Gevo vs Terrabon: Who's the Best?

Background: This is an Elite Eight (quarter-final), Central Regional match-up between #1 seed Gevo and #6 seed Terrabon, 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 Final Four (semi-finals), and a shot at the Championship.

The loser: Goes home.

Laurels: Gevo is the 4th ranked company in the 2010-11 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy poll. Terrabon is currently #39.

The match-up: It’s a Battle for Central Region Supremacy, with the winner advancing towards a match-up with either Novozymes or LS9.  Gevo took 70 percent of the votes in its first round battle with SynGest, won 63-37 over OPX Bio in the second round, and bested POET 55-45 in the Sweet Sixteen. Terrabon prevailed over Metabolix by 65-35 in the first round, then ZeaChem 53-47 in the round of 32, while recording another 53-47 victory over Virent in the Sweet Sixteen.

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.

Terrabon’s MixAlco is an advanced bio-refining technology used by Terrabon’s experienced staff of chemical engineers to convert low-cost, readily available, non-food, non-sterile biomass into valuable chemical precursors such as organic acids, ketones and secondary alcohols that can be processed into renewable hydrocarbon fuels.