If the MIT technology described in this story actually existed, its effects on the world population would be incalculable. A third of the worlds population is sustained by fertilizer produced by the Haber process. Half the nitrogen in your body was "fixed" (pulled out of the air) in this way. Half a billion tons of ammonia is made in this way each year. I recommend this article on the hundred year history of the Haber-Bosch process: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/03/fritz-haber-f....
My point though is this. Even if these MIT PhD's don't understand marketing and can't raise enough to keep their company afloat, this hypothetical technology would be worth many many billions of dollars to a deep-pocketed chemical supply company. So the comparison is a bit lopsided.
I like how troll-baiting it is to use MIT and Stanford stereotypes in this article. The sustainable ammonia technology in this example is audaciously important, but convincing people to buy sustainable fertilizer is also important too. I think that too many technology startups have an entitled disdain for literally putting shit in a box and selling it profitably---with a hand-signed note.
Even if a technology company can raise funding and grants, sustainable revenue from licensing or contracts should be the first priority for the company or it won't be able to stay together.
The technology is 20 years ahead of the need, or it takes 20 years to work out the kinks in the process. So the patent expires just as it becomes valuable.
But once the patent expires, no company can get a sustainable advantage. Thus, the net incremental producer surplus gets competed down to zero. However, consumer surplus is increased by zillions of dollars, because the technology has effectively been "donated" to humanity through patent expiration.
But this would be a terrible story for VCs, because they didn't make any money off of it. Instead, 100% of the benefits went to humanity.
In a industry with high capex and low margins, access to capital is often the deciding factor in competition. Especially for something, as posited in the original article, that "merely" improves process efficiency by 10%. (Order of magnitude would be a different matter.)
Big Chemical might make a huge capex investment to build a new plant. And then some Chinese company eats their lunch, because that Chinese company has access to low-interest loans from a state-owned bank.
This happened in batteries. This happened in solar panels. What's to say it won't happen in ammonia?
I had a roomate who was getting his Master's in industrial process chemistry. He once mentioned that, in fact, in that industry a 10% efficiency improvement was considered a rough standard for which an innovation could become a viable business.
Fertilizer actually has pretty decent margins, especially lately what with cheap natural gas. In any case, I suspect it would behoove whichever company had the necessary access to capital to invest in such tech.
That's temporary. The United States has huge quantities of gas, and cannot export it. Thus, the price of natural gas remains depressed. Everybody else is using expensive gas, so the price doesn't drop.
If enough LNG export terminals get built, that advantage goes away. Our prices will go up, and their prices will go down.
The oil refining industry demonstrates how bad things get in a capital-intensive industry when both the inputs and outputs are fungible. They had flush times, too, in the mid-2000s. That was also temporary.
My point though is this. Even if these MIT PhD's don't understand marketing and can't raise enough to keep their company afloat, this hypothetical technology would be worth many many billions of dollars to a deep-pocketed chemical supply company. So the comparison is a bit lopsided.