.Amyris drops out of the agrofuel business
Richard Brenneman
eats shoots n leaves, February 14 2012
Yep, Amyris [previously], the UC Berkeley-spawned company born of Bill Gates
bucks to create an antimalarial drug then reincarnated as a corporation
dedicated to creating fuels from plants, is dropping out of the fuel game - in
precisely the same way it left the drug business.
Ken Bullis of MIT's Technology Review explains:
Amyris said it's giving up making fuels too. Instead, it will to focus on higher
value products, such as moisturizers for cosmetics.
The company learned firsthand just how difficult it is to achieve the kind of
yields seen in lab tests in large-scale production. In an update call for
investors, CEO John Melo said he is "humbled by the lessons we have learned."
This is a common theme for advanced biofuels companies. Range Fuels, one of the
first of the current crop of companies, recently went out of business.
Others are giving up on making biofuels too, also hoping to break into markets
for higher value chemicals. Although they may be able to get more money per
liter of product, some experts warn that these markets are also highly
competitive.
Amyris's technology may still be used to make renewable fuels, but this will
happen not at Amyris, but under joint ventures established with Total and Cosan.
These ventures will need to build up their own production capacity, Melo told
analysts.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/27570/
Amyris was created by Jay Keasling, who holds appointments at both UC Berkeley
and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with money from the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation.
The firm's original purpose was to produce a low-cost version of artemisin, an
antimalarial drug normally derived from the artemisia, the wormwood plant.
Amyris bioengineers genetically tweaked microbes to excrete the chemical, but
dreams of lowering costs failed to materialize, and the technology was handed
over to pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis to produce the drug for no profit.
Meanwhile, thousands of small farmers who relied on growing artemisia face the
prospect of loss of livelihood, given the pharma giant's powerful marketing
machinery.
So having failed to produce a low cost drug, Amyris turned to tweaking microbes
to digest cellulose, in hopes of producing fuels.
But again costs got in the way, even after French oil giant Total invested
heavily in the company, along with other investors.
The company went public on 28 September 2010, with shares trading at $16.50,
rising to a peak of $33.89 four months later. Today, as we write, they're
trading at $6.77, after hitting an all-time low of $6.59 last week.
Lo, how the dreams of the technocrats have fallen. First it was cheap drugs to
save the world, then fuel to survive the end of the oil age. Now it's cosmetics.
| 
