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 […]
Last week, a company with the unlikely name of Synata Bio was the winning bidder in the race to acquire the former Abengoa Bioenergy cellulosic plant in Hugoton, with a bid of $48.5M, which you might regard as “three coins in the fountain”. They beat out a bid from Shell you might regard as “two […]
Beck’s joins the Benson Hill Biosystems genetics ecosystem In Missouri, more signs of the democratization of crop genetics arrives with news major seed retailer Beck’s will leverage CropOS, Benson Hill’s cognitive platform, to accelerate and enhance their corn breeding program. The Beck’s’ backstory Beck’s is a family-owned and operated seed company that serves farmers in […]
In political circles, the theme of “Better Together” has been under siege of late — barely winning (for now) in the Sctoland independence, debate, and losing unexpectedly in the Brexit vote — but it remains a theme for surviving and thriving in the advanced bioeconomy. We tipped it a few months ago, in “The Rise […]
