With the news that Cargill has acquired OPX Bio’s fermentation-based technology, which featured a hot route to biobased paints, adhesives, diapers, and detergents — we take a look back at a DOE paper that sparked so much interest in these biobased molecules. If they handed out Platinum and Gold certification to scientific papers as we […]
ABLC 2015 has come and gone. Here are new priorities, lessons learned, new advances, and cautionary tales. ABLC 2015 ended last Friday, and from the annual bioeconomy leadership conference in Washington DC., we have selected slides presented by CEOs from Abengoa, Algenol, Amyris, Aventine, Enerkem, Fulcrum, GranBio, Green Biologics, Iogen and LanzaTech — at the top rank in terms of […]
Thought Leadership: The Digest speaks with Sebastian Soederberg, Novozymes’ VP for Biomass Conversion on the cellulosic ethanol industry. Sebastian, you are fond of saying that the cellulosic ethanol production is a technology that is evolving beyond market hype to commercialization. Why? If you look at charts of installed capacity since the 1990s for a variety of clean-tech […]
Of all the pathways to drop-in algae biofuels, few have remained as promising as hydrothermal algae liquefaction. It may not roll off the tongue, but it might be the most important technology to come along in years. Here’s why. This past week, news has arrived from Colorado that Merrick & Company was engaged by Genifuel Corporation […]
It’s been a year of deployment and globalization. Here are the most important items to know. Back in 1927, 100,000 people flooded Le Bourget Airport in Paris to greet Charles Lindbergh as he completed the first solo, non-stop, transatlantic crossing by plane. Now, it’s done by dozens of pilots every day, who have no one […]
Feeling bullish or bearish on renewables? Before deciding, why not check out the current short interest in sector equities? In investing there are the longs and the shorts — while most investors take “long” positions, simply owning stocks and bonds, many traders “go short” when they think the stock is overvalued and ready to drop. […]
By Vonnie Estes, special to the Digest Having spent more than twenty years commercializing technology in the agricultural sector, I’m excited by the growing interest and investment in Agricultural Technology. AgTech did not receive much attention from venture capital prior to 2012. Investment in 2012 was around $150M – and then it exploded to $1.8 […]
4 weeks past the helter-skelter Oil Crash, as prices plateau for now (and maybe for the long term) — what have we learned about energy markets in the Age of Alternatives? No can perfectly predict what will happen with energy prices, over the long period of time, and the relief that the energy sector might be […]
Will oil prices ever stop falling, and who’ll be left standing when they do? How long can the war of attrition gone on between North American shale producers and OPEC? Oil prices are falling — fast. Nothing seems to stop the slide. Increasingly, it can be seen as a battle over market share as a […]
By Brent Erickson, Executive VP, BIO; Head, Industrial & Environmental Section The underlying legal constructs of the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) remain in working order, despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) failure to issue a final 2014 rule and its other regulatory missteps. Over the past five years, the program spurred billions of dollars of […]
