by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... Syngip talked here about the possibility of producing liquid hydrocarbons from waste feedstocks at costs as low as €100 per ton. ... What’s this deal all about? In two words, cheaper carbon.
The Global Bioenergies story is about converting renewable resources to hydrocarbons. The technical route is a specialized form of fermentation, where the product produced by the organism (after munching a sugar) is rapidly vaporized — in a gas state, the product is non-toxic to the organism and easier to separate and harvest. For other technologies, separation has been a challenge and titers have been low because of toxicity issues – adding costs and risks to already-new technology. Though companies such as Gevo report that their GIFT separation technology works just fine.
So, that’s the primary technological innovation. The starting point was using conventional sugars to make isobutene, which has a $30B market. From there, Global Bioenergies like just about everyone else has been seeking product and feedstock diversification. Thereby avoiding the costs and price volatility of mainstream sugars, avoiding some of the food-vs-fuel debate which is still puzzlingly popular in the EU. On the product side, diversification taps an ever larger set of markets for offtake, and allows for price optimization along the way.
In its own labs, Global Bioenergies had been making progress on diversification, demonstrating that it could shift from glucose to sucrose (thereby opening up the possibility of using sugarbeets or sugarcane).
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Syngip is a 3rd generation industrial biotech start-up created in 2014 in the Netherlands. It has developed a process to convert gaseous carbon sources such as CO2, CO, and industrial emissions such as syngas, into various valuable chemical compounds. To this end, the company has identified a specific micro-organism capable of growing using these gaseous carbon sources as its sole feedstock, and has developed genetic tools to allow the implementation of artificial metabolic pathways into it. Its recent work has been directed to the implementation of metabolic pathways leading to light olefins, major petrochemical molecules, which include isobutene.
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However, on the risk scale, the Syngip technology is very early — like an 8-year old gymnast of unusual promise who has been enrolled in a high-profile development, but we have to wait and see how the physical development comes along, how the gymnast train and prepares for a world-class level, and whether injuries along the way will derail the great hopes. READ MORE
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