Solazyme regains lead, Gevo drops to 4th in Hot 50; LS9 leads selector ballot

Solazyme regained its lead in subscriber voting as the 33-hour mark approached until the end of voting for the 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy. But with early international selector ballots now coming, in, LS9, Solazyme and Amyris are tightly bunched at the top of the international selector table.

Solazyme, Amyris, DDCE, Gevo, POET, Novozymes, Genencor, LS9, Sapphire Energy, and BP Biofuels formed the top 10 with two days to go in subscriber balloting. Cargill, OriginOil, Shell, Petrobras, Codexis, Coskata, Abengoa Bioenergy, Algenol, PetroAlgae, and Cobalt Technologies formed the second 10 for subscribers. Among those just outside the top 20: Mascoma, Verenium, Chevron, Ceres and ExxonMobil.

“Invited selector ballots are just coming in now, and its too early to say where it will all shake out,” said Biofuels Digest editor and publisher Jim Lane. “But companies like LS9, Virent, Coskata and Ceres are polling much stronger on that side of the ballot. It’ll be an exciting finish. Meanwhile we cleaned out a number of non-conforming ballots, primarily from those who voted anonymously and could not be identified as subscribers,” Lane explained. “This is to ensure that there is one vote, one person.”

Among the international selectors, LS9 has a slight lead over Solazyme, with Amyris in third. Virent, Coskata, POET, Gevo, DDCE, Codexis and Mascoma make up the balance of the top 10. Novozymes, UOP, Ceres, Enerkem, Rentech, Joule, Bluefire Rnewables, Qteros, Petrobras and Sapphire Energy make up the second ten, while Abengoa, Shell, Cobalt, ZeaChem and BP Biofuels round out the top 25 in early balloting.

Balloting will be open to the registered subscribers of the Biofuels Digest, Geothermal Digest and Renewable Chemicals Digest e-newsletters, through Tuesday November 30th at 5pm EST, as well as a panel of invited international selectors.

Ballots from the invited international selectors and subscribers will each make up 50 percent of the overall scoring. The invited selectors ballots generally feature a broader range of companies in terms of geographies and processing technologies.

All selectors and subscribers are able to take advantage of what has been described as the “most comprehensive, free data resource in bioenergy,” the 380-page “Selectors Data Book” which includes company profiles, surveys and industry data. This is the third year that the Digest has published its annual 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy rankings.