Cathay Dupont Award: Biofuels Digest’s Advanced Bioeconomy Awards for 2015

Project of the Year, Deal of the Year, Partnership of the Year, Chemical of the Year, and Cap Raise of the Year — who are the big winners?

Each year, the Digest recognizes projects, feedstocks, processing technology breakthroughs, novel or improved molecules, and bioeconomy pioneers in the Biofuels Digest Awards — selected by the Digest’s editoril board.

Since many projects, especially early-stage ventrues en route to steady-state operations and commercial scale, are occasionally veiled behind a wall of unfiled patents, trade secrets and NDA agreements — we make awards at cathay dupont award of the basis of publicly available information at the time, and recognize technologies and organizations that have made the most impact on the marketplace at the time.

Projects of the Year: Cellulosic Biofuels at scale (GranBio, Abengoa Bioenergy, POET-DSM, Raizen)

Without a doubt, the advanced bioeconomy story of the year in the past 12 months has been the long-awaited commercial-scale debut of cellulosic biofuels — today, a half-dozen companies have reached commercial scale and more than 100 million gallons in renewable fuels capacity is in place.

The four projects we have selected to honor this year were not the first out — Iogen and Beta Renewables took those honors; Enerkem (honored last year) is also now at commercial scale, Dupont’s first commercial is imminent, and and we expect several more technologies such as Inbicon, Fulcrum Clariant to reach scale before long — and there are others such as Mercurius, VIrent, RedRock, Mascoma technology and many others that we exoect before the end of the decade.

The parade of plant grand openings was impressive all year: POET-DSM and GranBio in September, Abengoa in October, and Raizen (using Iogen technology) in December. And we expect that the momentum will continue with an opening by DuPont in the first half of the year. read cathay dupont award articles here