Manufacturing microbes

With the heat on the biofuel industry as a whole, Amherst, Mass.-based SunEthanol says it has a game-changing cellulosic technology with some impressive results.

“We’ve already seen a ten-fold improvement in [our processes' efficiency] since the beginning of this year,” says founding chief executive officer—now, as of today, serving as chief marketing officer—Jef Sharp.

Rather than using corn or other food-based materials as feedstock, Sharp says his company is looking closely at woody biomass and fast-growing grasses as feedstocks, even though the company's website is vague about its formal feedstock selection.

Safely staying outside of the food versus fuel debate, SunEthanol hangs its lab coat on the technology it uses to turn plant material into ethanol.

Based on a microbe discovered by its chief scientist and founder, University of Massachusetts professor Dr. Susan Leschine, the company says its patented Q Microbe technology is naturally able to convert different forms of plant material directly into ethanol.

“It’s like if you had yeast that broke down into cellulose and sugars,” says Sharp. “It’s expensive to use the enzyme cocktails to break down the cellulose. Our fermentation process is working on par with yeast.”

According to Sharp, the SunEthanol process of turning the feedstocks into ethanol takes about four days.

While SunEthanol has plenty of microbe-producing competitors, such as Iogen, DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol (see Another cellulosic powerhouse formed), BlueFire Ethanol, Broin Companies, and ALICO, Sharp insists that since his company’s microbe is naturally occurring and has yet to be genetically engineered, it is already producing close to commercial levels.

“There are a number of companies out there that produce small amounts of ethanol. There are also a number of companies that are trying to genetically engineer them to produce more,” continues Sharp.

“Since ours is naturally occurring, it’s more stable, has a wider appetite for feedstocks and grows fast in the tank to breakdown the feedstock and ferment it into ethanol.”

Sharp says the company is already running internal pilot tests in its labs and plans to scale up to an outside pilot in 2009, with commercial production beginning towards the end of 2010.

In addition to its upcoming series B funding, Sharp also confirmed the company has applied for approximately $3.5 million in grants.

Earlier this year SunEthanol was one of four biorefinery projects funded by a U.S. Department of Energy $114 million grant that aims to fund small-scale projects with the goal of making ethanol cost competitive to oil in five years.

With this particular grant, the cellulosic ethanol company is under contract with the DOE to refine its Q Microbe technology in an effort to diversify U.S. feedstocks.

Sharp says his company plans to license its technology to ethanol producers. “We’re getting calls from all over the world for our technology because we don’t rely on geographically constrained feedstocks.”

While the Amherst-based company was not divulging any names of strategic partners, South Dakota-based VeraSun Energy (NYSE: VSE), one of the largest U.S. ethanol producers, made a minority stake in the company last August (see VeraSun takes stake in SunEthanol) and currently has more than one billion gallons per year of production capacity through 11 operating ethanol production sites.

According to the energy company, it has an additional six facilities either under construction or development with a combined capacity of 660 million gallons per year.

In regards to future technologies, SunEthanol’s Sharp says his company is still working on the maiden strain of the microbe and that while they haven’t done any genetic engineering to date, “we are looking very carefully at the genome and sequence so that when it comes time to add layers of improvements, we can do so in a targeted way.”

In a move to further establish itself as a top CE company, today SunEthanol said Dr. William Frey is to join the company as chief executive officer on June 23, taking over for founding CEO Sharp.

The company currently employs 20 people at its Amherst facilities and expects to add 30 more in the next year.