Biocatalysis

Any time an industry gets “hot” as has been the case for biofuels, spokespersons at the companies inevitably search for ways to differentiate their companies, products, and technologies. I’m not talking about hype or distortions, but rather the creative spin—names, words, and phrases—that are coined in an effort to make a company’s offerings stand out and be memorable.

I started thinking about this recently when I ran across a phrase on the web site of Joule Biotechnologies. According to the company’s web site, Joule is developing “SolarFuel^TM liquid energy.” I guess it just wouldn’t sound as impressive if they called it a fuel (and the company is assiduously eschewing the term biofuel). But if the so-called “ liquid energy” is not a fuel, what is it? And, just to be clear, the first “liquid energy” product Joule is aiming for is ethanol. This got me thinking that there must be other examples, and some I found are quite creative.

Below is a listing of some phrases from various biofuels companies, followed by my translation of what the phrase really means.

“Liquid Energy” (Joule Biotechnologies): biofuel such as ethanol

“99.7% pure ethanol” (Coskata): ethanol of similar purity to that made by every other bio-ethanol company, after refining

“Tightly protected Intellectual Property” (various): patents are pending

“Consolidated Bioprocessing Method” (Qteros): Their own particular sequence of bioprocessing steps to produce a biofuel

“The New Oil” (Range Fuels): biofuel (but really ethanol in this case)

“Green Crude” (Sapphire Energy): biofuel

“Pond to Pump” (Live Fuels): making biofuel from algae (I kind of like this one)

No Compromise^TM (Amyris): The trademarked name of Amyris’ new biodiesel product that is more like petroleum-based diesel (I like this one, too!)

If you have some other examples, please post in comments.