By Jim Spaeth Special to The Digest Before there were supermajors, there were scattered oil wells. Tiny, stubborn things—dug into dusty corners of Texas, each with barely enough output to fill a rail car. But early refiners didn’t try to process that oil in the field. They built a network. They moved intermediates—crude oil—across distance […]
The battle lines are drawn and the ethanol industry’s equivalent of the Met Gala is about to begin. When June rolls around, the titans of the enzyme and yeast industries roll out their latest offerings. The strain engineers unleash their latest offerings on the runways, and we all sit back and marvel at the audacity, […]
By Jim Spaeth Special to The Digest Renewable chemicals and biomaterials are no longer niche—they are the future of carbon. Europe stands at the threshold of massive opportunity, from decarbonized manufacturing to circular materials innovation. But crossing that threshold? That’s another story. The technology exists. The markets are interested. The policies are warming. And yet, […]
Keep on keeping on. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Uncertainty is another way of spelling opportunity. These are so easy to say and write, so hard to do. At a time of great economic and policy uncertainty — the world may not be going to blazes, as some of our friends […]
When the news scroll fills with flashy deals and billion-dollar headlines, it’s easy to overlook the most powerful stories—the ones that deliver sturdy companies and technologies for the long-haul. The Uptime technologies, the -we-found-a-way companies, the sustainable and affordable feedstocks. Entropy? Chaos in the market. They fold entropy into structure, convert symbolic weight into trust. […]
Some times, the rain comes down so hard, it’s hard to see the road. I’ve been driving American highways for years, I’ve seen the fall rain in Pennsylvania forcing trucks off the road, spring fog in Oregon so think you can’t see the headlights from the oncoming cars, the summer winds in the Carolinas sweep […]
By Mark Warner, CEO, Liberation Labs Special to the Digest On April 10, 2025 in Washington, the NSCEB released its final report to Congress and hosted a day-long convening of leaders from industry, government, and academia. I was there, and the mood was a mix of excitement and realism: bold ideas—like $15B in proposed funding—were […]
This past week, we reported that Manus and Inscripta have announced a strategic merger to establish an end-to-end platform for scalable development, biomanufacturing, and commercialization of bioalternative products. In our report, we noted the public rationale: by combining Inscripta’s whole-genome engineering technologies with Manus’ cell factory engineering platform, biomanufacturing expertise, and commercialization capabilities, the merged […]
By Sam A. Rushing, President Advanced Cryogenics, Ltd. Special to The Digest The long term sustainability of first generation ethanol facilities, through advanced biofuels plants, is realized by making money from all the by-products; and of course, CO2 is one of the leading components of this by-product list. There are many variables associated the feasibility […]
By Gerard J. Ostheimer, PhD and Douglas L. Faulkner “The Cleantech Conservative” Special to The Digest The East African Corn Belt runs from South Africa, north and east through Zambia, Tanzania and into Kenya and Ethiopia (see map). We believe that this area is poised to become a thriving hub of innovation and production of […]
