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In Massachusetts, Qteros unexpectedly dumped CEO Bill Frey and installed former Verenium EVP John McCarthy — one of the key players in the Celunol-Diversa merger that became cellulosic ethanol pioneer Verenium. McCarthy lost no time in clarifying the company’s message, in a Digest interview.

Job #1: “Well, there are two job #1s, which we will accomplish in parallel,” McCarthy said.

“With Kevin Gray on board [as CTO], we have reinforced and built up the R&D team with the highest caliber people, and will continue to reinforce. They have some key technical initiatives and we expect to make significant progress in those initiatives in the next six months.

“In addition,” McCarthy added, “we will begin to establish and accelerate corporate partnerships, where we can utilize existing and developing pilot-scale facilities of partners to demonstrate the Q Microbe and our process, in the US and elsewhere.”

McCarthy lost no time in clarifying the company’s communications on its proposed pilot facility, and news from last summer that it had achieved a 70 grams per liter cellulosic ethanol output,. 40 percent higher than current industry standards.

“I probably wouldn’t have put out that news on the 70 grams per liter — it’s true, but the fermentation period was too slow to be considered commercially viable,” said McCarthy. “It was an interesting find with a small ‘i.’”

On the company’s proposed pilot facility, McCarthy squarely put the focus on the use of partnerships with existing cellulosic ethanol developers. “As a high value technology provider, the advantage here is to be able to work with many participants. It doesn’t make sense in terms of time, money and expertise for a company of our size to build our own pilot, as opposed to working within the pilots developed by future customers. Meanwhile, if you saw our facility here, to many it would look like a pilot because it has larger scale fermentation than you would expect. We are building a facility near Chicopee with a pretreatment focus that will not be a full-scale pilot because it will not have some of the back end elements.”

Qteros is a pioneer in one-step, consolidate bioprocessing of biomass into cellulosic ethanol. The company’s signature IP is the “Q Microbe”, a species of clostridium, which is a naturally-discovered (but subsequently enhanced) consolidated bioprocessor that consumes (pre-treated) biomass, converts to simple sugars and then converts into ethanol. “What we’re really making is cheap sugars. Once you have that you have compounds that are identical to precursors for many useful products,” CTO Kevin Gray said in describing the company’s mission.  The company has raised $25 million+ from a who’s who of investors: Valero, BP, Venrock, Battery Ventures and Soros Fund Management.

The Q Microbe’s major promise: it saves 30 percent on the cost of cellulosic conversion, can realize 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of corn stalks and, according to EVP Jef Sharpe, “Qteros will not need fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer or distillation of the ethanol because the lignin portion of the plant material will be burned to generate the heat necessary to refine the ethanol. There will also be leftover green electricity created.”

McCarthy’s arrival marks the second major Verenium player in the hall — CTO Kevin Gray arrived from the cellulosic ethanol pioneer last spring. At Verenium, McCarthy was not only a key player driving the reverse-acquisition of Diversa and management of the combined company, he pioneered the relationship with BP that provided Verenium with much-needed capital and momentum through 2009-09.

Existing cellulosic ethanol pilots and demonstrations are not huge in number: Inbicon, ZeaChem, POET, Range Fuels, Bluefire, Iogen, Coskata, KL Energy, Lignol, Verenium, Mascoma, Abengoa, and TMO Renewables are the main companies to date, with DuPont Danisco ready to open its 250,000 gallons facility in Tennessee later this month.

With several companies working on gasification technologies, there are 7-8 sites for Qteros to quickly explore partnership opportunities with. KL Energy (with its excellence in pre-treatment), and Verenium might be considered the front runners, though with Iogen doubling its production and having an end-user market, via their investor Shell, may well be strongly in the hunt for improvements in its cost structure through consolidated bioprocessing.  The BP connection — the company is invested in both Qteros and Verenium — may prove to be the right one for Qteros. 

For more information, please visit www.biofuelsdigest.com.