In Wisconsin, Tesoro reached an agreement for Tesoro to acquire Virent. The acquisition, the partners said, will support the scale up and commercialization of Virent’s BioForming technology for the production of low carbon bio-based fuels and chemicals. As a result of the acquisition, Virent will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesoro and remain in […]
Yes, it’s time for voting in the Hot 40. Who will be #1? In Florida, The Digest announced the official opening of voting for the 40 Hottest Emerging Companies in the Advanced Bioeconomy. Voting Rules Voting will be open to all registered subscribers of The Digest and invited selectors; this year, votes may also be […]
News has arrived from Quebec and we are glad to report it that BioAmber, in its Sarnia succinic acid joint venture with Mitsui & Co., has achieved the final operational milestone set out in a $20 million commercial loan that the joint venture drew down in 2015. It’s worth some detail, before the cheering: BioAmber […]
In Belgium, the BIOFOREVER consortium of 14 European companies emerged from stealth with the news that they have started their demonstration project for the conversion of woody biomass to value adding chemical building blocks. BIOFOREVER intends to demonstrate the feasibility of various new value chains from lignocellulosic feedstocks to chemical building blocks like butanol, ethanol, […]
This month in Finland, a team of intrepid researchers herded one thousand European cows one-by-one into a glass “metabolic chamber” to measure their methane emissions, digestion, production characteristics, energy-efficiency, metabolism, and the microbial make-up of their rumens. The Project is known as RuminOmics, but if it had been titled The Truman Show II: When the […]
If you were reading BBC’s coverage of the aviation biofuels space yesterday, you would have seen the provocative headline: Wood fuel plan to cut plane CO2 branded as ‘pipe dream’ Then would have looked in vain for the quoted reference to “pipe dream”…because there wasn’t one. Just the invention of a bored editor. If that gives […]
Gaze at your navel for a second. Use a mirror if you like. Go ahead, it’s OK, I won’t tell anyone. Yes, the navel, the omphalos. To the Greeks it represented the Center of the World. And now, we are learning, it might well be the very center of your health and well-being. The Gut that […]
By the end of 2018, Intrexon is guiding the market that it will have successfully commercialized a technology to convert methane, or the primary component of natural gas, into isobutanol, a liquid fuel with a density far closer to gasoline than ethanol. There has been substantial doubt raised, especially in The Motley Fool, regarding Intrexon’s […]
A reader writes: I’d hoped that the biofuels crowd would have gotten beyond ethanol by now. The industry has made progress creating all kinds of specialty chemicals from renewable sources and more or less successfully brought them to market. There’s jet and diesel in commercial use whether or not they’re yet profitable. However they […]
In the UK, MPs from the Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee say they will pursue a ban on microplastics used in everyday household products from toothpaste to shower gels and cosmetics. “Trillions of tiny pieces of plastic are accumulating in the world’s oceans, lakes and estuaries,” said the committee’s chairwoman, Mary Creagh, adding that they harm […]
