The leader of the 210-year-old science giant DuPont, Ellen Kullman, sits down with GigaOM to give us her take on the future of energy for a world population that will boom to 9 billion in 2050. Read more »
Oil giant BP has invested in biofuel startup CoolPlanet BioFuels, according to an announcement on Thursday. CoolPlanet BioFuels is the biofuel startup you have never heard of but that has unusually famous investors like GE, Google, NRG Energy and ConocoPhillips. Read more »
Poet’s so-called “Project Liberty” biofuel plant, which will use corn waste instead of edible corn, is getting some support from the U.S. government. On Thursday, the Department of Energy announced it will offer Poet a $105 million loan guarantee to build out Project Liberty in Iowa. Read more »
Despite a series of successful biofuel IPOs recently, and a number of biofuel IPOs in the pipeline, the production of next-gen biofuels, in any kind of volumes that would make a dent in the transportation sector, seems to be creeping, very slowly forward. Read more »
More bad news about cellulosic biofuel maker Range Fuels. The financially-strapped company reportedly plans to shut down its plant in Georgia after making just one batch of ethanol. It needs to more raise more money and tackle technical problems at its first commercial plant. Read more »
Cello Energy, the beleaguered infamous biofuel company that’s been hit with fraud allegations, has finally dropped off of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) list of potential cellulosic ethanol suppliers for 2011. I seriously can’t believe the company was on the list for so long. Read more »
The well-funded Range Fuels said it has begun producing cellulosic methanol from its first commercial factory and plans to begin making cellulosic ethanol sometime this quarter. Read more »
Opera Software has released a beta of Opera 10.6, which offers improved support for HTML5 (including offline apps and geolocation) and royalty-free WebM video. It also promises to be even faster, with some fine-tuning of the impressively quick JavaScript engine that was introduced in 10.5. Read more »
The EPA has awarded $2.38 million under the Small Business Innovative Research program, including four awards (under the biofuels and vehicle emissions category) for R&D firms working on tech related to biofuels. Read more »
Cellulosic ethanol startup Enerkem needs trash and money. Massive trash company Waste Management has lots of both. The two said Wednesday that they’ve gotten together, with Waste Management making a strategic investment in the Montreal-based company as part of a 53.8 million Canadian dollars ($51.5 million) […] Read more »
Selling the Smart Grid to Average Joe: Smart grid analyst Jesse Berst examines how the Electrification Roadmap released this week by a coalition of heavyweight CEOs could be an inflection point for the smart grid. “Electric transportation is something the public wants; it will take a […] Read more »
This morning’s Video Rights Roundtable was, as we hoped, a rare opportunity for online video industry players to talk about their conflicts and collaborations in the wild — not in a courtroom or conference room. In a (more than) two-hour discussion, the nearly 50 attendees shared […] Read more »
Who are you and what do you do? My name is Jennifer Woofter and I run Strategic Sustainability Consulting (SSC). We’re a boutique consulting company that works with small- and medium-size organizations that want to “go green.” I spend about one-third of my time on billable […] Read more »
At Senator Harry Reid’s Las Vegas Clean Energy Summit on Monday, the two ends of the ethanol spectrum — first generation corn ethanol and next-generation cellulosic ethanol — were in full representation, but the stark contrast between the group’s diverging goals was clear. While the corn […] Read more »
As far as speed bumps for cellulosic ethanol ventures go, this one’s a doozy: Jurors in a federal court have ordered Cello Energy, a biofuel startup run by Alabama’s former ethics chairman, Jack Boykin, and backed by both Silicon Valley cleantech investors Khosla Ventures and pulp […] Read more »
Call it ethanol-on-the-cob. Corn ethanol giant Poet announced plans today to power its cellulosic ethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa, with methane derived from corn cobs — rather than natural gas. Never before have corn cobs been used as a feedstock in this way, Poet CEO Jeff […] Read more »
Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has made yet another bet in the struggling biofuels sector. Despite already having almost one-third of his portfolio companies in the space, his VC firm has invested an undisclosed amount in HCL CleanTech, a new startup in the cellulosic biofuels industry. Tel […] Read more »
The ethanol industry just can’t catch a break. We started tracking plant closures more than a year ago, when record-high corn and soy prices and an ethanol glut had squeezed ethanol’s profit margin to a slim 25 cents per gallon, down from $2.30 a gallon in […] Read more »
In case you weren’t sure that today is officially SBOW Day, this ought to convince you. What, you don’t know what SBOW Day is? It’s Sharing Broadband Over WiFi, silly! C’mon, everybody’s doing it! Case in point: we showed you earlier today how easy it is […] Read more »
For anyone who’s ever designed a web site on a Mac, you’ll know that one of the biggest headaches is testing your design on Windows browsers. Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer have a nasty habit of displaying the same web site in very different ways, and […] Read more »
For young companies toiling over how to convert plant waste and non-food crops into ethanol — the next generation of biofuels — the effects of the downturn are starting to play a familiar beat: access to capital is so limited that companies that could have snagged […] Read more »
A dig through biofuel maker Changing World Technologies’ SEC filings earlier this week (prompted by a report from southwest Missouri’s Carthage Press) revealed the signs of a company teetering on the brink. Yesterday CWT confirmed our take on the company’s dire situation, announcing late in the […] Read more »
U.S. to Set Single MPG Standard for Cars, Trucks? Carol Browner, assistant to the president for energy and climate, says she and others in the White House back the idea of a universal fuel-efficiency standard aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. — Washington Post Growing the […] Read more »
Cellulosic ethanol maker Verenium might have an important partner in UK oil giant BP, but it still can’t help the company from the pitfalls of the difficult capital markets. This morning Verenium says that it is moving forward with a previously announced joint venture with BP, […] Read more »
Cellulosic Ethanol Ready for Prime Time (Really): Cellulosic ethanol has been “five years from commercialization” for so long that even ethanol company POET’s research director admits it has become a joke. Now he and a crew of scientists say it’s for real. — Christian Science Monitor […] Read more »
And Then There Was One: Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, shut down all but one of its assembly lines for vehicles and auto-related equipment in Japan today. The plants are scheduled to remain idle for 10 days. — CNNMoney Peugeot to Go Slow on Plug-Ins: PSA, […] Read more »
In an inauspicious building on a strip of offices in Menlo Park, Calif., I recently met with the team behind ZeaChem, a 25-person startup that’s using a common microbe found in termite guts and regular soil to breakdown trees and plants into the next-generation of ethanol. […] Read more »
Global investment in clean energy must reach $515 billion per year by 2030 — triple that of last year’s investment — in order to avoid “the catastrophic impact of climate change,” according to a report from the World Economic Forum and New Energy Finance. Released this […] Read more »
Qualcomm said today it has purchased AMD’s handheld graphics unit (acquired during AMD’s $5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies) for $65 million. The deal shows that AMD is betting big on full-performance machines, from servers to laptops — rejecting its rival Intel’s move into […] Read more »
The FedEx guy (Ralph) showed up this afternoon with a big honking box from Apple. I was expecting the Apple 24-inch LED Cinema Display so it wasn’t a surprise other than the size of the box. It was darn heavy too and I had to wrestle […] Read more »
Montreal-based Enerkem, which just last week announced it would soon start up its first commercial scale cellulosic ethanol factory, is looking to secure financing to begin building its second such plant this year, CEO Vincent Chornet told us. Enerkem is teaming up with GreenField Ethanol, Canada’s […] Read more »
If your core business is making corn ethanol, you’ve got to evolve. Companies producing ethanol made from corn are canceling plant plans and struggling to stay afloat. Poet is one of the larger corn ethanol makers, and it has been trying its hand at producing next-generation […] Read more »
Any downed poles in your neighborhood in the last winter storm? Montreal’s Enerkem may be interested. The biofuel startup, which plans to make cellulosic ethanol using wood from used electricity poles, said yesterday that its first commercial-scale plant is within a few months of starting production. The […] Read more »
Remember cellulosic ethanol startup Verenium? Last we heard the company had started the commissioning phase of its cellulosic ethanol demo plant in May 2008, and it had big plans to start construction of a 30-million-gallon-per-year commercial plant in the middle of 2009. Well, a glowing story […] Read more »
Today, Creative announced yet another addition to their venerable Sound Blaster line of products. The device had its debut not at Macworld, but at CES, which, I might remind some of those with Apple tunnel vision, is going on right now in Las Vegas. While desert […] Read more »
Cellulosic ethanol startup ZeaChem is one of the firms that has been racing to build a next-generation biofuel plant in the United States. On Wednesday, the company announced that it has raised a sizable round of funding — $34 million — to help implement that goal, […] Read more »
Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs today issued a letter that outlines why he is skipping the Macworld: He has a hormonal imbalance that caused him to drastically lose weight, and he needs to take care of it ASAP. His weight loss had led to rampant […] Read more »
We’ve brought you the victories and the disappointments of the year in cleantech, and now here’s a top 10 list that’s a little more personal: The top 10 Earth2Tech stories of 2008. The list is a combo of reader favorites — page views and number of […] Read more »
Cleantech startups were a bright spot in terms of overall venture funding in 2008. But while the sector pulled in record investment from VCs, as BusinessWeek noted recently, shares of cleantech companies fell harder than the rest of the stock market. According to the Wall Street […] Read more »
Ethanol will have at least one friend in the next administration. President-elect Barack Obama announced his pick for Secretary of Agriculture this morning: Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, who built his underdog presidential campaign largely on a platform of energy independence and, during his tenure as […] Read more »
