World’s First Renewable Fuel

June 11th, 2008

A company called Sapphire Energy is working on a “renewable algae-based gasoline” called “green crude.”

Algae is touted as the feedstock with perhaps the most promise for growing fuels; a number of companies are developing algae farming technologies.

Sapphire said that it developed an algae process to avoid the controversy over using land for fuel crops instead of food crops.

But at this point, algae fuels are largely experimental and no company is making fuel on a commercial scale.

GreenFuel Technologies, which had to scale back a pilot site, said that it has landed a large European customer to make fuel from algae but has not shared any more information.

Sapphire is not the only company creating technology to make hydrocarbons from plants. Others include LS9, Amyris Biotechnologies, Codexis, and J. Craig Venter-founded Synthetic Genomics.

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