The Making of a Fossil Fuel Scavenger

In 1901 druggist John Francis Queeny incorporated the Monsanto Chemical Company in St. Louis, Missouri, hoping to make millions of dollars selling saccharin, a new artificial sweetener some five hundred times sweeter than table sugar that was derived from coal tar—a black syrupy byproduct of the coal refining industry. A native Chicagoan who had worked in the drug business since he was thirteen years old, Queeny first became interested in saccharin in the late 1890s while purchasing products for the Meyers Brothers Drug Company in St. Louis. At that time, American pharmaceutical and chemical companies trailed far behind their European competitors, especially the German powerhouse Merck of Darmstadt, which, with superior technology and vertically integrated factories, undersold more modest American firms. As a result, Meyers Brothers depended on Merck for its saccharin supplies, acting as a kind of U.S. distributor for the German firm. ^{Footnote 15}

Witnessing the incredible popularity of saccharin, especially within the burgeoning U.S. soft drink market, Queeny believed that he could make a lot of money as the first American manufacturer of the chemical. Working deep into the evening after shifts at Meyers Brothers, Queeny set up a rudimentary manufacturing plant in downtown St. Louis in 1901. With $1,500 of his own money and a $3,500 loan, Queeny, at the age of forty-two, soon got the plant up and running with the help of three Swiss chemists—Louis Veillon, Gaston DuBois, and Jules Bebie—collectively known as the “triumvirate from the Swiss Alps.” Queeny decided to name his firm the Monsanto Chemical Works after his beloved wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto, whose Spanish maiden name means “sacred mountain.” The company’s first major client was the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, which purchased virtually all of the chemical firm’s saccharin. To this day, Monsanto gives credit to Coca-Cola for keeping it afloat in the early days. Without Coca-Cola, there would have been no Monsanto. ^{Footnote 16}

From its founding, the Monsanto Chemical Works financial fate was linked to fossil fuels. Saccharin came from coal tar, a substance that by the early 1900s garnered the obsession of chemical engineers around the world. Coal tar contained a host of organic compounds that could be extracted and recombined to form new synthetic chemicals, including aspirin and caffeine. For Monsanto, coal tar was “nature’s storehouse,” a “junk pile of the chemical manufacturer” that offered the chemical firm endless prospects for new chemical development. ^{Footnote 17}

Originally, however, Monsanto did not create its products directly from coal tar produced in the United States, preferring to buy intermediates—chemicals that formed the building blocks for more complicated industrial compounds—from Europe. In the case of saccharin, Monsanto relied on a critical input supplied by the Sandoz Company in Basel, Switzerland. The story was much the same for Monsanto’s other product lines developed in the first decade of growth—which included laxatives, flavoring extracts, sedatives, and more—all of which came from intermediate chemicals shipped form Europe. ^{Footnote 18}

The outbreak of World War I changed all of this. Embargos associated with war meant that Queeny had to find ways to synthesize compounds starting with domestic raw materials. If Monsanto was going to survive, Queeny was going to have to find the building blocks of modern chemistry on American soil. ^{Footnote 19}

However, there was a problem: coal tar was being wasted in the United States. American coal-processing factories had gotten a late start in developing systems that reclaimed tar byproducts; even as late as 1916, Monsanto complained that such profligate habits had led to a lack of ample feedstocks needed for domestic chemical manufacture. The company claimed that less than 25 percent of coke ovens in the United States had tar reclamation systems. “The result,” one Monsanto executive exclaimed, “has been a shameful and needless waste of nature’s stores that should be a cause of humiliation to any country.” Tapping into utilitarian rhetoric espoused by Progressive Era conservationists, Monsanto urged coal processors and the American government to do everything in their power to make sure “a large, natural resource will be conserved,” thereby ensuring “profitable employment … for thousands of our people.” ^{Footnote 20}

In short, Monsanto pitched coal tar as a homegrown resource that, if recycled, could liberate America from foreign chemical dependencies, and it seemed American coal-processing firms were buying into the patriotic pitch. After all, for coal companies, reclaiming tar seemed like a lucrative way to turn waste into wealth. In 1918 the U.S. Tariff Commission reported that tar reclamation was taking off in the coke industry and calculated that U.S. coal tar production had more than doubled since 1913. Monsanto now had access to a valuable industrial waste product that could help it gain the autonomy it needed from overseas suppliers. ^{Footnote 21}

Mining processed coal waste for hidden chemical potentialities, Monsanto made big profits in the 1920s. Following a brief downturn in the postwar recession, Monsanto saw its net income explode, from roughly $336,000 in 1925 to $1.69 million in 1929, a fivefold increase. ^{Footnote 22}

By this time, there was a new president at Monsanto. In 1928 John Queeny had been diagnosed with tongue cancer and was told he only had a short time to live, so the company patriarch decided to transfer power to his thirty-year-old son, Edgar Queeny. An Ivy-league graduate known for his often cold and calculating personality, Edgar Queeny was an ambitious businessman committed to brokering big mergers that would dramatically expand Monsanto’s product lines in the decades ahead. He was brazen—so brazen, in fact, that John Queeny once quipped that his son’s desire to “change everything” would “ruin Monsanto,” but that prediction would prove wrong. ^{Footnote 23} By the time Edgar stepped down as Monsanto’s head in 1960, he could boast net profits totaling over $67 million, a far cry from the roughly $672,000 attained by his father in 1927. ^{Footnote 24}

One bet that paid off for Edgar Queeny was his decision to commit Monsanto to a new fossil fuel feedstock: byproducts of petroleum refining. Like his father, he was keenly interested in identifying raw material repositories that promised seemingly endless opportunities for growth, and oil seemed like the next best thing.

By the 1930s, the United States had become the largest petroleum producer in the world. The great oil field discoveries of the early twentieth century in California and the Southwest, including Texas’s great Spindletop gusher of 1901, led to a surge in domestic petroleum production that carried on well into the 1950s. The ease with which oil could be transported through new pipelines made the new fuel preferable to bulky coal clumps. In 1934 Monsanto president Edgar Queeny heralded “revolutionary changes resulting from the utilization of petroleum products for the production of chemicals,” and noted that the company could now depend on “relatively cheap and typically American raw materials.” That same year, the company organized the Monsanto Petroleum Chemicals subsidiary, officially signaling its entrance into the petrochemical business. ^{Footnote 25}

The fact that the oil industry initially chose not to fully integrate into its own chemical manufacture made Monsanto’s petrochemical boom possible. Business historians from Harold Williamson to Alfred Chandler have long held up petroleum majors, such as Standard Oil, as models of vertical integration. In The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Chandler called Standard Oil “the first of the great integrated industrial consolidations,” and discussed how oil companies purchased “tank cars, ships, and other facilities” to achieve economies of scale. ^{Footnote 26} It is true that oil companies controlled expensive fixed assets and combined marketing, transportation, and production operations under consolidated management. In addition, several oil companies began chemical manufacture as early as the 1930s. Monsanto’s move into petrochemicals, however, reveals that the oil industry’s vertical integration was never wholly complete. Chandler briefly noted this in his work on the chemical industry, but it is a muted point that is worth highlighting here. Precisely because oil firms did not initially integrate into total reclamation of its valuable waste products, chemical firms were able to become leading players in the petrochemical processing industry. ^{Footnote 27}

Over the course of the next four decades, Monsanto became increasingly dependent on both American and international oil refineries for the raw materials it needed. The firm diversified into an amazing array of new petroleum-based product lines after the 1930s, from synthetic pesticides to nylon clothing as well as a variety of plastics used for everything from automobile manufacturing to electrical engineering. Monsanto was essentially covering America’s cornfields, cars, and consumers with oil.

Even as the company became addicted to petroleum, Monsanto did not initially integrate backward into ownership of its own oil refineries. As it had with coal-processing firms, Monsanto chose to act as a buyer of petroleum byproducts rather than its own raw material supplier. This was because it was cheaper to scavenge on the waste byproducts produced by American refineries than it was to source such products in house. Refineries in the United States processed crude oil into gasoline at a remarkable pace in the 1940s and 1950s, responding to the exploding demand generated by wartime industries and the postwar consumer craze for automobiles. As a result, chemical compounds refined from gasoline began to pile up, creating a stockpile ripe for chemical company exploitation. It was on this pile of refining byproducts that Monsanto built its petrochemical empire. ^{Footnote 28}

Throughout the 1950s, Monsanto never faced any real problems scavenging raw materials from independent refiners, but this did not prevent the company from considering investing in the oil industry. In 1955 Monsanto finally decided that its addiction to oil warranted vertical integration into the refining industry. That year the company purchased the Lion Oil Company, breaking with a long tradition of buying instead of making its own petroleum byproducts. A major oil refining and petroleum business based out of El Dorado, Arkansas, Lion Oil owned over one thousand oil wells in eleven states, and the company had plans to explore “for new oil and natural gas reserves” in “almost one-third of the nation.” ^{Footnote 29} In 1956 Monsanto announced that Lion Oil was also investigating drilling opportunities overseas in Italy, Venezuela, and Spain. Roughly five years later, the company broke ground on a major refining plant in Chocolate Bayou, Texas. ^{Footnote 30}

Despite these investments, Monsanto continued to source most of its raw materials from independent refineries. In 1975, two decades after beginning its own oil exploration, the company reported that in-house refineries supplied just a third of the company’s raw material needs, with two-thirds coming from independent suppliers. Monsanto was still beholden to powerful oil interests for the raw materials it needed. The “Seven Sisters,” which included American giants such as Esso and Texaco, supplied much of Monsanto’s demand before 1960, but increasingly the company also turned to new suppliers in the Middle East and other parts of the world. ^{Footnote 31}

Over time, this dependency became problematic. By the late 1960s, big changes in the oil industry began to thwart Monsanto’s scavenging practices. As CEO Richard J. Mahoney explained in 1988, several of the oil majors—including BP, Exxon, and Conoco—increased investment in petrochemical manufacturing technology by 1970, using up compounds these firms had once “been ‘giving away’ to Monsanto and other chemical converters.” ^{Footnote 32} The oil majors were aggressively expanding into Monsanto’s commercial markets as competitors and they had a critical advantage: control over petrochemical feedstocks. This was a serious problem for Monsanto. ^{Footnote 33}

Scavenging Tactics in a Time of Scarcity: The 1970s Oil Crisis

As Monsanto entered the 1970s, Big Oil was putting the pinch on the company, but other forces were helping to drive up petrochemical feedstock prices. Beginning in 1970, oil production in the United States began to decline. It seemed the American oil boom of the early twentieth century was finally coming to an end, and U.S. petrochemical companies perforce had to look overseas for supplies. To make matters worse for Monsanto, in the early 1970s environmental activists led several successful campaigns to prevent construction of an Alaska oil pipeline. For American chemical companies, it seemed fossil fuels in the northern reaches of North America would remain out of reach for years to come. ^{Footnote 34}

In 1972 the Club of Rome put out their popular polemic, The Limits to Growth, which warned how natural resource scarcity would soon curb future economic growth. Many scholars and businessmen criticized Limits to Growth for its doom-and-gloom predictions, suggesting that technological innovations and new scientific discoveries would allow firms to overcome the limits outlined in the book. Despite this espoused confidence in salvation through innovation, some businesses were concerned about dwindling natural resource stocks. In the case of Monsanto, the Club of Rome’s rhetoric was fast becoming a reality. ^{Footnote 35}

A year after the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo hit. This had a devastating effect on the American economy because the United States had become increasingly reliant on foreign oil as the pace of U.S. petroleum production began to decline. OPEC producers in Arab nations could manipulate world prices through cartel coordination. Oil prices more than tripled between 1973 and the end of the embargo in March 1974, rising from less than $3 a barrel to roughly $14. ^{Footnote 36}

At first, this was actually a boon for Monsanto. As Mahoney explained years later, “The oil shock of 1973–1974 … fueled … optimism by creating product shortages that allowed chemical companies to raise their prices substantially.” ^{Footnote 37} Scarcity was something Monsanto could exploit in the short term. In 1974 Monsanto boasted a “20 percent return on shareholders’ equity,” the largest return in company history to that point. ^{Footnote 38}

Nevertheless, in the long run, the oil crisis would worsen an already serious supply-side shortage. U.S. oil production continued to diminish throughout the decade, and in 1979, when Iran, under the leadership of revolutionary Islamic fundamentalist Ayattolah Khomeini, broke off diplomatic relations with the United States, petroleum prices skyrocketed to more than $39 a barrel. Monsanto simply could not manufacture a profit margin if it had to purchase such expensive feedstocks. ^{Footnote 39}

Fearing financial ruin, Monsanto went to Congress to seek relief from its supply dilemma. In 1975, Ernest S. Robson Jr., energy and materials executive at Monsanto, proposed that Congress take measures to reduce gasoline consumption by approximately 8 percent. This would free up energy for industry and consumers alike. In imposing new regulations on fuel consumption, however, Robson argued the government need not focus on Monsanto: “We do not need regulation to make us conserve. We know fuel conservation is in the best interest of our industry as well as the United States and its citizens.” Besides, Robson added, “It must be recognized that there is no significant conservation or conversion potential for petrochemical feedstocks.” Monsanto was already operating at maximum efficiency, Robson argued. ^{Footnote 40}

Throughout the 1970s, Monsanto pitched itself as a paragon of conservation rather than a profligate consumer of scarce natural resources. According to Monsanto, the company had always been a scavenger, turning waste products of the oil industry into valuable consumer and industrial products. Take plastics, the company argued in a 1972 company newsletter: “In earlier days the raw materials used to manufacture most plastics once went out the stack as waste and gases, thus actually contributing to air pollution. Plastics technology, therefore, is in fact conserving what once was wasted.” ^{Footnote 41} Monsanto was not part of the problem; it was the solution. Mining the dustbins of other industries, Monsanto was repurposing refiners’ refuse.

According to Monsanto, the firm’s waste recycling practices on the frontend of the business were just part of what made the company great for a society facing scarcity. In his 1975 testimony to Congress, Robson posed the rhetorical question: “Why can’t we just cut out all those petrochemical-based products and go back to natural materials?” To do so, Robson, argued, would have devastating consequences for the environment and national security. “Take textiles, for example. To return to natural materials would require the planting of 16 million new acres of cotton … acreage [that] would have to be taken from food production.” Much the same with synthetic rubber, which, if replaced with natural sources, would expose “the United States to future embargo of another critical material produced abroad.” The only real, tenable solution to the country’s energy crisis was more oil: “The name of the game must be greater domestic supply.” ^{Footnote 42}

Even if Congress put its government muscle behind new drilling projects, this was never a real solution for Monsanto. As one company official explained, the company knew that it was a “midget compared to the major [oil] producers,” generating just 15,000 barrels of oil a day, compared to the 150,000–200,000 produced by “one of the ‘small’ majors.” ^{Footnote 43} Almost twenty years since deciding to buy Lion Oil, it was clear Monsanto was never going to be able to supply its own petroleum needs, and the prospects of relief from outside the company were bleak. As Monsanto Magazine noted, “looking for oil and gas in traditional domestic areas” was “no longer a highly profitable business,” and even if big refineries managed to find new reserves, it was clear these firms were not giving away their valuable petroleum byproducts like they had in the past. In this new era of Big Oil integration into chemical manufacture, raw materials were going to be hard to come by for chemical companies lacking access to vast oil reserves. ^{Footnote 44}

Thus, as Monsanto entered the 1980s, it could no longer scavenge on cheap natural capital as it had in the 1950s and 1960s. Declining American oil production, coupled with petroleum firms’ consolidated control of compounds released during refining processes, portended major problems for the St. Louis chemical company. Considering these realities, the task before Monsanto was to figure out a way to make big profits without relying on Big Oil.

The “Microsofting” of Monsanto: Biotech as a Solution to Natural Resource Scarcity

Gender studies scholar Chaia Heller used the term “Microsofting” in 2007 to describe Monsanto’s transformation from making chemicals to selling seeds. As she explained, “Just as customers must buy Windows when they buy many PC computers, farmers must buy chemical and other inputs when they buy genetically modified seed.” ^{Footnote 45} Heller’s comparison of Microsoft with post-1980s Monsanto is apt, because, by the 1990s, executives at the St. Louis firm were very much enamored with the business models coming out of Silicon Valley. As Bob Shapiro made clear in his 1997 Harvard Business Review interview, Monsanto’s top executives believed that “the substitution of information for stuff is essential to sustainability.” ^{Footnote 46} In the future, the firm would sell “DNA-encoded information” to America’s farming families, giving them the genetic software they needed to reap profit from the Earth. ^{Footnote 47}

Economic pressures brought on by a changing commercial ecology pushed the company to make this big leap. Monsanto’s financial returns were dismal in 1980. That year net profits were less than half of what they had been in 1979, dropping from roughly $331 million to $148 million. ^{Footnote 48} It seemed the oil problem was not going away and it was clearly affecting the chemical companies’ ability to sustain growth. Something had to be done.

In this time of crisis, Mahoney first became president and then also CEO of Monsanto. He had witnessed firsthand how changes in the petroleum industry had affected the petrochemical industry in the 1970s. A chemist by training with a degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mahoney joined Monsanto as a chemical engineer in 1962. He had worked in pesticide, fertilizer, herbicide, and plastics divisions of the firm, and had an intimate knowledge of the fossil fuel feedstocks that fed these enterprises. A confident and disciplined worker, he lived by the motto FILO—First In, Last Out—recognizing that he had to pay his dues if he wanted to rise to the top. When he became CEO in 1984, he felt he had put in the long hours and earned the right to speak confidently about where the company needed to go in the future. ^{Footnote 49}

For Mahoney, it was clear that Monsanto’s inability to scavenge for cheap feedstocks made future growth in the petrochemical business impossible. Later in his career, reflecting on the early 1980s, he wrote, “The once cheap hydrocarbons were no longer cheap. Whereas Monsanto once took 10 cents’ worth of oil or gas hydrocarbons and added 30 cents’ worth of technology, we were faced with buying 30-cent hydrocarbons and selling a finished product into a marketplace that allowed us to add only 10 cents of our technology. The value we added was dwindling—a guaranteed recipe for disaster.” ^{Footnote 50}

In 1982 Monsanto explained to its shareholders that it had no choice but to make big changes. That year, Chairman of the Board John Hanley reported that he, Mahoney, and other top leadership at the firm had “candidly debated the proper course for the future” and decided that “raw materials, particularly petroleum-based ones, had become too large a component of too many of our products.” Over 80 percent of what the company sold came from hydrocarbon feedstocks, making the company unreasonably “vulnerable to the cyclical fluctuations of the economy.” The company planned to slowly divest from commodity chemical production while pursuing a “strategy to expand toward higher-value proprietary and specialty products.” ^{Footnote 51}

Hanley and Mahoney tapped Howard A. Schneiderman to lead this new product development initiative. A former professor and dean at the University of California–Irvine, Schneiderman came to Monsanto in 1979 to help expand a pilot biotechnology program. He was one of the leading figures in developmental biology, pursuing cutting-edge research in genetics that focused on DNA codes regulating cellular growth. In 1982 Schneiderman told shareholders that his prime objective was to develop new products that were “less dependent on raw material costs” and which “have a strong proprietary character.” Without going into research specifics, he added: “We are going to be selling products for what they do rather than what they are.” ^{Footnote 52}

In 1984 Monsanto spent over $150 million dollars in biotechnological research and development, creating the Chesterfield Village Life Sciences Laboratory. The company invested in a variety of projects, from developing a bovine growth hormone (rBGH) that would help cows produce milk, to isolating genetic sequences that would engender pesticide-resistance in genetically modified (GM) crops. Monsanto was certain that development of these products would take time, but expressed hope in 1984 that “important traits of plants, including stress-, herbicide-, and pest-resistance … may be possible to transfer … to important crop species in the next few years.” ^{Footnote 53}

While investing in biotechnology, Monsanto simultaneously got out of the petrochemical business at a remarkable pace. In 1988 Mahoney reported that the company had “closed down businesses with sales of more than $4 billion,” including its fossil-fuel enterprises and much of its commodity chemical operations. As a result, the company’s investment in bulk commodity chemical production declined from 30 percent of total assets in 1980 to just 2 percent eight years later. ^{Footnote 54}

Monsanto’s competitors did not follow the same path as the St. Louis firm. On the contrary, DuPont decided that its best bet was to acquire Conoco Oil in 1981. Much like Monsanto’s Lion Oil merger in 1955, DuPont believed the Conoco purchase would give the company “a stronger position to compete with the oil companies.” ^{Footnote 55} This was a big deal, costing over $7 billion and making it, according to the Christian Science Monitor, “the nation’s largest merger.” ^{Footnote 56} DuPont was doing what it thought it had to do to thrive in a new commercial environment. Dow Chemical also kept a sizable portion of its commodity chemical business into the 1980s, hoping to weather the storm. As late as 1990, the New York Times reported that Dow’s “commodity chemicals still represented nearly a third of the company’s sales, more than at competitors like Monsanto and DuPont.” ^{Footnote 57} Chemical companies were experimenting with different strategies, watching one another adapt to the realities of the day. Over time, however, both Dow and DuPont began to follow Monsanto’s lead, aggressively unloading their bulk commodity chemical assets, which had become by 1997 “the dirty word of the industry,” according to the Wall Street Journal. ^{Footnote 58} DuPont dumped Conoco in 1998 and a year later acquired Pioneer Hi-Bred International, signaling its commitment to securing a top position among firms with capital investments in biotechnology. By the 2010s, headlines read “Dow Chemical Lists Commodity Chemicals Businesses for Sale,” and DuPont investor reports explained spinoffs of chemical assets as “DuPont’s transformation to a higher growth, higher value, global science and innovation company.” ^{Footnote 59}

Long before all of this, Monsanto had been more radical in its divestment strategy. In the 1980s, Monsanto’s Mahoney believed reducing its reliance on petrochemicals promised his company liberation from the vagaries of the natural world and international trade. This, after all, had long been the core mission of the chemical industry: to break through ecological limits imposed by nature through clever manipulation of molecular compounds. In 1945, for example, Monsanto argued that its production of synthetic caffeine would “not be subject to the vagaries of nature,” and when the company finally succeeded in producing caffeine from coal tar, it called the achievement “another chemical victory over nature.” ^{Footnote 60} Roughly forty years later, Richard Mahoney made a similar pitch. The company had finally shrugged off its “traditional dependence on cyclical commodity businesses” that placed the company forever “at the mercy of forces outside [its] control.” This was a new Monsanto. “Restructured to reduce [its] exposure to the uncontrollable,” the company would now be “far more makers of conditions than responders.” ^{Footnote 61}

Biotechnology offered an attractive means of moving Monsanto beyond oil. Limiting its frontend investments in bulk production of material products, Monsanto planned to sell a microscopic product—a kind of genetic software—that could be inserted in the hardware of plant and animal life. Shot into seed germplasm with the help of a “gene gun,” this software could be rapidly dispersed to farmers across the globe. Added to plasmids in microscopic bacteria, genetic cassettes could turn living cells into “biofactories” capable of churning out copious quantities of valuable antibiotics, pesticides, and hormones. Thus, lab-created biotech products promised to radically reduce Monsanto’s demand for petroleum feedstocks. ^{Footnote 62}

Monsanto’s transition to this new corporate model took time, and the company even went into the red for a few years, but by the mid-1990s the company could boast a series of successful new GM and biotech products that promised a bright future for the firm. In 1996 Monsanto released Roundup Ready (RR) soybean seeds, which were genetically modified to tolerate Monsanto’s signature herbicide, Roundup, one of the few chemical products Monsanto held onto as it transitioned to biotechnology. That same year, the company introduced Bollgard, a cotton seed that contained a bacteria-derived gene coding for the production of a toxin called Bt that repelled insects.

By this time, Bob Shapiro had replaced Richard Mahoney as chairman and CEO of the company. Shapiro had come to the firm in 1985 when Monsanto bought Searle, a pharmaceutical company known most notably for its successful aspartame sweetener, NutraSweet, which Shapiro had helped launch in the early 1980s. Unlike Mahoney, who was a staunch Republican and prolific conservative columnist for newspapers across the country, Shapiro was a Democrat, someone sympathetic to the political rhetoric of the liberal left. A fan of early 1990s environmental luminaries, such as Paul Hawken, Bill McDonough, and Amory Lovins, Shapiro believed that biotechnology could be used to improve the health of the global environment, a cause he fervently supported. As Shapiro explained, “The earth’s ecological system cannot withstand unlimited increases in the amount of material produced and consumed, but it can withstand exponential increases in knowledge and information.” ^{Footnote 63} Throughout the 1990s, Shapiro preached Monsanto’s mission to “produce much more with much less raw material and energy.” ^{Footnote 64}

Shapiro ballyhooed that biotechnology was good for both Monsanto and its traditional clients, especially farmers around the world. GM crops that produced their own Bt toxin would allow farmers to reduce their dependence on pesticides, which came from expensive petroleum feedstocks. Furthermore, GM plants would allow farmers to cut down on fertilizer demands and weeding operations, since Monsanto’s herbicide-resistant crops would allow farmers to spray fields liberally with chemicals that killed unwanted plant species. By the 2000s, Monsanto lauded what it called “no-till farming,” arguing that GM crops would eliminate the need for frequent tillage, thereby helping farmers to “reduce fuel use by at least 9–15 gallons per acre.” ^{Footnote 65}

A firm that had made its name feeding farmers petrochemical products was now suggesting it could help curb farmers’ dependence on fossil fuels. In other words, Monsanto was turning concerns about oil scarcity into a powerful marketing opportunity, recognizing that the threat of fossil fuel shortages could actually help it sell new products rather than impede its growth.

Monsanto’s promise of petroleum liberation did not prove entirely unfounded. Studies in the 2000s and 2010s showed that GM crops planted via no-till techniques helped farmers reduce fuel costs associated with maintaining farmland. For example, farmers using herbicide-resistant crops did not have to spend as much time removing weeds from their fields and therefore did not have to run diesel-guzzling tractors as long as they had in the past. ^{Footnote 66}

Nevertheless, farmers that switched to GM crops never fully curbed their dependence on oil. After the 1970s, farmers did begin to reduce their fossil fuel use, thanks to improved machinery and new tilling strategies, and total energy consumption on U.S. farms dropped from 2.4 quadrillion Btu to 1.7 quadrillion Btu by 2002. GM technology may have contributed to this, but since 2002, and in the period of GM crops most rapid expansion in the United States, energy use leveled off at around 1.5 Btu, where it remained as of 2011. In short, major reductions in fossil fuel use on farms largely predated the golden era of GM crop adoption and in the heyday of GM growth, the promise of dramatic energy savings never materialized. ^{Footnote 67}

Indirect fossil fuel consumption through the use of fertilizers and herbicides, both synthesized in factories dependent on substantial fossil-fuel inputs, also remained high by the 2010s. In fact, according to a 2013 study published by the nonprofit organization Food and Water Watch and publicized in Forbes magazine, the total amount of glyphosate herbicide “applied to the three biggest GE crops—corn, cotton and soybeans—increased 10-fold from 15 million pounds in 1996 to 159 million pounds in 2012.” ^{Footnote 68} Of course, much of this glyphosate still came from Monsanto in the form of Roundup, a trademarked chemical Monsanto never abandoned because it continued to yield strong returns for the firm. It seemed Monsanto was still willing to sell oil-dependent products to farmers as long as they could charge a premium price. ^{Footnote 69}

Fertilizers derived from fossil fuels also remained in high demand on farms using Monsanto GM seeds in the 2010s. Despite a sharp decrease in fertilizer use on U.S. farms after 2004—caused largely by rising fossil fuel costs that drove up prices—fertilizer use began to climb once again after 2010, from 21 million tons that year to 22 million tons a year later. World demand for fertilizers also grew between 2010 and 2014, especially in China and India, where GM crops made major inroads in the 2000s. ^{Footnote 70}

In short, fossil fuels were still an integral part of Monsanto’s moneymaking enterprise because the company’s farming clients still depended on copious quantities of synthetics derived from oil and gas to survive. Thus, roughly two decades after Monsanto began its biotechnology business, it had failed to deliver on its promise to replace “stuff with information.” In fact, it seemed new information actually meant more stuff, at least in the case of herbicide for farmers now reliant on Roundup Ready crops.