Any way you look at the US 2016 presidential elections or the turmoil within the European Union (e.g Brexit, or Italy’s referendum on membership), you can conclude that we are entering into in anti-federal cycle, and the most innovative public-private policies are likely for some time to proceed out of regions, provinces and states. In […]
On any list of 10 Colossal Failures of the Finance sector in this century, we’d put the failure of bankers and commercial-scale investors to get behind the advanced bioeconomy in a more timely fashion. “It seems as if we’re paying for the sins of others,” sighed CEO Martin Sabarsky. One CEO observed to us not […]
In France, Global Bioenergies agreed to acquire Netherlands-based gas fermentation company Syngip for €1.02M, with a milestone-based bonus that could boost the acquisition price up to €1.775M. The acquisition price includes assumption of €150K of Syngip’s debt. The deal is subject to shareholder approval. The ultimate goal Syngip talked here about the possibility of producing […]
News of high-level appointments have been streaming out of Trump Tower all this week and last, and two trends are already clear: it’s a group mostly out of the business and military communities, and there’s a pivot to Russia on. To us, it feels like the Nixon 1969 playbook, with one play run in reverse, […]
The old Christmas carol goes, “I saw three ships come sailing in,” and those perched on a widow’s walk this morning might have espied Anellotech, Edeniq, Novvi steaming in with material advances in their respective stories. For Anellotech, a new technology to extend catalyst life by reducing catalyst poisons that cause catalyst and product cost […]
In South Korea, BioAmber and CJ CheilJedang Corporation signed a LOI for a joint venture in China to produce up to 36,000 metric tons of bio-succinic acid per year. It’s not a greenfield. The CJCJ JV involves a retrofit of an existing fermentation plant in a market that BioAmber cannot readily penetrate today. How is […]
It may be a sign of the times, a sense of worry that R&D for renewable transport fuels may lose all their popularity under the incoming Trump Administration. Whatever the cause, the biggest set of projects announced in renewable fuels since the days of the Recovery Act have been just announced by the Advanced Research […]
News has arrived from Denver (the company) and the UK (the project and partners) that SynTech Bioenergy will build what it terms “a revolutionary clean-energy plant in the United Kingdom capable of carbon negative operation.” Carbon negative – what’s that? Carbon negative generally means that some of the resulting carbon is sequestered — possibly in […]
Every airline has pilots, but then there’s the Chief Pilot, and in the advanced bioeconomy the chief pilot is known by the ungainly acronym ABPDU, which might as well decode as “All Bioeconomy Processes Developed Upstairs,” but actually stands for the far more modest “Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit.” It’s run out of the Berkeley […]
This week, news arrived from Amyris that they have purchased the Glycotech facility in Leland, North Carolina where, since 2011, they have been on a contract basis converting their farnesene into squalane for the cosmetic markets. Total purchase price for the small manufacturer was $4.35M — a good deal for a manufacturing site with more […]
