ST1-05: Deployment at Scale: A Grand Challenge for Advanced Biofuels

Perhaps the single most distinguishing feature of the transportation fuel market is its size.  To have a meaningful impact in the fuels market, deployment at scale is a key challenge to be addressed. Because even the smallest of changes are difficult to execute at mega-scale, the question of scaling new technologies or manufacturing regimes is arguably best approached by making the most conservative changes to existing infrastructure.  One solution to scaling a hydrocarbon-based, advanced biofuel involves retrofitting sugar cane ethanol facilities.
By volume, the largest-scale production of biofuel is ethanol.  Sugar cane ethanol facilities in Brazil deploy more than 10 million acres of sugar cane to produce 350 million tons of cane crush which is fermented into 8 billion gallons of fuel.  To leverage the infrastructure built around the mills for advanced biofuel production, Amyris employs a “capital light” model, replacing the ethanol-producing yeast with a hydrocarbon-producing yeast.  Because a hydrocarbon is produced, rather than a water-miscible alcohol, this advanced biofuel can be adopted into the existing fuel infrastructure.  This model presents obvious advantages for rapid scaling and deployment and reveals some of the grand challenges presented to any scale up operation.