ZeaChem’s Lab: From Termite-Gut Bugs To Biofuel
In an inauspicious building on a strip of offices in Menlo Park, Calif., I recently met with the team behind ZeaChem, a 25-person startup that’s using a common microbe found in termite guts and regular soil to breakdown trees and plants into the next-generation of ethanol. The company is one of a dozen that are moving quickly to build large plants in the U.S. in an attempt to be among the first to produce fuels made from waste plants as opposed to the currently available method using corn. Fresh from raising a sizable round of funding earlier this month, this morning the team walked me around their lab, which makes about 5 gallons of cellulosic ethanol per day.
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