The molecule at the center of Lewis Dutel’s latest company is easier to understand by following where it goes. A strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae - the same species of yeast associated with baking and brewing - is engineered to produce 3-methylanisole. The shorthand is 3-MA. As fermentation proceeds, the oily aromatic does something commercially interesting: it volatilizes out of the broth. VIA BioFuels proposes to catch it there.
That exit is the whole intrigue. Fermentation can make useful things, but making them is only part of the factory problem. The product must then be separated from water, cells, nutrients, and other material. Recovery can consume equipment, heat, time, and money. VIA’s thesis is that a hydrophobic molecule that leaves the liquid as it is formed can simplify the back half of the process. No conventional distillation train is required in the process the company describes.
Dutel arrived at this problem by a route that runs through the physical machinery of energy. He earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1996. His patent record later placed him inside questions of flare-gas measurement, tar-sand separation, and hydrocarbon-well completion. VIA’s own investor materials say he was recruited to a Shell innovation team focused on deepwater solutions. Before fermentation tanks, there were wells, flow cells, sensors, and pressure.
A career built around the bottleneck
Dutel’s public record does not read like a tidy migration out of oil and gas. It reads like a continuing interest in the parts of industrial technology that resist easy answers. A 2010 international patent application names him as the inventor of an apparatus for metering flare gas. Other patents cover the separation of tar from sand and the use of optical measurements to guide completion of a lateral hydrocarbon well. Each lives in a world where an accurate reading or a better separation method can alter the economics of the entire operation.
That instinct carried into UltraDeep Energy, where Dutel served as chief executive. The company’s work centered on dilution-based dual-gradient drilling: adding a controlled stream of lower-density fluid to the returning drilling fluid so ultra-deep wells can be constructed within a workable pressure window. He co-authored an industry article on the method with University of Texas professor Eric van Oort and engineer Lucas deBoer. In 2024, he joined an ARPA-E workshop panel on the obstacles facing superhot geothermal systems.
The subject changed from hydrocarbons to geothermal heat, but the commercial question stayed familiar. How do you take a difficult energy resource and make the physical system around it manageable? VIA BioFuels applies that question to carbon molecules rather than wellbores.
“We don’t have to wait for 2035 for a new grid to support electric vehicles. We don’t have to wait until 2050 for Sustainable Aviation Fuel.”Lewis Dutel, on VIA BioFuels’ use of existing infrastructure
The trick is in the leaving
VIA BioFuels was founded in Houston in 2023. Its team brought Dutel and fellow oil-and-gas veteran Brent Konstanzer together with scientists including Philip Barr, a longtime yeast engineer, and organic chemist Charles Marlowe. The company entered SOSV’s IndieBio SF 14 program and became a member of Greentown Labs. This is a deliberately hybrid cast: people who know industrial scale working beside people who know how to rewrite a microbe’s metabolism.
Their proposed production chain begins with feedstock and yeast. VIA says its strain is compatible with a range of feedstocks; public descriptions name sugarcane, agave, and a USDA-supported project involving whey permeate. Fermentation produces 3-MA. Volatilization moves it out of the broth. Capture collects it. From there, established catalytic reactions can convert 3-MA into methylcyclohexane, known as MCH, and then into toluene.
feedstock
fermentation
and is captured
pathways
The nouns are obscure, but the destination is ordinary. MCH is used in jet-fuel formulations. Toluene is a familiar chemical feedstock. VIA is not asking engines or chemical plants to learn an entirely new language; it is trying to make renewable versions of molecules those systems already recognize. Greentown Labs describes the company’s products as like-for-like substitutes for fossil-derived equivalents in pump blends, aviation fuel, and chemical processes.
That compatibility is Dutel’s pitch for speed. In a public statement, he contrasted VIA’s approach with waiting for new grids, vehicles, or aircraft. The claim is not that every technical or regulatory step is complete. It is that existing equipment can be an asset in the transition. The jet, vehicle, fermentation plant, and chemical facility are already there. Change the origin of the molecule and much of the surrounding system can remain.
A useful molecule has to survive the spreadsheet
The challenge in industrial biotechnology is rarely just whether an organism can produce a target. It is whether the complete system can do so continuously, recover the material cleanly, tolerate variable feedstocks, and reach a price a commodity buyer will accept. A molecule can be scientifically elegant and commercially stranded.
VIA positions volatility as an answer to part of that spreadsheet. Its materials compare 3-MA with ethanol: both use S. cerevisiae, but ethanol production is followed by distillation while 3-MA is shown leaving through volatilization. The company also says 3-MA carries about 151 percent of ethanol’s energy density. Those are company-reported figures, and scale-up will determine what they mean in a working plant. Still, they explain the architecture of the bet: improve both the product and the process needed to retrieve it.
Company-reported energy density, indexed to ethanol
Continuous fermentation matters for the same reason. If the product can be removed while the organism keeps working, a tank can spend more time producing and less time stopping for batch changes. VIA describes extra-long fermentation runs and a simple capture process. It also talks about partnering with landowners, feedstock growers, fermentation operators, airlines, ethanol producers, and large energy companies rather than owning every link itself.
That partnership model suits an executive whose professional description is “Emerging Technology Commercialization Executive.” Commercialization is the connective tissue between patent and plant. It involves explaining biology to investors, industrial constraints to scientists, and an unfamiliar production method to buyers who value reliability above novelty.
The feedstock question reaches the beach
In June 2025, Dutel published an article proposing a source far removed from a Midwestern fermentation facility: Sargassum. Vast blooms of the brown seaweed have washed onto Atlantic and Caribbean shores, creating a disposal problem for coastal communities. His question was whether that unwanted biomass could supply sugars for sustainable aviation fuel and petroleum-free chemicals.
The proposal fits VIA’s broader emphasis on feedstock flexibility. A process that depends on one crop in one region inherits that crop’s economics and geography. A process that can accept different sources of fermentable carbon can move closer to available supply. Dutel’s public posts have also mentioned agave and sugarcane, and VIA sent molecular biologist Patricia Rohs to Australia’s Agventure Downunder program in 2025 to connect with growers and biomanufacturing partners.
No feedstock is free simply because it is abundant. It must be collected, transported, pretreated, tested, and delivered consistently. Sargassum adds salt, seasonality, and contamination to the equation. The significance of Dutel’s idea is the systems view behind it: coastal cleanup, biological conversion, fuel demand, and existing industrial assets considered as pieces of one chain.
An operator’s version of climate technology
There is a revealing continuity between Dutel’s old work and his new one. A flare-gas meter makes an unruly flow legible. Dual-gradient drilling changes the behavior of circulating fluid to keep a well within its pressure limits. VIA’s process depends on the behavior of a molecule at the boundary between liquid and vapor. Different industries, same attention to what moves, what separates, and what can be controlled.
VIA remains an early company. Its public story is about a platform, partnerships, and the path to scale, not a fleet of operating commercial plants. The work ahead includes the unglamorous tests that define industrial credibility: yields, purity, run length, feedstock tolerance, capture efficiency, catalytic conversion, customer qualification, and project finance. Dutel’s background does not remove those hurdles. It does explain why he frames the company around them.
A personal clue may be the kind of problem he keeps choosing. His career has moved across inventions and companies, from deep water to deep heat to a yeast cell. He has stayed close to technologies that must leave the presentation slide and enter severe, capital-intensive systems. For VIA, success would mean a renewable aromatic molecule doing something almost mundane: flowing through equipment that already exists, into products people already use.
That is the shortcut Dutel is pursuing. Not an escape from engineering, but a route through it - one physical property, one capture step, and one existing piece of infrastructure at a time.