Tuesday, August 26, 2008

SunEthanol teams with Michigan’s MBI for faster ethanol production

By Mass High Tech Staff

Hadley-based cellulosic biofuels technology developer SunEthanol Inc. has announced a collaboration with Michigan-based biotechnology firm MBI International to scale-up a fermentation method for producing ethanol from non-food agricultural feedstocks using SunEthanol’s Q-Microbe.

MBI International, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Michigan State University Foundation, specializes in fermentation process development and scale-up, and is currently working on scaling-up AFEX (ammonia fiber expansion), a new biomass pretreatment technology developed at Michigan State University.

SunEthanol’s Q-Microbe, discovered locally by SunEthanol founder and chief scientist Susan Leschine, effectively digests and ferments cellulosic feedstocks to ethanol in a single-step process. The microbe has attracted the attention of several other research facilities, including Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development, with which it signed a similar collaboration agreement in June.

The collaboration with MBI International was formed in response to the growing demand for cellulosic biofuels, according to SunEthanol officials’ statement.

SunEthanol was spun out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst last year and has since landed an undisclosed amount of funding from Waltham’s Battery Ventures, Hadley’s Long River Ventures and South Dakota’s VeraSun Energy. The company was also chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to participate in the agency’s $114 million project to build four small-scale biorefineries across the country, announced in February.