By Lorenz Bauer, PhD and William Quapp, MSME, special to The Digest Introduction The continued interest in advanced biofuels has produced numerous exciting technical advances on the laboratory, pilot and demonstration scales. However, attempts to translate these small scale successes into commercial technologies have been less successful. It is easy to blame lower oil and […]
Methanol is gaining momentum as a low-carbon fuels target, as Enerkem starts producing in Edmonton. Why methanol, why now? Here, we look at the technology and market rationale for this rising trend. As we reported earlier this week, Enerkem has initiated methanol production at its Edmonton waste-to-fuels facility, and has raised an additional $115M in financing. […]
Six years after 2009’s “summer of algae”, we look at who’s doing what now, as the industry diversifies heavily into nutraceuticals in search of sustaining product revenue. 31 Algae players, what do they make now, and how are they making out? Algae, algae, algae — biofuels made from and by the littleist creatures in the […]
Tell us about your company and it’s role in the Advanced Bioeconomy. Great Lakes Bioenergy is a DOE, Office of Science-funded Bioenergy Research Center. Its mission is to develop ways to produce ethanol, advanced biofuels and chemicals from the non-edible, lignocellulosic part of plant biomass. The Center includes researchers at UW-Madison & Michigan State University, […]
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 […]
An arbitration ruling details how Roquette seemingly attempted one of the most brazen intellectual property heists in the history of biotechnology, and almost got away with it. Today, the story of a JV gone wrong, a finding of Roquette misconduct, and a big arbitration award to Solazyme – all over a new way to make flour. On […]
Gevo has two proprietary technologies that combine to make it possible to retrofit existing ethanol plants to produce isobutanol, a four carbon alcohol which serves as a hydrocarbon platform molecule. We have developed a robust industrial scale yeast biocatalyst to produce isobutanol without typical byproducts operating at parameters equivalent to commercial ethanol producers. The second […]
In Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gevo’s favor and overturned an earlier Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on the interpretation of key patent claims. On April 11, 2013, the Delaware District Court (District Court) entered a final judgment of non-infringement in Gevo’s favor following the acknowledgment by Butamax Advanced Biofuels LLC (Butamax) […]
Virent is in the business of replacing crude oil by applying clever chemistry to create the fuels and chemicals the world demands using a wide range of naturally-occurring, renewable resources. Virent’s patented technology features catalytic chemistry to convert plant-based sugars into a full range of products identical to those made from petroleum, including gasoline, diesel, […]
Beta Renewables — a subsidiary of Chemtex, and Grupo M&G — has developed and deployed a low-cost cellulosic biofuels technology, known as PROESA. Chemtex employs approximately 1000 staff located in key centers throughout the world – Tortona and Rivalta in Italy, Wilmington, NC and Sharon Center, OH in the USA, Shanghai and Beijing in China and […]
