Given their propensity for a less-than-speedy gait, it’s no wonder snails evolved to blend in with their surroundings — but for one such slow mover, genetics had other things in mind.

Nameko mushrooms are a highly-prized gourmet ingredient. Here’s how to grow them in your backyard.

Jim Lane

Like MSW? You’ll love bagasse. Lot
of the advantages of waste, and there’s a lot more available. style="font-weight: bold;">

Sugar’s the new oil, DOE Secretary
Steven Chu is fond of saying. Codexis agrees, but argues that
sugarcane residue (instead of competing for cane syrup) is the
path to the real riches.

Petroleum – we all know what it is, but what does the word
actually mean? It’s a mash-up from Latin and Greek. Petra+oleum.
It means “rock-oil”.

What makes that etymology factoid significant is that, to find
oil, you generally find the rock first. Unlocking the oil from the
rock – that’s the magic from which all value flows.

Then, there’s bagasse.

So, as Steven Chu says, when the oil runs out, the sugar goes on.

You can extract sugar from a lot of things. Things that generally
cost too much to begin with, or are in short supply (compared to
the vast demand for oil), like corn starch, or wheat, or
cellulosic wonderstuff.

Then, there’s bagasse. That leftover residue at the sugar mill
after squeezing out all the cane juice.

Exciting enough that Cobalt recently signed an agreement with the
10th largest global chemical company, Rhodia, to pursue a fast
track program to evaluate, design, and build 30,000 – 75,000 ton
plants based on Cobalt Tech’s technology to transform  South
American bagasse into butanol.

Now, a lot of the excitement about Brazil has centered around the
cane syrup, not the bagasse.

Pshaw, says Codexis [ href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/codexis/">NASD:CDXS]
CEO Alan Shaw.

The problem with the easy sugars

src="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/codexis%5B1%5D.gif"
align="left" height="53" width="167">

Shaw grabs a magic marker and begins to scribble out the
equations on a white board in Redwood City. “It costs $275 a ton
for the sugar,” as he pencils out the conversion from sugar
carbohydrates to hydrocarbons, “and you lose up to 60 percent in
the conversion. You need 3-5 tons of sugar to make a ton of
diesel, once you have blown off all the oxygen. No one is going to
pay more for your diesel because it is renewable. Acrylic acid,
adipic acid – now there you have some good margin to work with.
But not diesel fuel.”

Now, the spread between the cost of Southern pine and the cost of
diesel fuel is pretty wide. Somewhere in the $70 per ton range
compared to, say, $800 per ton for diesel fuel. So, there’s
something to be said for gasification, so long as the hydrogen to
carbon balance is optimal. But even there, Shaw sees problems.

“There’s nothing wrong with the OPEX [operational expenditures],
with almost any of the advanced biofuel companies. It’s the CAPEX
[capital expenditures].” He’s right, of course. Coming up with
$200-$400 million checks for first of kind technologies, which
usually means securing something on the order of $200-$350 million
in project debt. Well, that’s proven to be a tall order for the
early stage companies, by and large.

The winners, so far: low cost feedstock, capital

To date, the projects moving forward have had relatively strong
loan guarantees (INEOS Bio, POET, Abengoa [ href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/abengoa/">ABGOY.PK]),

or been backed by immense balance sheets (BP). The other projects
getting through have featured zero-cost feedstock (e.g. Enerkem),
are small demonstration projects mainly financed with government
grants, or are conceived as low-cost bolt-ons to existing
technology (e.g. steel mills, ethanol plants).

Zero-cost feedstock. Hmmm, we’ll come back to that.

A handful of cellulosic biofuels technologies are banking on a
licensing model, and going no farther on their own balance sheet
than demonstration scale. Some of those are engineering firms,
like the Beta Renewables JV that is part owned by Italy’s giant
engineering firm M&G through its Chemtex subsidiary.

The goal of the demonstration? To convince customers that the
technology works, and to convince themselves to guarantee that
technology will work. Knowing that any customer will demand a
performance guarantee, and if they don’t, their bankers will.

Widening the window to success, narrowing the path to failure

But there’s something else. That’s broadening the conditions for
success. These days, its not at all impossible – in fact it’s
almost commonplace to design a technology at bench scale that
achieves the rate, titer and yield needed to make cellulosic
biofuels successful.

But there’s the problem of temperature. Distillation is at high
temperature, by its nature, you are separating products by using
differential boiling points. But enzymes, generally, don’t like
those high temperatures. Narrowing that temperature differential
saves energy – lots of it.

But its more than that. By widening the conditions at which
cellulosic biofuels can succeed, it widens the range of choices
for the engineers. Easier to use off-the-shelf parts, for example.
Easier to tolerate conditions than have to design expensive
work-arounds. Easier to have a hotter pre-treatment process.

That’s been a goal of the Chemtex-Codexis partnership – to
broaden the conditions, as well as to create a library of enzymes
that feature heightened rates of activities.  So that enzymes
not only work effectively in some narrow range that only a
biologist could lovingly maintain, they work in the broad range
suitable to massive fermenters with variable “weather conditions”
inside.

Is Shell a possessive, or permissive, partner?

How does Shell view these activities from Codexis – don’t they
have everything wrapped up in terms of biofuels that comes from
the Codexis labs?

“It’s a question for our partners at Shell,” says Shaw. “But we
know that their abiding interest is in developing the lowest opex
and capex for their cellulosic biofuels business, and having a
‘most favored nation’ status with respect to the winning
technology. A stronger Codexis means they are less likely to have
to wait, and have more opportunities for wealth creation, no
matter how we reach a solution that solves the problem, at scale.”

Next stop for the technology? Well, expect to see it in Brazil
sooner than later. Sugarcane is 1/3 sugar, 1/3 bagasse and 1/3
tops and leaves, in round numbers. As mechanical harvesting brings
the tops and leaves off the fields and into the mix, it can
release the bagasse for higher value creation opportunities, than
simply burning it to generate power, as happens today.

Given a 50-mile radius, says Shaw, there are opportunities for
utilizing up to 60,000 metric tones of bagasse, per project, in
the nearer term, and up to 100,000 MT in the future.

$600 billion, by the numbers

That bagasse is already paid for, aggregated at the mill. You can
make $3 fuels or $6 chemicals from it, with feasible margins on
either. Say, at 100 gallons per tonne. And there are more than a
billion tonnes of bagasse available from the land that the
Brazilian government has approved for cane cultivation. So,
somewhere north of $600 billion in value, just in the bagasse.

Which is where the value really lies, says Shaw. The cane sugar,
he says, is too exposed to the food markets and commodity
speculation. But no one eats bagasse, and you need advanced
technology to unlock the value. That’s a barrier to entry that
preserves value, he says.

And right now, its an advanced technology that’s affordable
priced.

The path less travelled: KiOR

src="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/logo%5B1%5D.png"
align="left" height="112" width="216">

Take KiOR [ href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/kior/">NASD:KIOR],

for example, an outstanding technology using Southern pine to make
cellulosic biofuels, at scale, at impressive margins. It’s $250
million per pop for a KiOR plant, the feedstock costs $72 per bone
dry ton, and there are a couple of hundred million tonnes
available. It’s a value proposition that has a lot of investors
salivating. You get Haley Barbour and Vinod Khosla as your
partners – not bad at all. Costs you $1.6 billion to own that seat
at the “future of energy” table. You get about 1 percent of, say,
Facebook, for that.

Compare Codexis. The feedstock is already paid for in the cane
harvest, there are ultimately more than a billion tones available.
You get Shell and M&G as your partners. Costs you $160 million
to own that seat.

Now, KiOR’s model – build, own, operate, will control more of the
value-chain, and more of the margin. But you could just about buy
Codexis (at today’s “affordable” share prices) for the money that
Khosla and friends pumped into Range Fuels. Now, that may well
prove to be one of the most affordable seats at the Final Table in
the World Biofuels Scale-Up Shootout  that will ever come
around. It’s what the US spends on oil imports in, say, a six-hour
stretch.

Rewind to Apple 2002?

It’s Apple 2002 promise, at Apple 2002 prices. Now, can Alan Shaw
and team pull it off? At Codexis, they think so – do you think so?
We’ll continue to watch the space closely.

DISCLOSURE: The author has no positions in the stocks mentioned.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher of href="http://biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/">Biofuels Digest style="font-style: italic;">.

Photographer Ben Canales is at it again, this time bringing us some outstanding video of the milky way and night landscapes.

I am driving the new 2012 smart fortwo electric drive vehicle (smart ed) through the busy downtown streets of San Diego, America’s eighth largest city. San Diego presents itself as “America’s Finest City” with some justification. The temperature is in the sixties on this November day as ships sail in the vast harbor, towering office [...]

Following a slew of rather disturbing animal-welfare violations, the greatest show on Earth has agreed to settle a USDA dispute by paying $270 thousand and promising to improve conditions for animals.

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A growing network of “ressourceries” takes unwanted goods, repairing and reselling them.

Tom Konrad CFA

src="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/accell-logo%5B1%5D.gif"
align="right" height="62" width="103">
The
Euro crisis rolls out a bargain in the stock of a leading
e-bike manufacturer.

A little over a year ago, I href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/2010/10/fourbest.html">concluded

a 27 part series looking into href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/2010/05/peakoil.html">non-oil

stocks that might benefit from rising oil prices by picking
what I thought were the four best stocks I had found in the
process.  I had not yet bought any of the stocks picked
because, as I said at the time,

I personally do not yet have a position in any of these
stocks because I expect the stock market to continue to decline in
the near term.  I’m waiting to make my purchases (of a
possibly slightly different set of peak oil stocks) at even more
attractive valuations.

It took a bit longer for the market to fall than I
expected.  Now it has, especially in mainland Europe. 
This is a good thing for bottom-fishers seeking peak oil stocks:
With high gas prices, limited domestic oil supplies, and a
realistic attitude towards climate change, Europe is far ahead of
the US in spawning companies that will be able to survive and
flourish in a world of constrained oil supplies.

The Four Picks

One of my “four best” peak oil stock picks was a Chinese company
with a NASDAQ listing.  The other three were European. 
The Chinese company was href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/abat/">Advanced

Battery Technologies (ABAT), which I liked because of their
e-bike business and apparent cheap valuation.  I did not
foresee that the company would be one of many Chinese companies
accused of cooking their books.  The allegations have not
been proven, but ABAT has also not been able to provide enough
information to clear its name, so the stock has fallen by two
thirds since I wrote the article, but I’m only interested in
investing in companies with financial statements I can trust, so
I’m no longer watching the stock.

src="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/VOS%20SGC%20ABAT%20ACCEL.png"
height="449" width="520">

The best performing of the four picks is London-listed href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/stagecoach/">Stagecoach

Group (SGC.L), an operator of rail and bus services in the
UK and North America.  Stagecoach is up about 50% since last
September, but I did not participate in the gain because I was
waiting for a pullback.

In between these two lie Dutch bicycle manufacturer href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/accell/">Accell

Group (ACCEL.AS), and German commuter and high-speed rail
supplier href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/vossloh/">Vossloh

AG href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/vossloh/"> style="font-weight: bold;"> (VOS.DE).  Both of
these companies did well through the middle of this year when the
Euro crisis began to heat up, and now they’re both below their
levels from when I originally wrote the article.  Last week,
I took a position in Accell stock, because I like the current
valuation (at 12.74 Euros.)  With the crisis continuing,
there is still room for further declines, but I feel like there is
currently enough blood on the streets to take an initial position,
despite the ongoing uncertainty.

Accell Group

src="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/Accell%20Geographic.png"
align="right" height="424" width="300"> href="http://www.accell-group.com/nl/accell-group.asp">Accell
Group is a Europe-centric manufacturer of bicycles, bike
parts, bike accessories, and fitness equipment.  The stock
trades on the Amsterdam stock market with the symbol href="http://www.altenergystocks.com/comm/content/accell/">ACCEL. 

The company owns a wide portfolio of national and international
bicycle brands, and the company’s strategy is to buy and cultivate
brands that are or can be leaders in their respective national or
functional niches.  The company’s annual report lists 18
“main” brands with focuses on everything from bikes for kids
(Loekie), to high-quality bikes and e-bikes in the Netherlands
(Koga-Miyata), to bike parts suppliers like Junker and
Brasseur.  If there is an underlying theme among the brands
it is attention to research in innovation combined with
sophisticated distribution and marketing. 

Accell’s current strategy is to reemphasize the lackluster
fitness segment, while putting greater emphasis on higher margin
e-bikes and sales outside its core European markets. 
Europe’s high fuel prices and compact cities have led to a cycling
culture and a rapid adoption of e-bikes, giving Accell an early
advantage in developing the sorts of e-bikes that appeal to
commuters. 

This e-bike expertise is why I see Accell as a good peak oil
stock: As higher fuel prices lead motorists to seek other modes of
transit, e-bikes allow people at all levels of age and fitness to
participate in bicycle commuting.  Accell has the experience
selling to bicycle commuters to understand the features they want.

src="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/Accell%20Segments.png"
align="left" height="373" width="300">
  Accell maintains a high but variable dividend yield by
setting the dividend at approximately 40% of net profits each
year, and allowing shareholders to opt to take the dividend either
in shares or cash.  Nearly half of all shareholders opted to
take the dividend in additional shares in recent years (48% in
2010, 44% in 2011).  This both allows the company to offer
a high (6.7%) dividend yield and to reinvest substantial cash in
the business.

Stormy Europe

Both management and analysts following the company expect 2011
sales and earnings to exceed those in 2010, despite a
disappointing third quarter.  In Q3, href="http://www.rtl.nl/components/financien/rtlz/nieuws/2011/46/accell-ziet-buiten-duitsland-afname-vraag-naar-nieuwe-fietsen-dowjones1001629.xml">
poor weather in the company’s core European markets depressed
sales, while the economic storm clouds emanating from the
uncertainty around the Euro are making dealers reluctant to build
up stocks of next season’s models.  One bright spot was
Germany, where demand remained strong, driven by increased
purchases of Accell’s more expensive e-bikes displacing purchases
of conventional bicycles.

All this uncertainty drove the share price down sharply last week
until, at Euro 12.76 the company is trading at only 7.6 times
expected 2011 earnings and 1.25 times book value.  With a
current dividend yield of almost 7%, I’m comfortable buying and
holding this stock through the ups and downs of the European
market.

src="http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/Accell%20yield.png"
height="451" width="521">
Further, although Accell’s core European markets may be hurt by the
fallout of the Euro crisis, I feel that much of that damage is
already priced into the stock.  Accell’s growth markets are in
the rest of the world, and a falling Euro will only make it easier
to increase exports.

All in all, now seems like a great time to take Accell for a spin.

DISCLOSURE: Long ACCEL.AS style="font-style: italic;">


DISCLAIMER: The information and
trades provided here are for informational purposes only and are
not a solicitation to buy or sell any of these securities.
Investing involves substantial risk and you should evaluate your
own risk levels before you make any investment. Past results are
not an indication of future performance. Please take the time to
read the full disclaimer here.

Nature is usually the best designer, but some scientists think they’ve improved upon her design for muscles.

Some latest scuttlebutt from the world of nuclear fusion has all the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller screenplay (and for those who remember Inside Greentech’s Greentech Avenger, you know I know scuttlebutt!) There’ve been all kinds of cinematic ideas, and personalities, on the front lines of the crazy world of cleantech innovation. Wild claims from charismatic mad [...]