
“There’s no doubt that my University of Michigan (U-M) undergraduate engineering training and my U-M graduate business training have helped me successfully lead the company to launch commercial operations, raise over $20 million in capital and build a team of 14 people.“
-Ryan Waddington, CEO at Cowboy Clean Fuels and Partner at Huron River Ventures, Co-Instructor of the U-M Center for Entrepreneurship (CfE) Class “Perot Jain TechLab Climate Change“

Ryan is a seasoned entrepreneur and venture capitalist specializing in energy and sustainability who has co-founded several companies, including Cowboy Clean Fuels. He holds degrees from U-M (BS in Aerospace Engineering, MBA in Business) and University of Wisconsin-Madison (MS in Environmental Engineering).

Can you talk me through your career path?
Initially, I started out in Aerospace Engineering at U-M, but soon discovered a passion for sustainability, which motivated me to pursue a graduate degree in Environmental Engineering. After finishing my engineering master’s degree, I worked as a consultant, helping manufacturing clients in the Midwest with air pollution permitting projects and also pioneering the use of database management software tools to support reporting and compliance.
My experience at Radian International (owned by Dow Chemical, at the time) showed me how important energy is to every sector of our economy and how its use contributes to environmental problems. Moreover, I also discovered that decisions that determine a firm’s impact on these issues are made in the boardroom, not the engineering office. So after a few years, I decided to get an MBA.


I returned to Michigan in 1997 to attend the Ross School of Business and participate in the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. There, I studied finance, strategy, and emerging sustainability principles, while securing an internship with DTE Energy, solidifying my interest in the energy sector. I also gained entrepreneurial experience through a start-up development class, launching a “dot com” company with several Ross classmates post-graduation before joining DTE in the fall.
At DTE, I worked in Corporate Strategy and New Business Development, which evolved into DTE Energy Ventures, a corporate venture fund. Over six years, I explored numerous new energy technologies and developed my venture capital skills by making a dozen investments. In the mid-2000s, I was recruited to build a venture capital group within a large family office in New York, where I expanded my experience base into oil and gas technologies, the nuclear fuel chain, rare earth materials, and other novel energy technologies.
After four years and nearly $1 billion of investments, I returned to Ann Arbor and launched Huron River Ventures to invest in early-stage energy, sustainability, and software companies, with a focus on the Midwest. My partner (another U-M grad) and I made about 20 investments, many with ties to U-M.

I then took a turn into entrepreneurship, co-founding (also with a fellow U-M grad) Halo Precision Diagnostics in 2018 and starting Cowboy Clean Fuels in 2020. F
For me, Cowboy is the culmination of everything I studied and everything I learned working in the energy industry and in the start-up world for the past 25 years. There’s no doubt that my U-M undergraduate engineering training and my U-M graduate business training have helped me successfully lead the company to launch commercial operations, raise over $20 million in capital and build a team of 14 people.

Can you explain what you do in a very simple way?
Cowboy leverages microbes that live in a geologic formation (coal bed) deep in the ground to produce bio-methane (or renewable natural gas) from soluble organic matter that we introduce into the formation. Those microbes also produce carbon dioxide (CO2), which is readily adsorbed by the coal formation.
Once brought to the surface, the bio-methane is sold to end users as a 1:1 replacement for natural gas. But because it is renewable and carbon negative, it garners a significant premium price from customers.
The CO2 produced by the microbes does not come to the surface. Once adsorbed to the coal, the carbon it contains is essentially permanently removed from the atmosphere. Increasingly, companies like Microsoft are purchasing Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) credits to help offset their own emissions that are tough to abate.

