Reborn Qteros Rises Again with New Plan to Develop Technology to Make Ethanol

by Jim Kinney (The Republican/MassLive) Qteros and the “Q microbe” discovered byUMass researchers and valued for its ability to digest plant waste into ethanol fuel is making a comeback.
...But the money dried up early in 2012. In September, creditors auctioned Qteros' pilot production facility in Chicopee. The equipment was broken up and removed.
“It broke my heart because I built that plant,” said Stephan Rogers of Amherst, an official with old Qteros and the CEO of the new company that has purchased the technology and name from the creditors of the old company. “I believe this technology is sound and they simply had a financing problem,” he said.
...But the new Qteros will have a less capital-intensive business model focused on developing both the strains of Q microbe and the equipment needed to produce them and have them make ethanol. The new Qteros will then license that technology to customers instead of building its own plants.
Potential customers include sugarcane ethanol operations both in the South and overseas, and paper mills where the microbes could feed on wood pulp without impacting papermaking, Rogers said. READ MORE