Here are some companies that have made material strides towards commercialization – through securing of funding, commencement of construction, offtake deals, or in other ways.

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Here’s the proposition: Two guys from the Bay Area come up with an idea to produce renewable fuel from algae in open ponds.

It’s a common tale, and in the renewable fuels business it is too often a story with an unhappy ending. But it happens to be the beginning of Solazyme’s story too – one that is quietly acquiring the shape, if not quite yet the dimensions, of a Bill Hewlett and David Packard story. But is there more than a casual connection between the Hewlett-Packard story and Solazyme, founded in 2003 by Jonathan Wolfson and Harrison Dillon?

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At Advanced Biofuels Markets, the Cellulosic Biofuels Summit and most of the other conferences this year, the talk has been all about cheap sugar – the simple sugars that form the feedstock that is fermented into biofuels and renewable chemicals.

There are a proliferating number of technologies for accessing sugars, or fermenting them. There are traditional yeasts used in first-generation fermentation of starches and sugars into ethanol, or exotic enzymes that work on cellulosic biomass, or modified e.coli, cyanobacteria, yeast or even algal strains that produce drop-in fuels. Low cost sugars are cited by all as the technology that will transform the biofuels story from a struggle for viability into a race for epic scale. If petroleum parity is the Holy Grail of biofuels, then cheap sugar is the nectar that fills the chalice.

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