never sat at the same table long enough, or patient money was hardly ever available for the years a process needs between a flask and a plant.

These are the questions I ask first. Will this process survive a real fermenter with a variable feedstock, and not only a shake flask? Who would have to be in the room for it to get built at all? And who is willing to pay for the years in between? I do not always have the answers. But these are the conversations I want to be in, and I would give my time to them.

Who I am

I have spent my working life between two worlds that talk to each other less than they should. Academic microbiology on one side: a doctorate in biochemistry, then twenty years across BOKU, FH Campus Wien and the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology. Industry on the other: a company I co-founded in 2014, and most recently head of the biotechnology department at OMV. I leave OMV at the end of December 2026 and work independently from January.

One demonstration plant: a chemical or a fuel made from a renewable resource, replacing a fossil product, and demonstrably lowering its carbon footprint. Not food, not pharma - those have their own logic and enough people working on them.

I do not expect to build it alone, and I may well not build it at all. But I would like to be one of the reasons it happened, and I would give my time to that…

Three kinds of work, roughly. The first is a judgement call on a process: does this have a chance at scale, what would have to be true for it to get there, and what should be tested before anybody commits serious money to it. The second is the room itself - who needs to be around the table for a project like this to move at all, and how a partnership or a consortium can be put together so that it survives the slow years in the middle. The third is teaching, in the broad sense: lectures and courses, and the occasional stubborn argument with people who are about to make mistakes I have made myself.

None of it needs a long contract to begin. An afternoon on one specific question is often worth more than a proposal, and that is a perfectly good place to start.

We have more than enough carbon above ground. Bringing up more should not be an option any longer: the carbon that is already here has to circulate.

The fungus on the card is a small version of that. It takes the carbon locked in dead wood and makes something else out of it - more fungus, and that bright orange. Closing Circles is about getting biological routes to chemicals and fuels into the places where fossil ones sit today - and, I suppose, about closing a few circles of my own along the way.

michael.sauer@closing-circles.eu

If something here overlaps with what you are working on, I am usually happy to talk. I also write most weeks on LinkedIn.