Is your favorite biofuels venture in trouble? — or might look in trouble but actually be just fine. Here are 12 tell-tale signs if you’ve “got trouble, right here in River City.” In the game of professional golf, Saturday is traditionally known as “moving day” as the leaders begin to separate themselves from the pack […]
Why is making affordable renewable sugars potentially big business? Which intrepid investors have targeted biofuels’ biggest bottleneck? News has been circulating that Proterro raised $3.5 million for a demonstration-scale of their renewable sugars technology, and secured a key patent allowance for their bioreactor system and microorganism. Giving us a good opportunity to review how Proterro, […]
“What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar”, US Vice President Thomas Marshall once remarked to the United States Senate during a long speech by Kansas Senator Joe Bristow on the subject of “what this country needs.” Today, we could use a good five-cent renewable sugar, suitable for microorganisms that, from sucrose, make affordable […]
Where other companies are growing sugars via crop improvements, or extracting them, Proterro is making them via synthetic biology. Specifically, they have engineered a cyanobacteria to make sucrose (via a series of steps you can read all about here), ultimately from CO2, water, sunlight and nutrients – and secrete it into a sugarwater stream that […]
In today’s Digest, we’ve looked at: • New investors flock to Proterro as all the incumbents re-up • Why Affordable Renewable Sugars are a Monster Prize• Making sugars, not extracting them: Proterro’s Technology So, when will we know if Proterro is a company and not a science project? The timing is in months, not years, in terms of […]
Biofuels Digest has released the next wave of its 5-Minute Guides – a “news you can use” digest on the leading companies in biofuels. Each 5-Minute Guide provides a company description, top development and commercialization, milestones for from 2010 through today, description of the business model; plus project info (location, feedstocks, product set, processing technology, […]
Next-gen renewable oils producer achieves first linear scale-up to 500,000 liter fermenters — clears path for large commercial production volumes. In biofuels, the “ethanol blend wall” gets a tremendous amount of attention. This is the restriction on ethanol blending in gasoline to (today) 10 percent. It limits overall US ethanol distribution, and vexes ethanol producers […]
Policy, finance, technology, feedstocks, markets, prices, opposition. Here’s what’s on your mind, as the critical 2013 deployment year for biofuels looms. Great topic suggestions from Digest readers have been pouring into my inbox all week — for the private, pre-ABLC briefing that we are prepping for DC this April. (By the way, thank you to the many […]
In today’s Digest, Will Rogers updates us on the operational and strategic rationale behind the U.S. military’s energy efforts. By: Will Rogers, Consumer Energy Report The recent debate over the role of the military in investing in renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency and conservation programs and alternative biofuels has included many voices that sometimes conflate […]
It’s been years of struggle to get cellulosic feedstock supply chains downfield. Now, companies like Woodland Biofuels, Sweetwater Energy, Ceres, Delta BioRenewables and Commonwealth Agro-Energy are moving the chains. For grownups of a certain age, memories of December past take us back to childhoods before Madden Football and XBox, when Electric Football sets were found […]
