Dozens of deals – what are the hottest paths to $$$? Who’s forming capital in bioenergy this year, and when, where, why and how? In the old days, the process seemed simple: seed round to fund some lab work at the bench level, series A for proof of concept, series B for the pilot, series […]
Brazil, India, the US, China and the EU point the way towards a 60 billion gallon biofuels market by 2022 – but can the capacity be built, and can the mandates survive pressure from opponents? In Florida, the Digest today releases its annual review of biofuels mandates and targets around the world, looking at the […]
Is the US government right in aiming to commercialize aviation biofuels production – or should it be aimed at ensuring affordable feedstock? Pain at the pump. $5 gasoline in California. $8 gasoline in the EU. We hear about it all the time. But in biofuels, the pain comes long before the pump. It arrives with […]
By Tom Kadala If you are wondering what our future holds with an economy subjected to political gridlock, an overview of an emerging industry called aviation biofuels could offer some interesting insights. Airlines today operate on razor thin profit margins with an industry average of less than one half of one percent, largely due to […]
While companies pursue alternatives to Fischer-Tropsch technologies, Velocys is seeking to make F-T work economically with micro-reactors. In last week’s Digest, Robert Rapier aptly stated the challenge in front of XTL technologies – companies whose primary focus is gas-to-liquids (GTL), coal-to-liquids (CTL), or biomass-to-liquids (BTL): “The two major problems with any of the XTL technologies […]
Biofuels Digest readers choose Clark by a wide margin; Chu in a distant second; Reicher, Podesta, Dorgan trail far behind. Biofuels Digest readers chose former NATO commander Wesley K. Clark as US Secretary of Energy in an online straw poll. In a field of 17 candidates, including the current Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, Clark picked […]
Ensyn – moving rapidly towards scale as a transport fuel technology after decades in smaller, high-value markets. What does Ensyn’s signature RTP technology, that’s making such a splash, look like? There’s a jeu d’esprit that Canadians repeat amongst themselves about how much better Canada is at basic research than applications development. At some point, someone […]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that the agency has not found evidence to support a finding of severe “economic harm” that would warrant granting a waiver of the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS). The decision is based on economic analyses and modeling done in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. […]
Why is ATJ experiencing NSF, possibly DOA, and certainly not yet RFTO (AFAIK), as skeptics are (FYI) ROFL? It’s NLACM. By now it must be universally understood that it’s tough to run a business that processes $10 bills into $5 bills, no matter what economies of scale you reach – and no matter what the […]
By Sam A. Rushing, President, Advanced Cryogenics, Ltd. Background Perhaps the most logical approach to boosting revenues from biofuels projects, that being those which yield a CO2 by-product, such as fermentation, is the recovery, and subsequent refinement, and properly assessing the best suited market for the commodity. The same is applicable to the other so-called […]
