Method
How a concept gets through
Seven gates, an independent audit that argues against our own work, and arithmetic we recompute in code instead of trusting a model to state.
The seven gates
Every candidate must clear all seven — no averaging, no partial credit:
- Scientific backing — the mechanism is established in the peer-reviewed literature, with works cited you can follow.
- Commercial absence — the process is not a product anyone sells today, or we name the specific barrier that has kept it off the market.
- Unit economics — the venture's own cost model, built from the paper's primitives (feedstock, yield, batch time, energy), must clear our thresholds. These thresholds are internal; what we publish is the computed result.
- Barrier to entry — the starting capital must be small enough that a first batch, not a first fundraise, is the entry ticket.
- Velocity — the time from first dollar spent to first paid delivery is measured and capped, including any qualification step.
- Mass-adoption market fit — a clearly defined, large, commercially reachable market, not a lab-scale niche.
- Demonstrated superiority — quantified head-to-head data against the incumbent the buyer uses today, at the incumbent's own price. Cheaper, greener or more sustainable are recorded as tailwinds, never as proof.
Three extra checks that exist only to void the other seven
The seven gates can be talked into a pass by choosing the wrong comparator. So before a concept can pass, three integrity checks must hold: the named incumbent must be the actual market-leading commercial product for that job (not a niche alternative, a research-grade analogue, or a negative control); the comparison must be like-for-like (finished product vs finished product, at the same formulation and qualification); and the stated hazard profile must be complete and cited — an uncited "inert, non-toxic" claim fails the concept.
The economics are recomputed in code
We do not accept a margin or payback figure the model volunteers. The report must supply sourceable primitives — feedstock cost, yield, batch cycle, startup capital — and the economics are recomputed deterministically from them. The dossier publishes the result: gross margin at the incumbent's price, payback, capital productivity, and a sensitivity table (what happens if price drops a quarter, yield drops a quarter, capital doubles, feedstock rises half).
An independent audit argues against us
After the gates and the economics, a separate, deterministic red-team audit re-checks the arithmetic, the comparator and the evidence base. It has overruled the scoring model repeatedly, and its verdict is the headline number. Its findings are published with the concept — including the warnings against our own survivors. The free sample shows what that looks like: the audit that criticizes the dossier is printed inside the dossier.
Questions any buyer should ask — answered
Is lab performance evidence of a business? No, and we say so in every dossier. A headline mg/g figure is a starting signal; the business case is the cost model at production scale. Both appear in the dossier, and the audit re-checks that the scale-up arithmetic is not hand-waved.
What does it cost per kg at 1, 100 and 10,000 tonnes a year? The dossier gives the feedstock and conversion economics, and the audit flags when scale-up costs are declared rather than demonstrated.
What happens with real-world feedstocks and impurities? Papers that only test pure, synthetic feeds are disclosed as such; a dossier that needs real-feedstream validation says so in the audit's warnings.
Can it be regenerated, and what happens to the captured material? Disposal and regeneration are part of the economics, not an afterthought — if the paper does not establish them, the dossier's audit marks that gap.
What does the incumbent actually cost per unit treated? The comparison is anchored to the incumbent's own price, from an independent market source. Where that source is missing or weak, the audit says so explicitly — see the declared-parity warning in the free sample.
What regulatory approvals are required? Where the pathway requires clinical, pharmaceutical or comparable qualification, the time and capital of that step are counted in the velocity and CapEx tests — not mentioned in a footnote.
Why are you telling us the weaknesses? Because a dossier without its own counter-arguments is marketing. The warnings are the product: they are what lets you judge whether the gap between literature and market is an arbitrage or a verdict.
What "The Absence Audit" means
The name describes the method, not a founder: an audit of what is absent — processes proven in the literature but missing from the market. It is not related to other uses of the phrase, such as auditing whether a company can survive the departure of its founder. This site is the research ledger; the ledger is the product.