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Explore the Edmonton Region's role in solving the global climate crisis.
Welcome to, to carbonizing today, a deep dive into
the Edmonton metro region's role in addressing the global climate crisis.
In this episode, we have your Edmonton Global host, Amanda Sparks,
here with John McDougall, the CEO of Sin Boblock's innovations.
Can you tell us what
little bit about yourself, John.
Sure.
I'm a longstanding eintonia.
Our family has been here since 1879.
So we got involved in economic
development right from the getco. and have continued, and
the most recent venture, really, is sin biolocks innovations,
which is a synthetic biology company
that essentially is uh taken on the
mission of massive transformation of greenhouse
gases into valuable products, but using biology.
That's interesting.
When I think about biology, I of course, think about the human
body and then adding synthetic into that doesn't really click in my mind.
How does biology become synthetic and then how do you use that
to capture carbon?
Oh, your analogy is kind of interesting.
First of all, uh because I'm gonna come at it right from where you posed.
So if someone does a kidney transplant,
does that make them synthetic?
I would say no.
Yeah, so that's exactly what we do.
We essentially transplant elements from one organism
to another in order to get them to do things properly.
or more effectively with uh, you
know, better performance, better productivity,
that kind of thing.
And uh what we've been able to demonstrate with
synthetic biology, which means we can now essentially more
readily identify what we might want to cut and paste, you know, the kidneys we want to transform, if you like.
We were able to essentially design
to purpose so we can say, what's the emission?
So is it CO2?
Is it methane?
Is it whatever?
And what's the product we want?
Is it uh cosmet?
Is it a aviation fuel?
And then basically design an organism
digitally that has the wherewithal to do that?
Then we create with synthetic biology,
created by taking things from other organisms
basically that will help it do that, uh
and uh put them together and hopefully achieve success.
So you basically just take your little body, your organism.
You add an extra kidney here, an extra leg there so
that it can produce what you want it to produce at the end.
We do two things.
You look at simplifying it, so what we're interested in is it
just focuses on what we want, so you try to get rid of the things
it doesn't need just to survive.
So you you you want a very efficient organism.
So so you minimize in one sense and you add in the other sense, right?
So so ultimately I get something that is really focused
on what I want it to do and just works really hard to do it.
Okay.
That's very interesting.
And that seems like a very technical start to accompany.
Where did the inspiration to start using that kind of technology come from?
Well, it begins because essentially
humankind is all about biology, right?
We biological things, we interact with biological things.
We use everything we do pretty much, you know,
is biologically based.
So that means that as we are
expanding in population, we're spewing out biological things,
like greenhouse gases or whatever.
If you're going to deal with that problem as the population
rises, then you have to turn around and say, well, maybe
the best solution is actually biology, because nature does that, right?
Does it all the time.
The problem is it doesn't do it very
efficiently. uh in terms of the load that we're imposing on it.
Once upon a time before the industrial revolution,
now, the world was in balance, right?
But now we start to turn things on with the industrial revolution.
We start to build factories and we start consuming much
more energy and we do it in different forms and we reach in.
ultimately, we start into the automobile.
We start shipping and aircraft and we're flying things around.
We're doing
So when we do that and at the same time, we multiply
the population by eight times, we
end up with all of the results just overwhelming nature.
Some years ago, we'd recognize that.
And actually, I'll tell you a funny story because today happens to
be my parents anniversarier would have been if they were still alive,
but my dad came up in the 1930s
with a beautiful diagram that I stumbled over a few years ago, which
was all about the carbon cycle, and it was amazing and
he obviously was thinking about, hey, what's happening to the world and and so on.
So I was really inspired by that when I found it
But we had also concluded that biology was
going to be the salvation because
it's the most logical way to go.
We'd started when I was with the Alberta Research Council, actually,
uh years ago to uh try to grow
algae, which are uh, you know, they're nice organism.
They make, uh, you can make them uh, you know,
heavy on fats or on carbohydrates or on sugars or whatever.
The challenge is the footprint is enormous.
So if we were to solve Canada's greenhouse gas problem,
for example, uh and chew up 750
million tons a year, we'd take a good chunk of the province to do it.
And I don't think people would like that very much.
So we said, okay, not on.
I went off and did some other things, but one of the fellows,
Quinn, that I'd worked with, came back when I retired,
quote unquote, and said, it's time, John, because things have changed and he was right.
What's changed?
We have synthetic biology now.
We've sequenced the genome on all kinds of organisms,
so that allows us to manipulate.
The hardware
and software has really advanced, so everybody
knows about Envvidia these days and the ships.
So we've got what used would have been called a few years ago,
two supercomputers sitting on our desktop because of those chips, right?
And we've got software, like artificial intelligence,
machine learning capabilities because of the chips and the massive amounts
of data there are to work on that allow us to
really understand things in ways we never ever could
of, even two or three years ago.
So we put all of this together now and we can
produce these amazing results.
So our first organism took
us about 15 months to design and another
three or four months to actually accomplish.
Doing it in the old traditional ways would have taken fifteen or twenty years.
It would have been trial and error after trial and error, probably would have cost a hundred million dollars.
You know, it just wasn't worthable, but now it is.
And so now it's more about if we can imagine it, we can do it
and with the tools that we've been able to build and put together, we
have ways of helping us visualize the possibilities so
that we can advance much more quickly and cost effectively.
So you really started using Edmonton's
like excellence in AI as kind of the push to start this.
Emon excellence in AI means there are people around here understand
what we're trying to do, which is good.
and they're teaching and training people. um,
you know, in these fields, which is good.
You know, it's nice to be in a place that's recognized,
but you also need a place that can support the bioinformmatics
piece, so that's more classical digital tools, not
what we would normally call a IRML, but the digital
tools of model building and all that kind of thing.
And then we need, of course, the science
and engineering skills that can work into the,
you know, the genetics and the bioprocessing side.
So unfortunately, we have all of those things that haven't.
Yeah Where we're most short is
on the bioinformmatics and genetics people who want
to play in a manufacturing space, because they they tend to go towards health rather than
the manufacturing site.
I asked to kind of change gears a little bit. um
Why is it so critical that we stop you viewing waste
as being an end product and really something that we can use more?
Well, we've all seen the pictures, right?
First of all, because there's lots of the waste that by a waste that is
very visible, the plastic bags and the, you know, the islands
in the ocean and uh things by the side of the road and,
uh, you know, the changing climate, the weather patterns,
you can there's all kinds of visible, uh effects,
which are clearly being driven by the waste and the volume of waste that we produce.
So that means we do have to do we need need
a somewhat different paradigm and the paradigm, you know, we feel is back to the future.
It's nature, right?
The only thing is, is to help nature do it a lot better and a lot faster.
because nature will do it ultimately.
It's just we won't like the answer, probably, because
it won't likely include human beings.
It is interesting.
You know, so if you accept the fact that that,
you know, I'll say helping nature solve the problem is the right way to go,
then that means we also have to as a
people get our heads around that too, right?
So let me give you some examples.
The world is heading towards mega
cities where probably 60% of the people will live in mega cities, like huge cities.
Those cities will generate enormous waste problems, right?
So if you don't create kind of the circular economy
mindset, where everything that is being done
is being essentially processed and reprocessed
and processed again into, you know, food
and materials, energy, chemicals, all the things we need,
then we're simply going to collapse in on ourselves.
So the real driving force
behind our company is to avoid that end state.
That means billion tons solutions, right?
So the world produces, depending
on who you talk to, but say roughly, 50
billion tons of CO2 equivalent a year.
And so that means solutions
have to really be in the billion tiny year deployable space.
And that's really tough, but it does mean
thinking about, you know, what some people think about food
and, you know, you know, the 50 mile radius of getting your food and so on.
If you think about these mega cities and
sort of a hundred kilometer radius of self-sufficiency, if I could put it that way.
That's the mindset that you ultimately want to have, right?
So
Yeah.
But if we think
about that.
What's that mean?
Well, we've got a refining center in the east side of Emonton.
If we had a biorefining center like that,
as a model for the rest of the world, and we
have the wherewithal to do that if we chose to, uh
you know, it would be supporting our agricultural industry with fertilizers.
It would be supporting our uh food needs with
all kinds of ingredients and amino acids and, you know, different things.
It would be supporting our materials.
It would be supporting our chemicals for, you
know, make our things, well, like your perfume or your whatever, right?
Yeah, then it would be doing all of this in an integrated
basis, and at the end of the day, just like we're saying with nature, would balance out.
now, maybe not exactly in every community,
but collectively it wouldn't.
So our goal is we
want to do that and our first agenda is sustainable aviation fuel.
That's our long-term goal.
because aviation isn't
going to change to batteries because they're too heavy, right?
So it's going to burn something.
And so how could we make them something that's
clean and essentially cycles their emissions at the same rate that they're being consumed
and back into the fuel they need and more or less, right?
That's the mindset.
To do that, we're talking about billion
or two tons equivalent a year.
And that means, as I say, it's refinery scale stuff
like we've got here, but it's probably 50 of them around the world.
And as I say, as a longstanding ammontonian, I'd love to see that kind of thinking
emerge and get established here and
see the rest of the world coming to us together.
Say we have the wherewithal to do this and if we
do have the wherewithal to do this, how come we haven't done it yet,
where there's our roadblocks that are preventing us from moving through.
There are two or three things.
First of all, it's takes a bit of patience.
um It's hard sometimes for politicians to have
the patience that it takes, but it does take patience.
It's different than pushing a button on an app, you know, and now I copy it a billion times, right?
This actually I have to build things.
and that actually takes some time and it takes a lot more money.
So they need to help build, if
you like, what we would call the the bridge over the Valley of
Death, which is uh where you've you've got your sort
of workable kind of what they call minimum viable product.
You've got to get to the other side where you've scaled it
enough that people can say, oh, yeah, we can now go into the big leagues.
And that does take help from the public sector.
So that's one thing.
It does take this vision, and
I'll remind people that it's actually that vision that brought the else hands to
where they are today, but took a long time.
It took from about the 1920s to the 1960s,
right?
And we're in that kind of a mindset here.
We're in the early days. digital will
help us do it faster, which is nice as we've already shown.
so probably by kind of the 2035 stage,
we could envisage these things starting to appear, right, and grow up around the world.
But it still takes that and it's
going to take a little bit of financial support along the way as well, right?
Otherwise, think of Edmonton as the perfect place, right?
Because we're in the center of a skill set that
understands manufacturing and processing on a grand scale.
We have the support industries.
We have universities that produce the right kind of people, uh
You know, we've got the industries that can be an anchor to
become sort of users and benefiters from what's done.
So we're likely to keep it here.
Scott, you couldn't ask actually for a much better place.
Even when we talk about biom manufacturing, like
with the moleule that you guys work with, uh we have
a biom manufacturing capacity here, as we see with
the Canadian critical drug initiatives.
That's one aspect of biom manufacturing, but we
do have exact we do have some examples for sure, right?
But it's still it's a very nascent industry
in Canada on the non-health site.
And, you know, the challenge
course is on the health side, they need
it's a terrible thing to say, but to a large degree, they're wealth consumers
at the end of the day, and it doesn't mean that people can't make money doing
it, but it just that is the way it works.
Whereas what we've got to make sure is we've got also
the wealth producing side, which is the that's
where you get into manufacturing and and product making
that is, uh, you
know, you can sell an export on a much grander scale.
The biggest challenge in this space is
that it, again, I'll go back to Alberta.
We're a commodity minded place, whether it's bag or energy or chemicals.
That's the space ultimately we've got to get into.
And the um that's hard.
It's uh, you know, but we're at the point where
it is feasible.
And we look at things and recommendations from very knowledgeable people,
you know, like the National Academy of science and the US
and so on who talk about the kinds of productivity,
uh the pace of development, all the kinds of things that we're dealing with that should be achievable.
and you know, we're right on the forefront of that.
So we're that gives us a lot of optimism that this could be a real gang changing.
else that you'd like to add that I may be missed?
Well, we're raising money.
At the moment, actually, we're we're literally there.
We've got our first designer organization. alive and kicking,
and we're uh, you know, ready to push it down the scale route.
So it's going to take us about two million dollars to do that,
and then we get to build a real factory, uh
but we're uh we're right in the early days of that,
and we hope that, uh, you know, we'll find people who share
our vision and really want to be part of this transformed economy.
Yeah, well, thank you so much for joining us.
He's been really insightful and I'm really happy that we hadn't
View on
Well, thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for listening.
Stay tuned for our next episode of decarbonizing today or
we meet with the Alexander Business Council to continue exploring
how decarbonizing tomorrow starts today in the Emmonton Metro. region.