Gevo vs POET: Who's the Best?

Background: This is a Sweet Sixteen (third round), Central Regional match-up between #1 seed Gevo and #4 seed POET, in the 2011 Transformative Technologies tourney, from Biofuels Digest.

Voting: Open to all Biofuels Digest subscribers. Voting links are in the Biofuels Digest daily newsletter. To subscribe (free), visit here.

The winner gets: Most votes advances to the Elite Eight (round of 8), and a shot at the Biofuels Final Four.

The loser: Goes home.

Laurels: Gevo is the 4th ranked company in the 2010-11 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy poll. OPX is the 19th ranked company in the 2011-12 30 Hottest Companies in Renewable Chemicals poll.

The match-up: It’s a Battle for Denver Supremacy, with the winner advancing towards a possible tilt with Colorado-based ZeaChem.  Gevo took 70 percent of the votes in its first round battle with SynGest. POET took 61 percent of the votes in its first round battle with Avello Bioenergy, and 51 percent against Honeywell’s UOP in the second round.

Gevo is coming off a celebrated IPO and a series of capacity acquisitions in Luverne, MN and elsewhere, and is readying for commercial scale by Q1 2012, with is fermentation of corn into isobutanol.

POET is getting closer to building its 25 Mgy Project LIBERTY cellulosic ethanol plant – having landed a DOE conditional commitment for a loan guarantee which it is now aiming to close; its enzymatic hydrolysis process converts corn cobs into ethanol.