This article highlights several companies developing bio-fuels.
The first one is Mascoma – a few weeks ago I reported that they had signed an agreement with General Motors to help develop bio-fuels. Mascoma are based in Boston, founded in 2005 and have raised 10s of millions dollars to help fund their R&D.
The usual method of ethanol production uses corn or other edible feedstocks, which is having a significant effect on the supply of corn for human or animal consumption. Mascoma is developing the next generation ethanol from cellulosic feedstocks.
What this means is that their R&D team is focused on developing bio-fuels from non-food biomass such as wood, straw, fuel energy crops, paper pulp and other agricultural waste products. They will use enzymes to break down the source product into sugars that can then be processed into ethanol. This will minimise the environmental impact of ethanol production.
Amyris Biotechnologies, based in California, share venture capitalist partners with Mascoma and have several ex BP executives on their board or management team.
Like Mascoma, Amyris are developing microbes to create bio-fuels in fact their first project is to use microbes to turn yeast into an anti-malaria drug! For vehicles, Amyris are developing a fuel that has more potency than ethanol but is compatible with petrol engines and a diesel substitute that can be transported and stored more efficiently than vegetable oil based bio-diesels.
GreenFuel Technologies is another Massachusetts company that is finding ways to turn waste into bio-fuels. Founded in 2001 to use algae as a conduit between CO2 waste and a usable fuel.
Algae are the fastest growing plants in the world and GreenFuel uses them to extract CO2 from industrial smoke stacks and then they convert the algal oil produced by the plants into bio-diesel.
There are many other companies across the world such as Acciona of Spain that are working to develop systems to make bio-fuels. I believe that this is the future of motoring, already carbon based diesel engines are winning major motor sports events and have reduced their pollution quite significantly – just look at all the news releases from the bus manufacturers. Bio-Diesel takes this further by taking waste products and re-using them, thus reducing the need for landfill or incinerators. We’re even seeing aircraft flying with bio-fuels today.
Don’t get too excited at the thought of cheap fuels – remember that your Government will want a slice of the pie and will find ways of taxing fuels that become popular. However, if you have some spare pennies, then these companies should be the type you invest in!