By Dr. Terry Mazanec, Lee Enterprises Consulting Special to The Digest Biomass is a rich salad of chemicals that contains many highly valuable materials that are precursors to fine chemicals, nutrients, and pharmaceuticals. But this strength is also a weakness of biomass. The assortment of materials in biomass is bound together in a complex, stable […]
By Mark Janeczko, Energy and Chemicals Marketing Manager, Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, Inc. Special to The Digest The Future of Renewable Fuels Whatever your thoughts regarding the future of the world’s energy supply, it is clear biofuel production and its clean implications are here to stay. On the federal level, The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program was […]
By Lorenz Bauer, PhD., Lee Consulting Enterprises Special to The Digest Sales of biopolymers and resins are predicted to grow to over $5 billion by 2021. Biomass derived materials have been used neat and as components in composites and blends for the last decade. Products made with high contents of cellulose, starch, proteins, chitosan are common. […]
By Mark Warner, PE, Founder, Warner Advisors LLC Special to The Digest The first installment of the series, here, discussed the need to determine an understanding of what success looks like to be able to adequately evaluate if an advanced biotechnology is ready for commercialization. Now, let’s move into the details of evaluating the state of […]
By Mark Warner, PE, Founder, Warner Advisors LLC Special to The Digest In my previous series What makes the scale-up of industrial biotechnology so difficult?, I discussed the need for a fully integrated pilot plant and reviewed common pitfalls that companies face on their path to commercialization. The series generated the obvious question as to how […]
By Steve Weiss, Co-Founder, Grey Heron venture consulting Special to The Digest Have you ever read articles with fund-raising advice? They have titles like “how to create an elevator pitch” or “the ten slides you need” – and can be very useful. And most of us already know how to show off our technology – the […]
By Dick Roche, Special to The Digest Just as the EU institutions were shutting up shop for the long summer break the EU Commission issued its strategy to reduce transport emissions in the post 2020 period, ‘European Strategy for low Emission Mobility’. The strategy will ‘axe’ any support for conventional biofuels. This should come […]
By James Cogan, Special to The Digest Europe’s Big 4 ethanol CEOs (Tereos, Cristal Union, Alco Group, Crop Energies) are in a curious situation. Together with their smaller peers they produce about 6 million tonnes of the fuel commodity annually, with combined revenues of around 4 billion euro. The product gets blended into petrol accounting for 4% of […]
By Susan Olson, Ph.D. Managing Director of Ag & Biofuels, Genscape Overview Biomass-based diesel mandates for blending in transportation fuel have increased in many nations worldwide over the last year. In several of these countries, domestic biodiesel production is underutilized and many of these same countries are net exporters. These increases don’t necessarily create the […]
By Lorenz Bauer and Gerald Kutney, Lee Enterprises Consulting Special to The Digest The concept of early stage, breakthrough technologies is a bit of an oxymoron: at an early stage how do you determine if it is a breakthrough technology? The only way is for experts to give their opinion, and, usually, they are wrong, […]
