Food vs Fuel, emissions, cost competitiveness, and RINsanity. Some of the most unfair bricks hurled at corn starch-based ethanol — and here’s why. If you were, like me, employed in the late 1980s in the eight-block radius around New York’s Washington Square Park, you knew to keep a sharp eye out for bicycle-mounted messengers that hurtled […]
Company description: Portugal’s SilicoLife develops solutions for the rational design of optimized microbial strains for the production chemicals with diversified uses, such as bio-fuels, food ingredients, chemical building blocks or biopolymers. SilicoLife builds computational models of microbial cells and develops proprietary state-of-the-art algorithms to effectively establish the most efficient pathways between raw-materials and end-products, streamlining […]
Bunnies, liposuction fat, Prince Charles’ leftover wine, day-old whale, the human poo bus, fire ants dipped in hexane, old beer, raging fireballs, vibrating blobs, dope, and even the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Take your pick and, yep, it’s all true, as the Digest discovers. IF YOU’RE ONLY AN OCCASIONAL READER in the world of biofuels, corn, sugarcane and […]
POET-DSM, Abengoa, Enerkem, GranBio, Raizen plant openings lead the list; REG’s M&A campaign, EPA’s RFS debacle, are other key trends. They said that cellulosic fuels were “five years away, and always will be,” but five major commercial-scale plant openings in the Americas put that label permanently to rest this year, and it was without question […]
Butamax, KRL, Vivergo, sugarcane ethanol business not impacted by cuts; consolidation to Brazil; San Diego research center, Highland feedstock operation also up for sale. In the UK, news broke from BP headquarters that the company has determined to divest the cellulosic biofuels business amidst an overall corporate retrenchment, in the face of falling energy prices, […]
Global Bioenergies achieves one-step renewable butadiene via fermentation. Who’s in the global chase for a process to make one of the world’s Big 7 industrial chemicals via a renewable process — and how did Global Bioenergies just jump into the lead? The Digest investigates. From France, news arrives that Global Bioenergies has succeeded in the […]
Shell VP Matthew Tipper, at ABLCNext: “We will likely begin manufacture in the southeast United States. We plan to be operational by late this decade. “We believe our best bet is woody biomass and energy crops as feedstocks. We plan to do this with a scale-up of smaller plants with widespread feedstock availability.” “The RFS […]
Mascoma’s “slow rabbit, the first commercial app from its CBP technology, gets snapped up by Lallemand. In Massachusetts, Mascoma Corporation announced that it has completed the sale of its yeast business to Lallemand Inc., a privately owned company that researches, develops, produces and markets yeasts, bacteria, and related products. As part of the transaction, Lallemand […]
How does a technology take municipal solid waste and turn it into liquid fuels and chemicals? What’s the “death of landfill” all about in terms of creating value streams from waste streams? We take you through the world’s first commercial-scale waste-to-fuels project, in Edmonton, Alberta. In the sector to the northeast of Edmonton, Canada’s 2nd […]
10 leaders, 10 enterprises, 10 paths to scale — what’s really key to making algae a commercial crop for feed, fuel and pharma, soon? This week at the Algae Biomass Summit, a pair of key sessions featured 10 of the leading companies in the algae sector: Paul Woods, CEO, Algenol Jason Kolb, VP, Algix Tim […]
