Biocatalysis

Colorado-based Gevo announced a new agreement with Bye Energy (Love that name!) to develop aviation fuels. According to a statement by the companies, they have initiated static engine tests with general aviation aircraft using a sustainable fuel alternative. No terms were disclosed. For previous news on Gevo, click here.

Let’s say you are a vegetarian. Do you think you should pay an extra tax on your veggies because producing them takes away land that could otherwise be used to produce feed for livestock, thereby driving up the cost of raising cattle, and ultimately the cost of beef for all the meat-eaters? No? Well, the so-called logic behind ILUC is analogous to that little story.  Actually, it is even more twisted.

Stripped of fancy political language, indirect land use change (ILUC) penalizes American farmers for deforestation in Brazil.  The reasoning goes like this: producing more corn to produce fuel ethanol displaces other crops, like soybeans.  Then, farmers in other countries, such as Brazil, will cut down rainforests to grow soybeans to fill the gap. Therefore, ILUC proposes to put a levy or tax on biofuels based on a convoluted calculation of how much carbon dioxide will be “indirectly released” due to the supposed deforestation. In essence, ILUC advocates believe that American farmers and biofuel producers should be held accountable for the actions of people on the other side of the globe over whom they have no control.

Confused? You should be, because this is one of the most cockamamie schemes ever cooked up by “political minds”—no, that is an oxymoron—“politicians.”  And leave it to my home state of California to lead the way in implementing cockamamie schemes. The Golden State has decided to incorporate ILUC calculations in its Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Never mind that there is absolutely no scientific basis or consensus for this calculation. I think I need some ethanol …

GreenFuel Technologies Corporation, which planned to convert CO2 from smokestacks into fuel using algae, announced it is closing and put its assets up for sale. This is after spending more than $70 million in venture funding. I like this lead sentence from its web site announcing the offering of assets: “After leading the algae clean tech industry for the past 8 years …“. Leading the industry where?

South Dakota-based POET Bioenergy is scouting for acquisition among distressed assets. CEO JEff Broin believes that his company’s superior technology allows certain unprofitable ethanol producers to become profitable if only they could adopt POET’s BPX process, producing up to 3 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn.

Just when you think the biofuels industry is running out of ideas, a new one emerges. Enter nitrile biofuels, touted as having higher-energy content than the first generation biodiesel products that are based on fatty acid esters. The company Western Biofuels (interestingly with a Miami, FL address) is developing high-energy biodiesel (HEBD) and said it plans to build a 1.4 Mgy demonstration plant in Guatemala.

There is no shortage of biofuels conferences to attend. The 5th Annual Biofuels FInancial Conference is coming up in Minneapolis, MN June 24-25.

The newest pretreatment method to get investor backing is actually a very old method: hydrochloric acid.

A lot of attention has focused on the development of more efficient cellulases and hemi-cellulases to convert cellulosic feedstocks into fermentable sugars. Once this step becomes efficient, biofuels come much closer to a practical reality. Well, a company called HCL Cleantech has just received investments from high profile VCs Burrill & Co. and Khosla Ventures based on a different, enzyme-free approach. HCL Cleantech claims a low-cost biomass to sugars conversion using good, old concentrated hydrochloric acid, offering a process that uses little water and is self-sufficient energetically. As a path to fermentable sugars, the methods would help biofuels development broadly, whether the product is ethanol, butanol, or hydrocarbons. R & D is ongoing in Israel currently, with a pilot plant slated for the USA in 2010. Read the full story here.

T. Boone Pickens on ethanol as a fuel: “It’s an ugly baby, but it’s our ugly baby.”

To read our previous take on ethanol as a fuel, click here.

Bluefire Ethanol has announced that it is partnering with Solazyme to pair its acid hydrolysis technology for producing fermentable sugars from biomass with Solazyme’s algae-based fuel production process. This is an interesting partnership. Solazyme wins only if fermentable sugars are cheaper this way. Bluefire wins if Solazyme can produce fuel at lower cost than Bluefire. Or is Bluefire acknowledging that it lacks a competitive ethanol production method, and is simply trying to create value from its biomass pre-treatment method?

Biofuel company LS9 and Procter & Gamble announced a partnership to develop chemicals  to be used in consumer products. As has been typical with LS9 since its inception, details are sparse, but they have boldly stated that the deal is “multi-year” and includes “sustainable chemicals” in the products under consideration. LS9 has reported that it is developing methods to produce hydrocarbon products for fuels by combining the fatty acid synthesis pathway and adding its own proprietary enzymatic steps.