Amyris vs HCL Clean Tech: Who's the Best?

August 14, 2011 |

Background: This is a first round, International Regional match-up between #1 seed Amyris and #16 seed HCL Clean Tech in the 2011 Transformative Technologies tourney, from Biofuels Digest.

Voting: Open to all Biofuels Digest subscribers. Voting links are in the Biofuels Digest daily newsletter. To subscribe (free), visit here.

The winner gets: Most votes advances to the second-round (round of 32), and a shot at the Biofuels Sweet Sixteen.

The loser: Goes home.

Laurels: Amyris is the #1 ranked company in the 2010-11 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy poll. HCL Clean Tech is currently unranked.

The match-up: A celebrated US technology that is primarily being commercialized out of the country, vs a celebrated Israeli technology being primarily commercialized in the US.

Amyris has developed genetic engineering technologies that enable modification of the way microbes process (i.e., metabolize) sugar. By controlling these metabolic pathways, Amyris is able to design microbes, primarily yeast, to be tiny living factories that convert plant-sourced sugars from crops such as sugarcane or sweet sorghum into target molecules. Using its industrial synthetic biology platform, Amyris develops yeast strains designed to produce a broad range of molecules. The first molecule that Amyris is focusing on is Biofene™, Amyris-brand farnesene, a hydrocarbon building block that can replace petrochemicals in a wide variety of products in the cosmetics, flavors and fragrances, consumer product, polymers, lubricants and fuel markets.

HCL has developed a biomass treatment process made of proprietary extraction and separation technologies combined with concentrated hydrochloric acid hydrolysis, which deliver near to maximum yields in high grade cellulosic sugars, lignin and tall oils. Feedstocks: Concentrated hydrochloric acid will hydrolyze any biomass. So far the company has proven it can efficiently extract sugars, lignin and tall oils from softwood, hardwood, bagasse, and corn stover.

Deep dive data on Amyris and HCL Clean Tech

Amyris’ complete Hot 50 / Transformative Technologies profile is here.

HCL Clean Tech’s complete Hot 50 / Transformative Technologies profile is here.

Category: Fuels

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