Solazyme vs OriginOil: Who's the Best?

Background: This is an Elite Eight (quarter-final), Western Regional match-up between #1 seed Solazyme and #11 seed OriginOil, 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 Final Four (semi-finals), and a shot at the Championship.

The loser: Goes home.

Laurels: Solazyme is the 2nd ranked company in the 2010-11 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy poll. OriginOil is currently #33.

The match-up: It’s a tussle between the last two algal-based technologies in the tournament, and one of the first match-ups between two publicly-traded companies.

Solazyme defeated OakBio in the first round, 79-21, easily handled Genomatica in round two, 62-38, and defeated Cobalt Technologies 55-45 in the Sweet Sixteen. The Cinderella of the tournament, OriginOil, upset #6 seed Genencor, winning 56-44 in round one, then defeated #3 seed Sapphire Energy 56-44 in round two, and bested Codexis 55-45 in the Sweet Sixteen.

Solazyme is coming off a series of partnership announcements with Roquette and others, and a celebrated IPO. It’s path of growing algae in the dark and producing renewable oils has seen the company sell out its capacity through 2015 as it scrambles to raise $$ to meet the demand. Solazyme took 79 percent of the vote in its first-round match-up against OakBio.

OriginOil, an algae-to-fuels technology developer that has recently acquired a hot new customer in MBD Energy, in Australia, for its algal growth and extraction systems.

Deep Dive Data on OriginOil

OriginOil’s complete Hot 50 / Transformative Technologies profile is here.