ethanol

Poet, seeking patronage

November 24, 2009

Jeff Broin knows his way around a corn field. The 44-year-old CEO of Poet, which is the largest ethanol producer in the world, grew up in Minnesota on a family farm. He lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Poet’s 26 ethanol plants are scattered across the midwest.

Jeff Broin

Jeff Broin

Broin also knows his way around Washington,  which he visits about once a month. Smart move. Without an array of subsidies and mandates from a farmer-friendly Congress, no one would invest in corn ethanol.

Which doesn’t mean that Broin is satisfied with the status quo–to the contrary, he’d like more help from the powers-that-be in your nation’s capital, which is where we met last week. We talked about the subsidies, about the challenge of competing with Big Oil and about Poet’s big plans to make cellulosic ethanol from corn cobs.

“While the corn cob is a very small item, it can have a very big impact,” Broin says. “We have the potential to replace gasoline in this country with ethanol.” [click to continue…]

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Qteros: Turning mud to big money

July 1, 2009

Can we find a clean, planet-friendly fuel to power our cars? Electric cars will take a decade, at least, to have a majorimpact on climate change, while corn ethanol has a slew of well-documented problems. Investors and the government are increasingly focused on so-called next-generation biofuels, which turn sustainable feedstocks (not food-stocks) into transportation fuels.

Dozens and perhaps hundreds of companies are frantically searching for the perfect biofuel. One is Qteros, a Massachusetts-based startup, spun off from Umass-Amherst, that has discovered and refined a microbe called the Q Microbe that turns biomass—switchgrass, wood chips, grass, corn stover or even municipal liquid waste—into ethanol. Qteros’s CEO is Dr. William Frey, former global director of biofuels at Dupont, who recently told a reporter that the company is “basically trying to become the Microsoft of energy.

Since Qteros was formed in 2006, the company has raised about $30 million from venture capital firms, big companies, individuals and, yes, taxpayers like you. The investors include Battery Ventures, BP, Camros Capital, Long River Ventures, the Quantum Group of Funds (advised by George Soros), Valero and Venrock. The U.S. government has given Qteros a $2 million grant towards construction of a pilot plant, and the company wants more, specifically, another $18 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. The DOE says it will provide nearly $800 million from the stimulus package for biofuels research and development, inviting companies to submit proposals to compete for the money.

I met with Qteros executive vice president Jef Sharp and business-development chief Jon Gorhan last week in Washington. They told me that company traces its beginnings to 1996 when Tom Warnick, a lab assistant to a University of Massachusetts microbiologist named Susan Leschine, took a walk near a reservoir in western Massachusetts (below), brought a batch of mud back to her lab and isolated a microscopic organism that has since been recognized as a “novel life form.” It’s a nice origin story: Informational technology companies (HP, Apple) often start in a garage, so why can’t a clean tech company get its start in the mud?

mn_ab_history
[click to continue…]

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