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 […]
In Nebraska, word has arrived from Green Plains that it will purchase the Madison, Ill., Mount Vernon, Ind. and York, Neb. ethanol facilities from Abengoa Bioenergy with combined annual production capacity of 236 million gallons per year, for approximately $237 million in cash, plus certain working capital adjustments. The company said it was the successful […]
Lightning strikes often in the Advanced Bioeconomy. The Magic catalyst, the miracle microbe, the super strain, the wonder feedstock, the peerless process. But it’s after the lightning strikes that we begin what former BP Biofuels chief Phil New called “the hard yards of commercialization” and learn not only what is exciting, but what is needed. […]
One of the more perplexing problems of the advanced bioeconomy is getting algae out of the water or the water out of the algae. It simply isn’t a problem in traditional, land-based agriculture and most of the nutraceutical applications of algae that were developed early on featured such high price points that it almost didn’t […]
