The 10 Top Biofuels Stories of the Year

BP, KiOR, Terrabon, DuPont, Beta Renewables, Sapphire Energy, Gevo and more — project starts, stops, births, deaths, predictions, and policy — the readers judge the most important stories of the year.

In years to come, historians will look back and identify with the lusty “aha!” the true trends that emerged from 2012-13 — all of us in the here and now, we lack the illuminating power of hindsight, and instead have to use the dim bulb of our sensibilities and judgment to decide what the really, really big stories are.

If there’s no perfect way to measure in the present what will matter to the future, there’s Winston Churchill’s formula, all the same. “There’s one person smarter than anyone,” he said, “and that’s Everyone.”

So, here as a first draft for history are the ten stories you thought were the most important of the year, as measured in the clicks as you surfed through 12 months and 4400 stories in the Digest.

From 2012-13, here are the Top 10 most viewed stories in Biofuels Digest.

The printer-friendly version of the story is here.

10. Gevo restarts isobutanol production at Luverne: what’s happening now, what happened?

Editor’s Note: If there’s any story better than a rise, or a fall, it’s a comeback, and Gevo’s been making one with the restart of isobutanol production at Luverne. There’s probably been on overage of hand-wringing over Gevo’s decision to stop production in the face of high corn prices and lower-than-optimal yields back in 2012. But if readers were overly worried, they were certainly eager to read the news when production restarted this spring.

In Colorado, Gevo announced that it has resumed commercial production of isobutanol at its Luverne, Minn. plant in single train mode, successfully utilizing its proprietary Gevo Integrated Fermentation Technology (GIFT).

“I am pleased to report that we have been successful in operating our full scale fermentation and our GIFT separation system that separates the isobutanol from the fermentation broth. This serves to further validate our technology as we had not previously run the GIFT system at full scale. I can now say that it runs beautifully,” noted Gevo CEO Patrick Gruber.

“We plan to be producing isobutanol and operating throughout the rest of this year, bringing all of our fermenters and GIFT systems online in the third and fourth quarters, testing run rates, then ramping up production and sales in 2013 and 2014” Gruber added.

“We will sell the isobutanol we produce, using it for market development in the specialty chemicals market, in specialty oxygenated fuel blendstocks markets, and as a building block to make fuel products such as jet fuel and chemical products such as paraxylene for polyester used in the production of bottles and fibers.” Isobutanol applications for the specialty chemicals and chemical intermediates sectors include work in paraxylene with Toray and Coca-Cola.