Hot 50 voting closes…Solazyme leads in subscriber poll, LS9 in invited selector poll

In Digestville, Solazyme retained its lead in subscriber voting at the end of voting for the 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy. LS9, Solazyme and Amyris are tightly bunched at the top of the international selector table.

Now, attention turns to recounts, write-ins and combining the results from the invited international selectors and reader voting.

“Well, the ballots are in, and now we count all the write ins, recount the ballots, and mash the subscriber and invited international selector polls together” said Biofuels Digest editor and publisher Jim Lane. “We’ve had a surge from Gevo, Cobalt, POET and Ceres in the past day. In all, we had more than 50,000 votes come in for around 300 different companies.

“One of the most fascinating aspects is that no single company made every Top 50 list from the invited international selectors. What a mix of opinion – 10 percent of invited selectors named POET their #1 company, but 15 percent didn’t even name POET in their Top 50.”

Solazyme, Amyris, DDCE, Gevo, POET, Novozymes, Genencor, LS9, Sapphire Energy, and BP Biofuels formed the top 10 as subscriber balloting closed.  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 round out the top 25.

Among the invited international selectors, LS9 has increased its lead, and Amyris has slipped into second place. POET, Virent, Gevo, Codexis, Coskata, UOP and Ceres make up the balance of the top 10. DDCE, Mascoma, Novozymes, Enerkem, Sapphire Energy, Petrobras, Qteros, Cobalt, Joule and Rentech make up the second ten, while BlueFire, Abengoa, Shell, BP Biofuels and ZeaChem round out the top 25 in the balloting.

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.