The 25 Hottest Topics in the advanced bioeconomy

July 30, 2014 |

Hot-25-topics1. The Hot 50 and Hot 30

A perennial favorite. This year, Solazyme topped the list while LanzaTech slipped into second place. More here.

The Top 100 People

Another perennial. This year, international project developers made a big move while some policy figures slipped. But US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack continues to rule the roost. More here.

3. Obligations.

Our annual Biofuels Mandates around the World update appears each January and racks up the page views. More here.

4. If its hot, it must be algae.

At no time in the field of human endeavor have so many read so much about something so little. Our 10 hottest trends in algae feature generated more attention than anything we wrote on feedstocks all year. More here.

5. Cellulosics, in pictures

Seeing is believing, and we had two picture essays – on Brazil’s GranBio and Beta Renewables in Crescentino, Italy that were the top reads among cellulosic biofuels technologies for the year. More here.

6. Drop in, turn on

Cool Planet has been intriguing readers just about since the moment it was founded, and this year it led all stories about drop-in biofuels with the announce of a commercial scale project in Louisiana.  More here.

7. Send in the Marines, er, the Navy

When it comes to bold visions carried forward under adverse circumstances – well you can think about “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead” or the navy’s biofuels program. They’re determined to reduce their petroleum dependency for cost and security reasons, and in this story, showed why they’re in the “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” league.  More here.

8. Challenges.

Who said that readers only like to hear the good news? One of our most popular roundups this year was 10 Scariest challenges, and some of them are scary indeed. More here.

9. Concerns

In early stage technology there’s fail and there’s epic fail, and No company got so close to commercial scale and generated so much public visibility and excitement as the Columbus project, which got financed, got built, got running and then….pffffft. More here.

10. Geographies.

We’ve often observed that, in the advanced bioeconomy, if you don’t know the real answer and you have to say something, say Brazil. Why is your technology important? Brazil. What is your financing strategy? Brazil. What are your thoughts about affordable feedstock? Brazil. Our Brazilian round-up on the Big Six didn’t change our thinking when this one got a huge readership last September. More here.

11. Chemicals, chemicals, chemicals.

If you cant think of what to say and you cant say Brazil, try renewablechemicals. Say it fast three times, and you’ll feel better about everything. What is the secret of life? Renewablechemicals, chemicals, chemicals.

And if you were a doubter, doubt no more. This roundup on the activity in BDO, butanol and butadiene proved a massive hit with readers. More here.

12. Obama Messes with the RFS

Industry execs have been saying for some time Dont mess with the RFS. Usually they aim this remark at Congresss. The, surprisingly, the Obama Administration popped up with a devastating attack on the RFS structure and rvo volumes This summary of the action to date attracted a lot of attention, and some head scratching. More here.

13. Advanced biofuels for under $100 a barrel.

There is a lot of coverage of high oil prices, but almost universally the coverage of advanced biofuels focuses on price, never in a good way. Here we profiled some bargains out there in biofuelsland, and readers must have been as surprised as the general public, because it picked up a sizeable read. More here.

14. Completions.

In the past year, nothing bigger got finished than the massive 133 million gallon Diamond Green Diesel project in Louisiana. Here we profiled the good news on new capacity in renewable diesel. More here.

15. Waste makes haste.

In sports, garbage time refers to the end game when the result is not in doubt. In Digestville, it means page views about a hot topic with first commercials just now getting installed. Here, we profiled the biggies. More here.

16. Exhortations.

In looking at the landscape for 2014, we saw not only that fermentation-based technologies would be arriving at scale — but that a new generation of thermocatalytic technologies is fast arriving and has a range of opportunities worth exploring. So, feel the pressure, we advised, turn up the heat and get cracking! More here.

17. Feedstocks

In looking at the huge range of feedstocks, in this popular read we looked at the “hot energy crops” that are coming to market now from Brazil to the US. More here.

18. Ships in the Night.

In “As KiOR stumbles, Aemetis soars” we looked at some of the underlying reasons that KiOR has been underperforming — but more importantly, we attempted to focus attention on the corresponding overachievers among the Biofuels Digest Index stocks. In this case, Aemetis, and its extraordinary blend of ethanol and biodiesel assets based around bringing superior technologies forward to unlock advantaged feedstocks. More here.

19. E85.

What’s the deal with E85 we have been asking all year — given ithe resurgence in demand in the wake of high RIN prices, low ethanol prices and the general turbulence over the ethanol blend wall. It proved a key read for many. More here.

20. Transformative costs

We’re all on the lookout for advanced fuels that have strong carbon attributes, hot technology and deliver a comparable-or-better cost to conventionals. In this case, we looked at the case of Algenol, which has been making huge strides in productivity with its algae-based ethanol technology. More here.

21. Cap Raises.

There’s been a lot of coverage of slo.wing investment in cleantech as a whole, and biofuels in particular. Don’t believe it — that generally reflects that it’s easier to track VC investment — only one flavor. In this round-up, we looked at $364M raised by biobased ventures in Q3 of last year. More here.

22. Hot Molecules.

In 2004, the DOE released a hugely influential survey of the opportunities in biobased chemicals — in many ways, touching off this wave of investment in renewable chemicals that continues to this day. In this popular read, we looked at the 12 molecules that DOE focused in on to see which ones are getting traction, which ones are yet to be addressed. More here.

23. Visibility.

In this survey, we looked at 50 Most Visible Companies in the sector, and as rankings generally do, people were watching the numbers closely. More here.

24. M&A activity

There’s been quite a bit of consolidation this year — a trend that we expected to get strongly underway in 2013 but only truly reached a frothy peak in 2014. Perhaps the most intriguing deals was the $61M acquisition of LS9 by REG that was announced in January, and that we profiled here. More here.

25. Digest data

Perennial hot reads include the Digest’s SuperData Free Access — a collection of 150 reports and studies on the industry, including a database of every known and existing project. Plus, we have the 5-Minute Guides, which were introduced in 2013 and greatly expanded in 2014. Plus, a compelling read for many was the Digest Job Board. More here.

Category: Top Stories

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