Solazyme’s S-1 filing on March 11, 2011 confirmed its intention to go public, officially. Speculation about an IPO for the company preceded that by many months in the cleantech industry, however.

Algae-derived marine and jet fuels made by Solazyme have been used and tested by the U.S. Navy. Prior to going public, the company also sold dietary supplements and skin care products, made from algae-based oils, via retailers including: Whole Foods, GNC, Sephora and QVC. It also struck deals to expand production and sell its fuels and oils to Chevron, Dow Chemical, Unilever, and Qantas Airlines Ltd.

Founded in 2003, and headquartered in South San Francisco, Solazyme’s venture investors include: the Roda Group, Braemar Energy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sir Richard Branson, a well-known advocate for the use of renewable fuels.

Competitors to Solazyme include biofuels makers like Gevo and Amyris, also public companies, that convert plant-based sugars — from sugarcane and other starchy crops, rather than algae — into fuel and oils that can displace petroleum-based products.

Other privately held cleantech startups in the algae biofuels space could prove significant competition. One interesting player, LiveFuels, is a next-generation fishery and biofuels maker, that uses living fish to process all forms of algae, and then presses the oil out of the fish before selling the edible fillets. LiveFuels’ business would avoid the cost of phosphorous — which is used in food farming, and is in shorter and shorter supply these days, globally — through its unique methods; but the company has not scaled up to commercial sales of biofuels and fish, yet.

Several others that have already begun to produce and sell biofuels from a variety of feedstocks — including food waste, jatropha, sugarcane and algae — have struck huge partnerships with, or drawn venture investments from traditional oil and gas companies, already.

A few examples: earlier this month, BP Alternative Energy Ventures led an investment round of $9.4 million (out of a targeted $15 million) in Verdezyne, a startup using yeast to produce biofuels and chemicals; in June 2010, Cargill and Shell led a $46.4 million investment in Madison, Wisconsin-based Virent Energy Systems, the makers of biogasoline; and Synthetic Genomics, which is genetically engineering algae for biofuels, attracted a $600 million research and development deal from Exxon in 2009.

On May 24, the U.S. federal government announced plans to “Contribute to meeting national goals of reducing oil imports by one-third by 2025 and putting one million advanced vehicles on the road by 2015,” by making all of its new, light duty vehicles — leased or purchased by agencies — ”alternative fueled vehicles” by the end of 2015. That government definition includes hybrid or electric, compressed natural gas, or biofuel vehicles — that’s good news for Solazyme, and its competitors.

Image: Solazyme founders, Jonathan Wolfson and Harrison Dillon ring the opening bell at Nasdaq, courtesy of Solazyme [hat tip: Clean Economy Network]

Primarily, Cobalt Technologies turns non-food crops into “n-butanol,” which is used to make a variety of paints and coatings, as well as renewable chemicals used to make jet fuel.

The U.S. Department of Energy defines biobutanol as: “…an alcohol that can be produced through processing of domestically grown crops, such as corn and sugar beets, and other biomass, such as fast-growing grasses and agricultural waste products.” Biobutanol generally has greater energy density than ethanol.

According to its own press statement, Cobalt will use its $20 million series D capital to build a 470,000 gallon-per-year demonstration plant in Alpena, Michigan. The company’s chief executive officer, Rick Wilson, explained further, in an interview by phone on Monday:

“Our Alpena facility will start up around April 2012. We located this facility by a factory called DPI. What they do is make decorative panels from wood. They bring in wood chips and shavings, and cook it so it sticks together. From that process, you end up with sugars, not the kind you’d necessarily want to eat. We ferment and use a non-genetically modified organism to convert that to butanol. We could use corn or sugar, but that’s $300 to $500 a ton. Wood chips are $60 to $80 a ton.”

The company will generate some revenue from the biobutanol it produces in Alpena. It will use that revenue and the remainder of its series D round to begin development of its first commercial facilities; and continue developing bio jet fuel(s) for use by the U.S. Navy, which struck a partnership deal with Cobalt in late 2010.

In January 2010, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture set up several goals, including that by 2020, the Navy’s total energy consumption for ships, aircraft, tanks, vehicles and shore installations would come from alternative sources, including biofuels.

Unlike other sector players such as Solazyme* — a company that uses algae to make biofuels and chemicals, and supplies these to the U.S. Navy as well — or SG Biofuels, which uses non-edible jatropha seeds, Cobalt’s process draws on feedstocks that are often a byproduct of food and paper makers.

*Correction: In an earlier version of this post, I mistakenly called Solazyme a public company. Solazyme filed to go public but has not yet had an initial public offering.

Encouraging the industry to upgrade to more energy-efficient fryers could help reduce the overall environmental (if not health) impact of kitchens in the U.S. catering to the collective appetite for fried foods, an appetite that seems pervasive, and permanent here. One Texan cook, Mark Zable, has even invented a method to make deep-fried beer.

According to a press statement and calculations by the EPA:

” If every large vat fryer in the [country] met the new Energy Star requirements, energy cost savings would increase approximately $81 million per year and reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the emissions from nearly 95,000 cars.”

The lifetime costs and footprint of commercial frying goes beyond the electricity and gas that it takes to run kitchen equipment, of course. Certain vegetable oils are more sustainable than others. Spent grease, and even vegetable oil, can become a pollutant unless disposed of properly.

Many food businesses are opting to give or sell their spent grease to biofuel producers, these days, thankfully.

Bon Appétit Management Company — which provides sustainable food in cafes at SF Giants stadium, eBay, Oracle, Google and college campuses including U-Penn, Duke and MIT — has been doing this for years, in collaboration with local biofuel companies like Kelley Green Biofuel for example.

This month (as Tilde Herrera reported for Greenbiz.com) U.S. Foodservice went so far as to acquire a “grease diesel” company, WVO Industries. The foodservice business will begin to power its truck fleets with their own spent cooking oil, allowing them to avoid the rising costs of gasoline here.

Ultimately, foods that are sautéed, boiled, toasted, roasted or prepared raw will prove better for the body and planet than deep-fried with rare — no pun intended — exception.

There is no official carbon footprint label for food here, but a sustainability blogger and small business owner in Germany, Peter Graf (not to be confused with Peter Graf, chief sustainability officer at SAP) has shared some rough calculations via his blog Ecofriendly-Company.com. He wrote:

“The path from potato to french fry takes 9 steps.The potatoes are…

1. Steamed and peeled,
2. Cut
3. Blanched
4. Dried
5. Par-fried
6. Cooled
7. Frozen
8. Transported
9. Stored frozen

Then, they’re fried in hot oil in the canteen and served. All this transforms a single kilo of potatoes (140g CO2) into a real climate-killer (5700g CO2).”

Photo courtesy Brandi Jordan (CC-2.0)

Based in Camarillo, Calif. CoolPlanet claims its biofuel products are not just net zero, but “negative carbon fuels,” because the byproducts from making and using them can sequester carbon, and therefore act as a soil conditioner. Converting cellulosic plant material into gasoline could help the agricultural sector by creating demand for non-food crops, and potentially new jobs in rural farming communities.

The investment represents Google Ventures’ first foray into biofuels. CoolPlanet was previously backed by North Bridge Venture Partners, and GE Energy Financial Services in an $8 million series B round. Google Ventures did not disclose the amount it invested into the round.

(Company representatives did not respond to a TechCrunch query as to how much money went into their series B investment by the close of business on Thursday.)

San Diego-based SG Biofuels secured a series A investment of $9.4 million led by two privately held companies involved in the development of renewable energy, chemicals and biotechnology, Flint Hills Resources in Kansas, and Life Technologies Corporation in Carlsbad, Calif.

SG Biofuels catalogs, develops and produces seeds for a crop called jatropha, which is a drought-resistant plant used to make biodiesel, jet fuel, soaps, organic fertilizers, medicines and pesticides.

Two United Nations agencies (the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development) reported in July that jatropha seeds “can be processed into lower-polluting biodiesel than fossil diesel to provide light and cooking fuel for poor rural families… [and] seed cake, a by-product from this process, can be used as fertilizer and animal feed after detoxification.”

Because some other biofuel crops — like corn, soy or sugar cane — could be used for food, jatropha is frequently regarded by environmentalists as a more favorable potential source of biofuels. Yet the crop is not without controversy. Jon R. Luoma wrote last year in e360, a publication from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies:

“Whether jatropha will turn out to be the wonder plant it was originally touted to be will depend a great deal on how and where it is grown — an issue that must be resolved by scientists, businesses, and governments.”

Jatropha plantations displaced food crops in the Philippines, and in order to cultivate jatropha, forestry groups in India drained rice fields and reclassified public land where rural farmers had previously been able to let their livestock graze, Luoma reported.

SG Biofuels says its “crop improvement platform” has doubled the yield of jatropha, while reducing input costs for growers.

Jatropha image via: Ton Rulkens

Solazyme produces fuel by fermenting algae to create oils and biomaterials including fuel, skin care, chemical and animal feed products. The company claims the Solajet HRJ-5 fuel it delivered to the Navy produces 85% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels. In the next two weeks, Solazyme will also provide the Navy with 20,000 gallons of F-76 naval distillate fuel to be used in military ships.

The South San Francisco based company was founded in 2003 and received $21.8 million in federal grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy last December.

Image by Solazyme

Major Japanese oil wholesaler Nippon Oil and Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi Plant Technologies are developing a technology that’s supposed to make it possible to mass-produce eco-friendly jet fuel from Euglena, single-celled organisms that live in ponds and lakes.

To be more exact, both companies are cooperating with and acquired shares in a Tokyo-based venture called Euglena, Inc., which is trying to find a way to extract oil from these organisms to produce fuel.

The venture says they already have a culturing system in place that can be used to grow Euglena efficiently, adding their production yield is superior to crops usually used to produce biofuel, i. e. corn or sugarcane. The current goal is to push down production costs per liter in a test plant to $0.80 per liter in order to be able to compete with regular jet fuel as far as prices are concerned. Another option, according to Euglena, is to use the biofuel for buses.

The company says mass-producing Euglena-derived biofuel should be possible by 2015.

Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

Anyway, scientists at Imperial College London found a form of degradable polymer made of sugar which would, in theory, allow you to add your plastic bottles to your compost pile and watch them degrade into happy, healthy plantfood.

The plastic is made from tree and plant glucose and… here, I’ll let them explain it.

The degradable polymer is made from sugars produced from the breakdown of lignocellulosic biomass, which comes from non-food crops such as fast-growing trees and grasses, or renewable biomass from agricultural or food waste.

My question is whether you could feasibly eat the bottles after you were done with them. I would totally do it, too, at parties and stuff.

The plastic should be commercially viable soon.

via Treehugger

Just 8 months after Virgin Atlantic flew a 747 from London to Amsterdam on coconut and babassu nut biofuel, Air New Zealand has done it also.

Air New Zealand, Boeing, Rolls-Royce and Honeywell modified the engines on a 747-400 to run on half Jet A1 fuel and half jatropha oil. The jatropha plant is pretty remarkable. This common plant from India produces nuts that contain 30 to 40 percent oil that can be converted into biofuel. It has been used previously to power cars, but this is the first time it has been used for an airplane. 

What would be more impressive though is an airplane powered by a real Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future. You’d just need to stop be a landfill to refuel.

Using excess or leftover corn as a fuel source sure sounded like a good idea, especially here in the U.S. Let’s get our farmers from, I don’t, Iowa, to set aside a certain percentage of arable land for the production of fuel corn. (The term “fuel corn” may or may not exist, but it should if it doesn’t.) This corn, rather than being used for food, would be used for the production of ethanol, an alcohol that can power combustion engines. Follow the logic: grow corn, which is fairly inexpensive to do, create ethanol, power car engines. Simple, direct and seemingly a possible solution to our reliance on foreign oil and all the bonus adventurism that comes with that. Grow corn at home, or meddle in other people’s affairs for access to oil?

Onward! to our bright, biofueled future. Wait, what?

There’s a word in that opening paragraph that suddenly no longer applies, apparently. What if all that corn (and other sources of biofuel) is no longer “leftover”? What if, you know, we should be using all that corn (etc.) to feed people? (Food used to feed people? Madness!) What if the price of food, for some reason, skyrocketed, and the poorer peoples of the world look longingly at all that “excess” corn being used to fuel your dumb automobile?

It would seem we, Westerners, are stuck between a rock and a rock. Big rocks. With sharp edges.

If you read any of the Big Papers, like the Financial Times, the Guardian or the New York Times—please don’t watch cable “news,” which has devolved into infotainment—you’ll have noticed an uptick in the number of stories covering some sort of food crisis. The Readers Digest version of the crisis is, as a result rising oil prices (increases transportation costs), poor climate (lots of droughts in food-producing regions) and—ding ding ding—the diversion of food-for-food to food-for-fuel has increased the price of food around the world. My local coffee place recently increased the price of a small cup of coffee by 25 cents. I mention that not for the “woe is me” factor (woe unto me for altogether different reasons), but to illustrate the fact that rising food costs isn’t merely a problem “over there.”

So we’re looking at quite the dicey situation. The world’s poor (40 percent of people live on less than two dollars a day) can no longer afford the most basic of foodstuffs, while the West hums along producing fuel to power its automobiles and other near-luxuries. (I say “near-luxuries” because, frankly, try living without a car in the U.S. outside of a few major cities; they’re “luxuries” compared to food. Call me crazy.) What should we do, how should the West react? Personally, I’m a cynical jerk, and I truly believe Americans are more concerned with who’s going to win American Idol or whether or not they’ll 100 percent GTA IV than whether some invisible foreigner can afford a loaf of bread or cup of rice. Not to be a whiny liberal, but you gotta figure most Americas are more concerned with their needs and wants than someone else’s; it’s only rational, I think. So when Americans pay, what, $4 per gallon of gas and they hear about some sort of weird “corn gasoline” that could be cheaper and can be grown in Our Backyard, you try convincing them to keep paying $4 just to save some poor person they’ll never see and never know, certainly never care about, to alter their lifestyle. It’ll take some sort of sticker shock at the supermarket for Americans writ large to even notice any food crisis.

Back to biofuel. There’s so many competing interests here that I’d rather hop on a message board and argue with a 13-year-old from Ohio whether or not the PS3 is “cool” or not. Are we gonna tell Iowa farmers to stop growing heavily subsidized and hugely profitable biofuel corn? Not if you’re an office-seeking politician, you’re not. Remind me again of Clinton, Obama and McCain’s views of ethanol? I have zero faith in politicians standing up to the ethanol pushers. Americans at home certainly aren’t going to support any schemes that prevent them from lowering their petrol bill. More biofuel, then, nuts to the rest of the world.

So we can “go green” (again, I think going green is a load of hogwash given China’s not-give-a-damn attitude toward pollution) and embrace biofuel, which doesn’t put filth into the atmosphere leading to a happy, Greener Earth, or we can actually grow food for food’s sake. I have no idea where I stand, which is how I am politically on most issues. I don’t like the idea of people starving, but if I have to be inconvenienced to make a difference… eh, I’d rather not be inconvenienced.

What dreams may come.

First of all, I think it should be said that the whole corn-as-fuel idea is a red herring when it comes to alternative energy. The corn industry is a bloated mess and throwing the demands of widespread biofuel use into the mix would probably push it beyond the breaking point and make for some really weird corn politics.

That said, if the process of fueling some things with corn is made easier and more efficient, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be used on a limited scale where it’s cost-effective. That’s why I’m glad advances like this one are being made. Dr. Mariam Sticklen at Michigan State University has been researching ways in which the most stubborn part of the corn plant can be easily broken down. She’s come up with three different strains of modified corn, each one with a different method of cellulose breakdown, each copied from a different microorganism.

The corn keeps the breakdown enzymes in vacuoles its stems and leaves, not in its seeds and pollen, which Sticklen says will prevent the plant from fertilizing other crops with the enzyme-producing gene. That doesn’t sound right to me; the gene would be found in the DNA of every cell, regardless of whether that cell produced the breakdown enzyme or not. Of course, unlike her I do not have a PhD in Bioengineering, so I’ll have to defer to her on this one.

You may heave heard about, or even seen first-hand, rising food costs. (As have I—milk is how much?) Just be grateful you’re not a biofuel producer, since those guys are feeling some heat, namely for “crimes against humanity.” That’s a hard accusation to shake, methinks.

Certain individuals are blaming biofuel producers for the high cost of food right now. Why waste foodstuffs producing fuel when people, quite literally, are starving because they cannot afford to buy food? Especially since the whole goal of biofuel—to help reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses in order to prevent global warming—really seems to be a Developed World concern more than anything else. When you’re living in the Developing World with several children to feed, do you really care if the temperature of the Earth has risen by a 1/100th of a degree? It’s just not an immediate, “I have to feed my children today or something bad will happen” concern.

It’s gotten so heated that some are demanding the European Union suspend its subsidization of biofuel. Obviously I’m not a foods scientist, but this quote, addressing what will happen if biofuel subsidies don’t end, from Nestlé’s CEO sounded scary enough:

There will be nothing left to eat

A fine way to start your day.

Why can’t anyone take a dignified mugshot anymore?

This man, David Richardson, was arrested for trying to steal used cooking grease from a Burger King. He was to use the grease for his biofuel Wacky Races car. While I agree he should have been arrested for even going to a Burger King—I’m a Howard Dean-loving, latte-drinking, New York liberal*—he should have known better. Many fast food joints will gladly hand over their used grease for the greater good, else they’ll have to pay someone to truck it off to the landfill (or wherever used grease goes to die).

*No I’m not

A Virgin Atlantic airplane fueled by a coconut and babassu nut biofuel mixture flew from London to Amsterdam at the weekend. It was the first commercial airline to fly on a biofuel mixture, something that Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson said would forever change the way the airline industry operates.

Before you run around, telling your friends that the fuel problem has been solved, know that there’s some caveats. First, though the flight was powered by biofuel, you need a hell of a lot of land to cultivate the needed plants. Do you know of anywhere where you can just cast away existing plants in order to grow the ones used by the fuel? Apparently saltwater-gorwn algae is the holy grail of biofuel, since you wouldn’t need to displace other crops in order to grow it.

Virgin exhibits coconut-powered flying jumbo [The Register]

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic airline will conduct a test flight at the end of the month wherein a Boeing 747 will fly from London to Amsterdam using an 80/20 blend of conventional fuel and biofuel, respectively. The plane will carry no passengers but will be “the first time a commercial aircraft has flown on biofuel,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Branson announced this little experiment last year and analysts posited that it could be done by the end of 2008. With this experiment, Virgin announced that it’s about 10 months ahead of schedule. How do you like them apples? Not only is something in the technology happening ahead of schedule without being delayed, but a full ten months ahead of schedule.

Here’s more…

From the business perspective, the airlines are under great financial pressure because of soaring fuel costs; the price of crude oil is consistently flirting with $100 per barrel. On the environmental side of things, aircraft represent up to 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the U.S. transportation sector, according to the Environmental Protection Agency…

…To get it done, Virgin Atlantic is teaming with Boeing and GE Aviation, maker of the engines that power the airplane. The airline said the GE Aviation CF6 engines used during the flight will not require modifications to burn biofuel, nor will the biofuel have negative effects on the engines.

The fuel used in the flight will be a blend of 80 percent conventional jet fuel, which is essentially kerosene, and 20 percent biofuel. Although the exact type of biofuel to be used has not been disclosed, the airline said it is a form that does not compete with food and freshwater resources.

Exciting, no? We’ll keep an eye out for an exact flight date and update everyone.

Virgin jet to use biofuel blend in test flight [San Francisco Chronicle] via Boing Boing