Full-circle fuels
Palm oil isn’t the villain. Waste is.
That’s the conclusion that Kelly Redmond, MS ’23, and Gabriella Dweck, MS ’23, reached after months of studying palm oil driven deforestation, a chronic problem in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where 85 percent of the world’s palm oil is produced.
“We need to figure out a way to supplement and produce more oil to fulfill the world’s growing demand, without the input of arable land,” says Redmond.
In 2021, she and Dweck launched Oleo, a startup focused on transforming biowaste such as palm fibers into oil feedstocks for advanced fuels.
Palm oil is the most common vegetable oil on the planet. Shelf-stable, semisolid, and inexpensive, the oil and its derivatives are found in one-third of all packaged items sold in supermarkets [1], from shampoo to scones. Industrial uses range from detergents to printing inks, among scores of other products.
They learned that palm oil, for all its faults, is incredibly land efficient. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reports that palm oil plantations account for less than 6 percent of the land used to produce all vegetable oils—while supplying 40 percent of the world’s vegetable oil demand. To produce equivalent amounts of oils “like soybean, coconut, or sunflower, you would need anything between 4 and 10 times more land,” wrote WWF [2].
“So, it’s not really as simple as swapping it,” says Redmond, who spent three months in Indonesia in 2022 conducting on-the-ground research across seven associations of palm oil farmers.
Seeing that Oleo couldn’t cultivate a more land-efficient oil, instead the cofounders devised a way to squeeze more oil out of the same land. Over several years, they built a biomanufacturing system that converted leftover palm husks—a common waste product in Southeast Asian plantations—into palm oil.
“Kelly and I had both used our master’s as a mechanism to pivot our careers, and we were both really passionate about environmental justice and trying to contribute to solving the climate crisis,” says Dweck, about how they met in Design Impact Engineering at Stanford.
Redmond was a West Point graduate who spent five years in the U.S. Army as an environmental engineer, leading teams ranging from 7 to 76 people and regulating the environmental practices of thousands more soldiers. Dweck was a process engineer at W. L. Gore & Associates, a global leader in implantable medical devices, as well as a manufacturing engineer at Abbott Laboratories.
Outside of class, they were on the hunt for “where technology and engineering could be applied to make a difference,” says Dweck.
Soon Oleo became a Certified B Corporation, and the cofounders hoped to help smallscale palm farmers in Sumatra and Kalimantan. In practice, that business model was challenging.
“Oftentimes there aren’t even roads,” says Redmond, about trying to commercialize technology for remote farms in Indonesia. “That’s a really, really extreme case of implementation.”
For a bigger, swifter impact, they shifted strategies.
“What we quickly found was that palm oil is really cheap. It’s a commodity. And ultimately, in order to penetrate the market, you have to achieve price parity with palm oil,” says Dweck. “That’s only going to come from economies of scale, so that’s what led us to focus on the energy sector.”
Aiming high
In August 2025, Oleo was among 29 startups chosen from around the world to join the International Airlines Group’s IAGi Accelerator, a program that is pushing for more renewable feedstocks for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
Aviation and marine shipping are two of the hardest industries to decarbonize, and the cofounders estimate that their platform, by supplying oil feedstocks to SAF and renewable biodiesel producers for these sectors, could generate over $500 million in annual revenue. They hope to establish five commercial-scale facilities producing roughly 100,000 metric tons of oil feedstock per year.
“Oleo is really a platform technology where we can produce replacements for long-chain fatty acids or triglycerides that often come in the form of virgin seed oils, but that could be palm oil, soybean oil, or canola oil,” says Dweck.
Through fermentation, waste feedstocks are broken down into their essential chemical components that can be rearranged into biofuel. The venture’s technology can now convert 30 different types of biomass, from almond hulls to grape skins. For example, Oleo can turn grape pomace into cellulosic sugars—a building block for biofuels—in just 10 minutes, which is 70 percent faster than conventional approaches.
“The TomKat Center was absolutely instrumental in helping us get this idea off of paper,” says Redmond of how the center’s support went beyond the financial support, from advising the startup to hire a contract lab, to supplying summer interns who built everything from the startup’s website to a bioreactor on campus.
At Stanford, the Oleo team designed a series of experiments over two years to prove out their two-step manufacturing process. The proof was in the chemistry. With the help of the Biorenewables Development Center, a contract research organization based in the United Kingdom, Oleo verified that the oil they synthesized in fact matched the chemical profile of palm oil.
“We were able to do the process at a really small scale, able to produce the molecule, and then from there came the commercial development,” says Dweck. “From that point, we’ve pivoted a million times.”
Through a partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where their headquarters is based, they currently are scaling a 10-liter laboratory up to a 300-liter pre-pilot model, with their sights on an industrial scaleup of 10,000 liters in 2027.
Now in a California market, Oleo’s primary feedstocks are soy hulls and waste from almond orchards, but the platform can convert whichever farming and forestry waste is available in a given geography.
“Once we scale internationally, we will come all the way back to palm oil,” says Redmond.
If you pivot enough times, adds Dweck, “eventually you make a circle.”
This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article.
