Protein and Perfume: At ABLC, Even Less of a Focus on Fuels

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February 22, 2016

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by Pavel Molchanov (Raymond James/Biofuels Digest) This week, we attended the Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference, a major annual gathering of firms in the bioindustrial space. As we noted in our conference recap from March 2015, the industry’s focus had been pivoting away from transportation fuels well before the oil meltdown began in mid-2014. In this sense, the oil price landscape – which, needless to say, is even worse now than a year ago – is not as impactful as it might seem at first glance. The changed oil price environment is, however, accelerating the shift to chemicals and other high-value materials, a shift that had been visible as early as 2012. This report has our latest thoughts.

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Codexis originally had a cellulosic biofuel R&D partnership with Shell. In the years after Shell pulled the plug on that in 2012, Codexis reverted back to its legacy business of supplying biocatalysts to the pharma industry.

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Amyris began with a multi-faceted business model, encompassing both fuels and specialty products. After running into scale-up issues starting in 2012, Amyris has deemphasized fuels (though it still has a renewable diesel JV with Total and some biojet sales to airlines), while entering new verticals such as nutrition and cleaning products. Similarly, Solazyme laid out both fuel and non- fuel opportunities from day one, but its fuel initiatives as a public company have been limited to small-scale sales to the military and UPS.

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For example, over the past few years, Cool Planet has broadened its scope from renewable gasoline to biocarbon for agricultural end users; Virent also hasn’t given up on gasoline and biojet but has emphasized its bioplastics work with Coca-Cola and others; Sapphire Energy has entirely shifted from “green crude” to nutrition/aquaculture solutions; and Cellana (which in 2013 had signed a biofuel
feedstock offtake deal with Neste) has refocused on Omega-3 oils and other animal feed/food markets. READ MORE and MORE (Raymond James) and MORE (Biofuels Digest)

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