Today marks the beginning of biofuels’ three-day “Big Dance” – properly known as World Biofuels Markets - and 1400 delegates are gathering in Amsterdam to talk about big breakthroughs, big bucks and big scale. But the key to thinking big in biofuels, 2010 style, is thinking very, very small.Though the stakes could not be bigger, the pop stars that will be gliding across biofuels’ Red Carpet this week are so incredibly tiny it can take an electron microcrope to see them, as the latest designer e.coli, yeast and enzyme strains take a turn down the runway.
The microbes divide into three main camps – those that are used to capture sugars and oils for extraction and fuel conversion (a.g. microalgae, lemon); catalysts such as the enzymes produced by Genencor and Novozymes, and microbes that consume a feedstock and secrete a fuel (not completely unlike the cow, who consumes hay and emits methane, but in a far more elemental and fungible way than simple rumination). LS9, Amyris, Qteros and Joule Biotechnologie are among those who have such a “magic bug,” – by far, Joule’s is the most mysterious to date – but it is the only one who can make a fuel from carbon oxide and water, rather than a simple sugar.
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