Companies Producing Energy Crops

Here’s a list of energy crop producers:

Agrivida
Ceres
Syngenta
Edenspace
Cleantech Biofuels

Agrivida

Agrivida is an agricultural biotechnology company developing varieties of switchgrass, sugarcane, sorghum, corn, and other energy crops designed to produce chemicals, fuels, and bioproducts from non-food cellulosic biomass.

Technology

Agrivida's energy crops and process technology is designed to convert the non-food, cellulosic biomass into chemicals, fuels and bioproducts.

According to the company the energy crops developed by them produce their own inactive enzymes within the plant cell wall to breakdown cellulosic biomass with less severe pretreatments and without addition of exogenous enzymes. The end result: a significant reduction in the cost of chemicals, fuels and bioproducts.

According to studies presented by Agrivida scientists at the World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing in Washington, DC in Aug 2010, a new generation of Agrivida’s proprietary trait technology— proteins genetically engineered into the cell walls of waste corn stover and “energy crops” such as sorghum and switchgrass – increases cell wall degradation by up to 100 percent compared to non-engineered plants, while significantly decreasing enzyme loadings, following a mild pretreatment and heat activation.

The company stated that the Agrivida’s transgenic corn stover was demonstrated in this study to have a conversion of more than 60 percent of cellulose to glucose, compared to approximately 30 percent seen with the control plants,” following a proprietary low-cost pretreatment with heat and at reduced enzyme loadings. Further, the enzyme loadings used with Agrivida’s engineered plants can be reduced well over 50 percent and still provide improved performance relative to the full enzyme loadings on non-engineered plants, thereby significantly lowering external enzyme requirements.

http://www.agrivida.com

Ceres

Ceres, Inc. is a leading developer of energy crops that can be planted as raw materials for advanced biofuels, biopower and bio-based products. Its development efforts include switchgrass, high-biomass sorghum, sweet sorghum and miscanthus. The plant breeding and biotechnology company markets its switchgrass and sorghum seeds under its Blade Energy Crops brand.

Product & Technology

Ceres is improving the crops with the latest genomics-based breakthroughs. Their research starts by sequencing plant DNA, discovering genes and their function, and determining their potential use.

Ceres, with its partners, has established major seed collections called germplasm for energy crops. Marker-assisted breeding (MAB)[1] technology speeds up the product development and allows them to work with multiple traits in a simple, efficient way. Their biotech tools allow them to precisely add traits in ways not feasible through other plant breeding methods. They’re using specialized, high-throughput systems to accelerate entire product development process.

Their first products, high-yielding switchgrass cultivars and high-biomass sorghum hybrids are now available under their Blade Energy Crops brand. Other crops in pipeline include: sweet sorghum, miscanthus and energycane.

http://www.ceres-inc.com/

Syngenta

Basel based company Syngenta is a agri-business committed to sustainable agriculture through innovatie research and technology.

Syngenta offers complete crop solutions from seed to grain, virtually at every step of food creation. The total crop solution consists of seed, seed care, crop protection and public health.

The company is a leader in crop protection, and ranks third in the high-value commercial seeds market. Their company provides two main types of products: seeds and crop protection.

Syngenta and its partners use a combination of technologies - genetic modification, as well as conventional breeding, and marker assisted breeding to develop plants that could further increase yields, making industrial processes cleaner and more efficient.

Syngenta's product portfolio is divided into seven product lines: five for Crop Protection (Selective Herbicides, Non-Selective Herbicides, Fungicides, Insecticides, and Professional Products) and two for Seeds (Field Crops, Vegetables and Flowers).

www.syngenta.com

Edenspace

Edenspace Systems Corporation is a crop biotechnology company developing innovative systems solutions for customers in renewable fuels, agriculture, and chemicals. The company has entered into research and development agreements with the U.S. Department of Energy ("DOE"), the U.S. Department of Agriculture, DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Syngenta Ventures, universities and other corporations. The company received the U.S. Department of Energy's 2008 Energy Innovator Award.

Products and Technology

Edenspace is developing Energy Corn™ technology and other enhanced energy crops to produce cellulosic biofuels such as ethanol and butanol. According to the company, Energy Corn™ will significantly increases the ethanol yield per acre compared to corn grain ethanol alone; thereby providing farmer cost efficiencies and higher farm profits.

Further, the company claims that the technology will benefit the biorefinery with:

Lower enzyme costs. Crop plants can produce large quantities of enzymes in their biomass at essentially zero variable cost, compared to microbial enzymes that are added during conversion and today are estimated to cost as much as $1.00 per gallon.

Lower preprocessing costs. Edenspace's crop-produced enzymes are pre-mixed with cellulose inside the crop plants which reduces capital costs and operating costs of pretreatment and hydrolysis, two crucial processing steps that account for more than one-third of today's cost of producing cellulosic ethanol.

In June 2010, the company announced the introduction of a new liquid additive, Product 2010B^tm. The new product is said to increase sugar yields from biomass while reducing other processing costs by as much 10%, thereby reducing the overall cost of cellulosic biofuels and other bioproducts.

According to the Edenspace researchers, the new 2010B^tm additive is introduced during the saccharification step following biomass pretreatment. Baselined for use following dilute acid pretreatment of cellulosic biomass, the 2010B^tm additive is also effective with a variety of other pretreatment methods. The additive supplements commercial enzyme blends used with existing varieties of sorghum, switchgrass, corn stover, corn cob, corn fiber, and poplar. The product also works with new genetically-engineered varieties of these crops, and is being tested on other crops. Contracts with commercial manufacturers are anticipated to provide the product in ton quantities by early next year. Samples are now available to biorefinery operators and process developers for testing.

http://www.edenspace.com

Cleantech Biofuels

CleanTech Biofuels is developing a set of technologies that, when combined, are capable of converting the cellulosic material in municipal solid waste into ethanol.

By using the existing infrastructure for municipal solid waste collection and disposal to collect biomass, CleanTech aims to achieve profitability quickly relative to other cellulosic ethanol producers who must develop their infrastructure to collect and transport more expensive feedstocks such as switchgrass, wood waste, or corn stover. Moreover, biomass derived from garbage will not be subject to increases in commodity prices that plague producers’ currently manufacturing ethanol from corn.

Technology & Process

Biomass Recovery Process

The company’s proprietary Biomass Recovery Process uses steam and pressure to separate and clean municipal solid waste into high-quality biomass, capturing recyclables at the same time. When removed from the process vessel, the cellulosic material is sorted from the recyclables and other garbage contents using shaker screens. The cellulosic biomass falls through the screens. The recyclable materials are recovered and the remainder, less than 20 percent of the total input, is sent to the landfill. The process also removes a sustainable amount of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) avoiding their release into the atmosphere.

The process is claimed to recover 80 to 90 percent of the material in the garbage for commercial uses.

http://www.cleantechbiofuels.net/

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