Proterro’s low-cost nectar aims to fill biofuels’ Holy Grail

Biofuels Digest
November 22, 2010 Jim Lane

At Advanced Biofuels Markets, the Cellulosic Biofuels Summit and most of the other conferences this year, the talk has been all about cheap sugar – the simple sugars that form the feedstock that is fermented into biofuels and renewable chemicals.

There are a proliferating number of technologies for accessing sugars, or fermenting them. There are traditional yeasts used in first-generation fermentation of starches and sugars into ethanol, or exotic enzymes that work on cellulosic biomass, or modified e.coli, cyanobacteria, yeast or even algal strains that produce drop-in fuels.

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