From Oil & Gas Engineer to Climate Tech CEO: The CleanJoule Origin Story

From Oil & Gas Engineer to Climate Tech CEO: The CleanJoule Origin Story

Most career pivots start with opportunity. Mukund Karanjikar’s started with existential dread.

He was a chemical engineer working in oil and gas, trained to build molecules and transform feedstocks at massive scale. He knew intimately how the petroleum industry worked. And that knowledge was slowly destroying him.

“I was always driven by sustainability and impact of human operations on sustainability,” Mukund Karanjikar, now CEO of CleanJoule, a sustainable aviation fuel producer that’s raised $55 million, explained in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. “If you go back, we decided to drill petroleum in 1859. Standard oil. The rest of it is history. And we designed a modern lifestyle around petroleum crude. This gunky, dark, nasty looking substance that we take out of the ground ten mile below sea level. And I don’t believe that’s how it should have happened ever.”

The phrase “gunky, dark, nasty looking substance” reveals something about Mukund’s internal conflict. This wasn’t intellectual disagreement with his industry. It was visceral rejection of the foundation on which modern civilization had been built.

The Life Choice Crisis

For most engineers, expertise becomes identity. You spend years learning a domain, building skills, establishing yourself. Walking away means abandoning the infrastructure of professional credibility you’ve constructed.

Mukund felt this tension acutely. “I always question number one, my life choices, whether it was good to be a chemical engineer. But now that I was one, what can I do with it?”

This is the question that separates career changers from mission-driven founders. Not “should I start over in a different field” but “how can I leverage my expertise to solve the problem that’s eating at me?”

The answer wasn’t to abandon his chemical engineering knowledge. It was to redirect it toward a different end state: turning the paradigm from fossil-based human life to sustainable, raw material based human life.

The Boring Job Conversation

The actual pivot started with a chance encounter with a serial entrepreneur in his eighties from Salt Lake City, Utah. The entrepreneur asked Mukund a simple question: “How do you like working in oil and gas?”

Mukund’s answer was honest. “I say it is pretty boring because working in a large oil and gas company is like working for the government in the sense of the bureaucracy of it.”

The comparison to government bureaucracy isn’t just about slowness. Large oil and gas companies operate with the risk tolerance of institutions that have massive capital deployed across decades-long projects. Innovation happens, but incrementally, within established paradigms. Not exactly the environment for someone questioning whether petroleum should be the foundation of human civilization.

The entrepreneur’s response was disarmingly simple: “Okay, why don’t we come to Salt Lake City and we’ll do something together?”

Something was never defined. No business plan, no technology roadmap, no funding strategy. Just the opportunity to work with someone who had built deep tech companies ten times over.

The Houston to Salt Lake City Drive

Some career transitions happen through LinkedIn messages and negotiated offers. Mukund’s happened with his wife and dog in the car, driving from Houston to Salt Lake City.

“The wife and the dog are in the car and away we start driving from Houston, Texas, and here we are in 2009. And then all we had was four walls and the roof.”

That image captures something essential about mission-driven career pivots. You don’t optimize for stability or salary or title. You pack up everything and drive toward undefined “something” because the alternative is spending another decade working on problems you don’t believe in.

The Asset Inventory

What Mukund brought to that room with four walls and a roof wasn’t just general business ambition. It was specific technical capability.

“Being a chemical engineer, I know how to build molecules, right? So I take feedstock and we do what we call in our jargon, molecular transformation. So a becomes b, and b does not look like anything that a started out with.”

This is the hidden advantage in mission-driven career transitions from technical roles. Your expertise doesn’t disappear when you change industries. If anything, it becomes more valuable because you can apply established capability to unsolved problems.

Mukund knew how to work with petroleum. He understood molecular transformation at scale. Those skills transferred directly to building sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based products.

The Three-Question Framework

From 2009 to 2012, CleanJoule’s founding team used three questions to navigate from undefined “something” to actual company strategy:

What can they meaningfully contribute based on their expertise? What’s relevant? What would be impactful?

“With my sort of a mental frame of those asset of expertise, I have always been driven by sustainability,” Mukund explains. “So we decided to jump into what is hard to decarbonize and long haul transport is very hard to decarbonize.”

The intersection of expertise and mission pointed toward energy-dense hydrocarbon building for mature industries. Specifically, aviation fuel.

“Energy dense hydrocarbon building for mature industries is the most impactful aspect of pursuing sustainability from the viewpoint of what is that we are going to disrupt, and that would be building molecules in a new way from different and sustainable feedstock.”

The Dark Alley Years

Those first three years were what Mukund calls going down “many dark alleys, coming back, restarting.” This is what mission-driven career transitions actually look like in practice. Not smooth upward trajectories but messy exploration.

“The most important piece of those three years, I remember, is we were learning every day there was something new every day. And that’s what kept us going.”

This is the psychological shift required for technical professionals transitioning to entrepreneurship. In established companies, learning happens within defined parameters. You’re optimizing known systems. In early-stage deep tech, learning is the entire job because you’re not yet sure what needs to be built.

By 2012, “we thought we hit gold in at least framing the problem.” Three years to understand what question they were trying to answer. That’s not slow. That’s the minimum viable timeline for novel deep tech problems.

The Technical Expertise Leverage

What made Mukund’s transition work wasn’t abandoning his oil and gas expertise. It was recognizing that the same molecular transformation skills used to process petroleum crude could be applied to biomass feedstocks.

“I could not write a code to save my life,” Mukund admits about why software wasn’t his path. “So a natural home for me would be like a petroleum industry or a petrochemical industry where polymers are manufactured by million metric tons.”

The insight: instead of leaving his natural home, he could transform what his natural home was building. Same technical domain, different feedstocks, different end goal.

The Mission Clarity

What sustains mission-driven founders through the dark alley years is clarity about why the problem matters.

“We wanted to turn the paradigm of fossil based human life to sustainable, raw material based human life. And aviation is right in the middle of it. It contributes not only to a betterment of our civilization, but it’s also, as some people say, hardest to decarbonize. So we made our life’s mission to decarbonize the planet. Let’s start with aviation as an industry.”

This mission clarity provided resilience through rejection, slow progress, and years of uncertainty. When you’re working on making aviation 100% independent of petroleum, quarterly setbacks don’t derail the journey.

The Long View Advantage

Fifteen years after that drive from Houston to Salt Lake City, CleanJoule is on track for commercial manufacturing by 2029. They’ve raised $55 million from strategic investors including three airlines. They’ve built technology to transform biomass into drop-in compatible aviation fuel.

“From my viewpoint as a SAF entrepreneur, I want to make sustainable aviation fuel affordable and available to everyone, everywhere on the planet,” Mukund says about the vision. “And while doing that, since we use biomass as the feedstock, we are looking at lifting millions and millions of people around the planet who are on the rural side of the world out of poverty forever.”

The career transition that started with questioning whether it was good to be a chemical engineer led to building technology that could decarbonize aviation while creating economic sustainability for rural populations globally.

The Retrospective Satisfaction

Looking back, Mukund has no regrets about the transition even though it required 15 years in dark alleys before reaching commercial scale.

“Even if you have to look back 20 years later and God forbids you do not succeed, you should derive the satisfaction out of, well, I tried and I was in it for the long haul and it just wasn’t my time. I think that’s a much better solution than making a quick buck in three quarters and walking away to do something else.”

This is the mindset shift required for mission-driven career transitions. Success isn’t just financial returns or exit multiples. It’s knowing you spent your technical expertise trying to solve problems that uplift civilization rather than optimizing systems you don’t believe in.

For technical professionals feeling the same existential dread Mukund felt in his oil and gas role, the CleanJoule origin story offers a template: identify the problem eating at you, inventory your technical assets, find partners who’ve solved hard problems before, and be prepared to spend a decade or two in dark alleys.

The alternative is spending those same decades building molecules you don’t believe in for a system you think shouldn’t exist.