A 33,000-square foot lab sits off a quiet road between the fast-growing cities of Richmond and Fulshear, just 30 minutes southwest of Houston's Energy Corridor. It's divided into two main parts: a traditional lab space with 17 workbenches and a fermentation facility filled with tanks and pipes reminiscent of a brewery. It was once home to Texas Biotechnology, a company specializing in organic fertilizers. Now, the building is being leased to BioWell, a nonprofit accelerator founded by First Bight Ventures that supports industrial biomanufacturing startups. These companies can rent lab space there and test the early stages of mass producing their products – and BioWell’s leaders say it’s an ideal location to run a startup accelerator. "Ultimately, these are businesses to be run," said Veronica Breckenridge, founder of First Bight Ventures and BioWell. "So it offers business opportunities, construction opportunities, land development opportunities as well as community." Biomanufacturing uses renewable biological matter, such as corn, wood chips or palm oil, to produce materials that can be used to make everything from seat cushions to shopping bags. According to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology , biomanufacturing uses the same fermentation process as beer production to make fuels, chemicals and other materials. It's a more sustainable way of making products that would otherwise use nonrenewable resources, such as petroleum. "Almost everything you touch today has a chemical that contains petroleum," said Anthony Breckenridge, the chief operating officer for First Bight Ventures. The Breckenridges have worked with a range of biomanufacturing companies. One company uses seaweed to make PVC. Another business drew attention from the U.S. Department of Defense, for its development of a nontoxic solvent. "We’re creating what’s called green collar jobs," Anthony Breckenridge said. The lab facility near Richmond in Fort Bend County includes equipment that can process up to 13,000 liters of fermentation. This area will allow startups to test the process of mass-producing their products on a small scale. Due to a lack of these types of pilot facilities, many American biomanufacturing startups are going abroad – a problem that the accelerator hopes to help address through the new facility. "It’s where the bottleneck is right now, because there’s a lot of research at the lab level, and there’s a lot of labs, but we don’t have manufacturing facilities to support the scaling of this," Veronica Breckenridge said. Previously based in California, the Breckenridges were drawn to the Houston area by what they describe as Texas' business-friendly environment, the availability of land and its sizable engineering workforce. "Houston has the chemical engineers and the manufacturing expertise and the scaling experience and talent to really help meet these scientists halfway, and help them scale it," Veronica Breckenridge said. "And that’s one of the reasons we moved here."
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