Digging at the data

After showing off his awards and patents, Cheiky leads me through the Batcave and back to his rows of cars and tables of lab equipment. He grabs two plants borrowed from Cool Planet: the more robust specimen was grown with a substance known as biochar, he tells me, the other without.

"It was total snake oil. He was selling a revolutionary new technology that wasn’t."

Cheiky founded Cool Planet on the premise that he could break down plants into liquid fuel, water, and biochar, a sort of charcoal byproduct that can improve soil for agriculture. It’s why Cheiky claims his process doesn’t just make cheap fuel, but is also good for the environment. "Biochar puts carbon back in the ground," he tells me. "It holds more water and it’s also sequestering CO2. That's reverse global warming. That's the magic compound. I consider it the most important work I’ve ever done."

As the long oral history of Cheiky’s many accomplishments winds down, I explain that after interviewing former employees, I heard repeatedly that he was forced out of companies once investors discovered that his science didn't add up. He folds his arms across his chest, expression unchanged, barely missing a beat. "When somebody comes in to the company to be the president, they want to take over," he says. "People want to have extreme ownership, so they’ll come in and say whatever was done before was no good."

So why does he leave these companies after a few years? "I'm the lab guy, I'm on to the next thing," he says. "I've made lots of money, couple of yachts, lots of houses, and high-performance sports cars, but I really love working in the laboratory. That's my mission. To be the first person to do something."

I press him on the science behind Cool Planet. What about quantum chemistry, an esoteric and largely theoretical field, that he boasted was key to the company’s technology during a talk at Google’s Solve For X event? He responds with a bewildering string of scientific terms: zeolite catalysts, quantum wells, substitute benzene rings, angstroms, and hydrocarbon fragments. "This is not mystical or anything, this is standard quantum chemistry," he adds. "There is nothing novel or controversial about it. It’s just one of the many thousands of fields you need to have expertise in to do something like this."

I later run his comments by three experts, including professors in quantum chemistry and zeolite catalysts. They tell me Cheiky’s got his science a bit mixed up and is making exaggerated claims. But it’s not until I call the University of Wisconsin that I really find the smoking gun. I reach William Banholzer, PhD, a chemical engineer who previously spent eight years as the chief technology officer at Dow Chemical. "I actually use Cool Planet as a teaching example of outrageous claims that defy common sense," Banholzer says.

He means that quite literally: Banholzer has created a PowerPoint presentation using Cheiky’s claims from his Google Solve for X talk, along with early Cool Planet presentations and charts. He doesn’t need to know exactly how Cheiky’s patented process works to conclude that it’s wrong: there simply isn’t enough energy in most plants to get the quantity and quality of fuel Cheiky claims he can produce. "And if you’re going to make biochar," says Banholzer, "everything I just said about the amount of plant material you’d need gets even worse."

Banholzer is uniquely qualified to assess whether someone is selling snake oil or pitching solid science. In addition to working as Dow Chemical’s CTO, he spent years helping to manage its venture capital arm. He saw hundreds of companies claim to have amazing new technology and learned to separate fact from fiction. His lesson on Cool Planet is meant to help business students do the same.

"Students get sucked in, because they want to believe," says Banholzer. "They see GE and these other big people put their money in. Because these companies put their money in, the students immediately jump to the idea, ‘Oh well they must know what they’re doing, it means there is something pretty good there.’ So I use Cool Planet as an example of ‘Don’t forget your engineering.’"

Executives at Zpower, Transonic, and Cool Planet all say they’ve significantly changed or improved on their company’s core technology since Cheiky left. Transonic and Cool Planet executives added that they no longer rely on his patented "breakthroughs" as the core of their business at all. When asked about the claims Banholzer had dissected, Cool Planet’s new CEO Howard Janzen told me: "Some of those claims were in the very early days of the company, and since the time that I’ve been here we’ve been very careful to try and be accurate with the statements we put out, and that has not been one of the things we put out."

"They have enough grasp of science to be dangerous, but not enough to accept they could be wrong."

They’ve distanced themselves from Cheiky, so why do Transonic and Cool Planet continue to operate next to his private lab, in the tiny kingdom he’s been building for decades? In part, it’s because Cheiky’s reputation has thus far been an asset to these companies rather than a risk. Cool Planet says it’s moved away from his technology, for example, but the company still has many of his claims, slides, and patents on its website.

Even Mike Rocke, who lauded Cheiky’s brilliance several times, admitted in a phone call after my visit that some of Cheiky’s work in the lab was shaky at best. "Let’s get this straight. What I admire and respect Mike for is his early thoughts and innovation, okay?" After all, Rocke points out, creating viable companies isn’t easy. "I’ve been with these different companies and watched a lot of them not commercialize, or struggle to commercialize," Rocke says. "I’m a mechanical engineer and there are issues with his stuff. But the thing is, the initial ideas are the ideas that I like, the science and how do you get this proven, sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes it’s not good. Sometimes it isn’t good science or it’s not provable science."

I later email this quote about "bad science" to Cheiky, who took it as a compliment. "So, my approach in early-stage development is to cover a lot of ground with very little money by flying through the test process and only cherry-picking for the most interesting and promising candidates for further later-stage work," he wrote. "I contend that this is not bad science, it is simply a super lean management style to move the company forward very fast with limited resources."