Calysta was formed in 2012 in Menlo Park, California. Calysta was founded by Josh Silverman. and is led by CEO Alan Shaw, a chemist who previously worked to turn waste from crop production into biofuels. By June 2013, Calysta began working with NatureWorks to use methane fermentation to produce lactic acid. However, Calysta's main technological development is based on a method originally developed in the 1980s by Statoil, an unrelated and state-owned energy company in Norway. In 2014, Calysta purchased the technology and further developed it in an effort to use the methanotroph microbes to convert methane gas into other useful products like protein for animal feed. In March 2015, Aqua-Spark initially invested $2 million into Calysta. Using the ten-million-dollar total funding from investors including Aqua-Spark, Calysta began "an engineering and feasibility study" to determine the viability of a mass production facility. In January 2016, Calysta began building its first production facility in Teesside, England. The production center is being developed with a supplemental grant of £2.8 million from the UK Government. Also in early 2016, Calysta announced it had raised $30 million in funding led by Cargill, an American agribusiness corporation. Calysta's Teesside facility opened in September 2016. The facility is dedicated to the production of the company's chief product which it branded as FeedKind. Calysta raised an additional $40 million in May 2017 from existing investors and new investors including Japan's Mitsui & Co. and Singapore's Temasek Holdings. At the end of 2016, Calysta and Cargill announced that Cargill was building a new facility near Memphis, Tennessee. The site was previously occupied by a Cargill sweetener manufacturing facility. The joint-venture facility named NouriTech broke ground in April 2017 and is expected to employ 160 people and utilize advanced automation.
Operations
Calysta's processes rely on methanotrophs which naturally convert methane into methanol by use of an enzyme called methane monooxygenase. Methanotrophs are prokaryotes, organisms that metabolize methane as their only source of energy and cellular material like carbon. Calysta is mainly concentrated on producing an alternative yet non-genetically modified protein for use in commercial feed. Protein produced from methane is being offered as a substitute or supplement in the farmed fish industry which conventionally employs fishmeal and fish oil as its source of protein. Currently, the company's manufacturing facilities use natural gas as their source of methane. In addition to its facilities in Europe, Calysta's first manufacturing facility in the United States is due to open by 2019. The new facility in the United States is expected to produce an estimated 20,000 metric tons per year when operational and 200,000 metric tons per year when at full capacity.
