Biocatalysis

In a press release yesterday Massachusetts-based Qteros, developer of the Q-microbe “”superbug” (actually Clostridium phytoferrans, but “Q” is much easier to pronounce and type).

The processes uses a material the company calls Recyllose-sewage sludge solids that are high is cellulose. Turning sewage sludge into ethanol offers a big opportunity for Qteros, which is partnering with Israel-based Applied CleanTech to develop the technology. Recyllose is a particularly good type of cellulosic feedstock as it contains very low amounts of lignin, the plant cell wall component that is difficult to degrade. Qteros-ACT scientists claim 120-135 gallons of ethanol per ton of Recyllose, and titers of 9% ethanol currently.

Quoting from the press release: “Our customer is every municipality that has a wastewater treatment plant,” said Jeff Hausthor, Qteros co-founder and senior project manager. “It will provide a value-added product for municipal wastewater plants, thereby making treatment plants much less expensive to run and helping local governments throughout the world with their constrained budgets.”

Israel Biran, ACT’s CEO, added, “It also helps answer the question of what municipalities can do with their sewage sludge, a major challenge now facing every wastewater treatment plant operator.”

There has been a PR blitz over the past 24 hours, and it appears to be well-merited.

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.

What would you call a company that uses a microorganism to produce fuel? Well, according to Bill Sims, CEO of Joule Biotechnologies, not a biofuels company.

Sims was only announced as CEO of Joule yesterday, but he is wasting no time in trying to shine a public light on the company, although his comments are not always very illuminating. Joule has developed what it calls a HelioCulture system that concentrates sunlight and relies on a “highly engineered synthetic organism” that is unidentified but is “not algae” to convert CO₂ and nutrients to produce fuels and chemicals. But since no biomass is used, Sims is trying to avoid the “biofuels” moniker and what he considers to be the negative PR that comes with it.

The basic concept is termed “revolutionary” by Sims, and appears to be similar to that of Craig Venter’s company Synthetic Genomics, which recently announced a large commercialization agreement with Exxon Mobil.

According to Sims, Joule hasn’t worked out its business model yet, preferring to wait for the market to determine whether it is better to produce and sell fuels or license the technology to fuels producers, but that didn’t stop Flagship Ventures from making an initial investment that is termed “substantially less than $50 million.”

It all sounds great, but I see one drawback right away. Ethanol is planned to be the first product, and ethanol is a lousy fuel. And, I am sorry about this Bill, but I am tagging this post under biofuels and biofuels companies. I really wouldn’t know how else to categorize it.

Exxon Mobil, which has avoided the biofuels frenzy so far, has finally made its entrance, and it is a grand one.  The oil giant has announced a $300 million investment to develop algae as a producer of hydrocarbons, which could then be processed in existing refineries. Exxon Mobil’s partner is notable as well–Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics. If all goes well, Venter’s company will engineer carbon dioxide-utilizing algae to produce and–the key step–then secrete the hydrocarbons to eliminate the need for isolating and breaking the cells. It is an ambitious goal, and if successful, a commercial home run.

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.

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?