Drop In, Scale Up? (10/6/11)
b'Drop In, Scale Up? Ed Dineen, CEO, LS9 Alan Shaw, CEO, Codexis Jonathan Wolfson, CEO, Solazyme Next-generation biofuels are on the verge of a breakthrough but aren\\u2019t ready to displace conventional fuels, three Bay Area biofuel company CEOs say in this Climate One talk. The CEOs insist that their fuels must compete on price with conventional gasoline or diesel, with or without government support, or a price on carbon, which means they have to scale up, fast. For biofuels to scale, all agree, they must be drop-in fuels. Meaning, says Jonathan Wolfson, CEO, Solazyme, \\u201ca fuel that fits directly into the existing infrastructure without modification.\\u201d \\u201cYou\\u2019ll not replace mass transportation, internal combustion engines, in our lifetime \\u2013 not at mass scale,\\u201d says Alan Shaw, CEO, Codexis. \\u201cWhat drives it is a liquid transportation fuel. We need an alternative to that. We\\u2019re still in the very early days. And that\\u2019s because the technology is not ready to be deployed at scale.\\u201d Ed Dineen, CEO, LS9, says \\u201cfor the type of technologies we\\u2019re practicing\\u201d \\u2013 second-generation biofuels \\u2013 \\u201cI think three years you\\u2019ll start to see plants be established. And once the initial plants get established, and we learn the technology, the acceleration will pick up,\\u201d he says. \\u201cThe bigger issue is the capital intensity of these plants,\\u201d he adds. \\u201cIf we see a world of $150 [per barrel] crude, I think that\\u2019s going to accelerate the pace of this technology,\\u201d he says. Agreeing with Jonathan Wolfson, Shaw says that \\u201cthe key driver of economics here is feedstock costs\\u201d \\u2013 in this case, sugars. Promisingly, he says, the second-generation cellulosic sugars that he and fellow panelists\\u2019 are developing run about a tenth the cost of their first-generation predecessors. The larger price competition, biofuels pitted against conventional crude, would be a fairer one, Wolfson says, if the two sides were evenly matched. \\u201cThere is one thing people forget, which is that the big integrated oil companies have had 100 years to bury subsidies in all kinds of places. People are talking about Industry should stand up, and We should all be dependent on alternative and renewable fuels meeting parity with petroleum. But the truth is parity isn\\u2019t parity because of all these hidden subsidies.\\u201d This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 6, 2011\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices'