DuPont Tate & Lyle BioProducts (DPTL) is a joint venture between DuPont and Tate & Lyle which provides natural and renewably sourced industrial materials. In collaboration with Climalife, DPTL has developed and launched a new line of heat transfer fluids (HTF) under the brand name Greenway. (more…)

Chemical giant DuPont has started construction of a large-scale cellulosic ethanol biorefinery in Iowa capable of converting corn stalks and leaves into a biofuel that could be used in place of fossil fuels at some power plants.

The $200 million facility, which will be among the first (more…)

As I wrote last month, global biofuels production is nearing 2 million barrels per day – an impressive number that ranks biofuels ahead of Libya among oil producing nations – but most of this consists of conventional biofuels derived from corn starch and sugarcane. While these fuels may meet ground transportation needs, they lack the performance (more…)

How Waste = Food

Imagine if we could create a super-efficient world where there was no waste… Actually, there’s no need to imagine it: nature is already ahead of us on this one.

In nature, almost all “waste” from one organism can be used as “food” or fuel by another organism—a (more…)

A series of recent policy-related developments within the biofuels industry may have set the stage for what could prove to be a significant shift in biofuel geopolitics over the next decade.

To recap: the European Court of Justice (ECJ) affirmed an earlier ruling that held the imposition of (more…)

It’s a $160 billion a year market you’ve probably never heard of.

Ethylene, the intermediary chemical compound from which popular plastics and many other high value products are derived, has traditionally been made in the petroleum industry via steam cracking, an energy- and carbon-intensive process. It’s the most produced (more…)

Solazyme is a South San Francisco company that makes oil from microalgae. Instead of providing sunlight and carbon dioxide for direct photosynthesis, Solazyme feeds the algae sugars from various biomass feedstocks in the absence of light using fermentation tanks. (more…)

Biofuels have been heavily promoted in the hydrocarbon-poor third world as both a fuel source and a valuable earner of foreign currency.

Now however, The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe is seeking to sell is 50 percent holding of Transload (Pvt) Limited, a biodiesel fuel manufacturing joint (more…)

What if the ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide that are heating up the atmosphere could be used to produce an abundant supply of liquid fuels? The U.S. government and private labs are pursuing that Holy Grail of renewable energy — but for now the cost of large-scale production is prohibitive. (more…)

Biofuels have been dismissed by environmentalists as an unsustainable alternative to fossil fuels. But some hope that second-generation biofuels could offer a better solution to the dirty oil crisis.

Second generation biofuel, or cellulosic biofuel, is made of non-food feedstocks such as straw and (more…)