Biocatalysis

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?

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.

According to Jack Huttner, VP, Public Affairs, DuPont Danisco, “From our point of view the [cellulosic ethanol] technology is ready for commercialization. It is no longer five years from the market.” 

Now if they could just apply this technology to produce butanol or another better biofuel …

The LA Times reports today that Sacramento, CA-based Pacific Ethanol filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday. Pacific Ethanol has 4 plants with a combined capacity of 200 million gallons per year. The company says it will try to continue operations while reorganizing, but capacity shut-downs are near certain since its production is uneconomical.

Mascoma announced a bioprocessing breakthrough of sorts. The breakthrough relates to what the company is calling consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) – a transformational technology which the DOE/USDA 2006 Roadmap called “the ultimate low-cost configuration for cellulose hydrolysis and fermentation.” CBP  eliminates the need for adding enzymes to process pretreated lignocellulose into ethanol by integrating their production into the processing step. Estimates provided by Mascoma suggest a 60-% reduction in cost using CBP. You can bet that enzyme developers and producers such as Codexis, Danisco, and Novozymes are not cheering this breakthrough.