Amyris Biotechnologies on Wednesday announced the opening of a pilot facility in Emeryville, Calif., that turns sugar cane into diesel fuel through genetically designed microbes.
The company is at the forefront of a commercial movement to use biotechnology to convert plants into fuels that resemble petroleum-based hydrocarbons.
Amyris' technique is to genetically engineer a yeast that can metabolize sugar into the desired molecules. Its first effort was to develop a malaria vaccine, which it continues to do, and it has since developed a focus on renewable fuels.
(Credit:
Amyris Fuels)
"We're engineering the yeast, reprogramming it from making alcohols to making hydrocarbons," CEO John Melo said. "We started with E. coli (bacteria), which is what many other companies are doing, but we moved to yeast because we discovered that it was more scalable."
The company has also modified yeasts to produce chemicals; a sugar-derived jet fuel is planned for in about three years as well.
Through a partnership, Amyris plans are to produce biodiesel from sugar cane at commercial scale in Brazil by the middle of 2010. Brazil is one of the world's largest producers of ethanol, using sugar cane as a feedstock.
Amyris' biodiesel can be blended at up to 50 percent concentration with petroleum diesel, higher than most biodiesel today, which means that it can be pumped through existing pipelines. Environmentally, Amyris' "renewable diesel" has lower carbon emissions than petrodiesel and burns cleaner, Melo said.
Amyris has set up a distribution subsidiary and intends to sell its biodiesel to fleet operators, such as Wal-Mart Stores and FedEx.
Melo said the economic slowdown has forced the company to shelve its plans to go public next year.
It does expect to raise some form of capital in the next two years, either through venture funding or strategic partners, he said. The company expects revenue to increase rapidly next year, to more than $100 million, he added.
Amyris, a rapidly growing biotech company that coaxes genetically enhanced microbes to produce fuel and medicine, has signed a deal with two Brazilian companies to come out with a sugar-cane-based diesel and other fuels by 2010.
Right now, Brazilian sugar cane growers convert a substantial amount of their crop into ethanol. Ethanol, however, isn't as flexible a fuel as biodiesel. For one thing, only certain types of cars can run on ethanol-heavy fuels like E85. Biodiesel works pretty much in any diesel engine. Ethanol is an alcohol. Biodiesel and other fuels produced via Amyris' process are hydrocarbons. The hydrocarbons get produced by designer microbes turning food into fuel rather than geological forces, but they are hydrocarbons nonetheless. The well-to-wheel (or crop-to-exhaust pipe) output of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, however, is lower with biofuels.
A gallon of ethanol also only gets about two-thirds of the mileage of gas. Biodiesel gets, roughly, 11 percent lower mileage than regular diesel. Still, that means that the energy density of biodiesel is better.
Amyris, Crystalsev (a fuel distributor), and Santelisa Vale (an ethanol refiner) will also produce a jet fuel and a synthetic gasoline. This will be Amyris' launch into commercially producing fuel. The company currently makes a medicine for malaria.
The three companies will open research and development headquarters in Campinas in June, and a pilot facility is expected to be operational in 2009.
Demand for diesel is growing at approximately 4 percent annually and is estimated to exceed 600 billion gallons by 2020, according to Amyris. The Brazilian diesel market is expected to grow from approximately 45 billion liters in 2007 to more than 80 billion liters in 2020.
Amyris came out of research at UC Berkeley and is funded by several venture firms (The Gates Foundation has also given the company grants.) The company also has ties to BP. Amyris CEO John Melo, in fact, is an alum of BP.
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