As the old Irving Berlin song put it, Let’s Start the New Year Right. By looking into something gone wrong. USASpending.gov launched with a certain amount of brouhaha back in 2007, after the enabling legislation sailed through Congress in the fall of 2006. The bill’s Senate sponsors included the unlikely grouping of Senators Tom Coburn […]
In Washington, the Energy Department announced the selection of six projects for up to $12.9 million in federal funding, entitled, “Project Definition for Pilot- and Demonstration-Scale Manufacturing of Biofuels, Bioproducts, and Biopower.” These projects, required to share the cost at a minimum of 50%, will develop and execute plans for the manufacturing of advanced or […]
In Florida, the Digest today releases its annual review of biofuels mandates and targets around the world, looking at the state of biofuels mandates in 64 countries. The bulk of mandates continue to come from the EU-27, where the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) specified a 10 percent renewable content by 2020 but has been scaled […]
If you find yourself among the 79 percent of people who “agree that they consider themselves an environmentally conscious person,” you’ve probably stayed up nights in recent years wondering what the heck to do with the swamp of dubious chemicals in your hair known benignly as shampoo. But if you are among the 75 percent […]
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 […]
