Verenium Names New CEO as it Consolidates in San Diego

Verenium (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VRNM]]), the biofuels developer that sold its cellulosic biofuels business to BP last summer, says CEO Carlos Riva plans to retire at the end of March, as the Cambridge, MA-based company consolidates its operations in San Diego.

In a statement today, Verenium says Executive VP and CFO James Levine will succeed Riva as CEO and board member on March 31. Chief Accounting Officer Jeffrey Black was named as Verenium’s Chief Financial Officer. He will continue to report to Levine, along with Janet Roemer, who will continue as Verenium’s president and COO.

In December, Verenium disclosed plans to close its headquarters and consolidate the company’s operations and headquarters in San Diego as part of a cost-savings move. The move to San Diego, which was initially scheduled to be completed by the end of March, is now expected to be done by the end of June, according to Verenium spokeswoman Kelly Lindenboom. The company said it expects to spend as much as $10 million to build out a new San Diego facility over the next two years, although it was exploring opportunities to stretch its capital outlays over an even longer period of time.

Verenium sold its cellulosic biofuels business to BP for $98.3 million last July in a deal that transferred Verenium’s San Diego-based R&D sites and a demonstration-scale facility and pilot plant in Jennings, LA, to BP. The consolidation leaves Verenium looking very much like San Diego-based Diversa, which was focused on developing commercial enzymes before it became Verenium through its 2006 merger with Cambridge, MA-based Celunol.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.