Company Name
KiOR

Company Web Site
http://www.kior.com/

Headquarters
The Netherlands

Latest News
November 2, 2007 -Khosla Ventures and BIOeCON announce today the formation of their joint venture KiOR Inc. Khosla Ventures, will provide the Series A funding, whereas BIOeCON will bring its knowledge and intellectual property for the "Biomass Catalytic Cracking Process" (BCC). KiOR Inc. will focus on the further development and commercialization of the BCC technology as well as prepare for raising significantly more capital in the next two to three years.

BCC technology converts lignocellulosic biomass, found in grass, wood, and various agricultural and forestry wastes, into a bio-oil product that can be further upgraded to transportation fuels. The conversion of cellulosic biomass to bio-oil represents a significant commercial opportunity that also offers important benefits, including using post-harvesting waste rather than competing with food crops; promoting environmental sustainability; reducing reliance on fossil fuels such as crude oil; and enabling economic development and job creation in rural areas.

"The key technical problem in the conversion of cellulosic biomass into usable fuels is how to open up the inaccessible solid fibrous 'woody' material, so that it can be effectively transformed. Most of the existing processes to unlock the woody structures are quite costly and intensive of energy or chemicals,"says Paul O'Connor, founder and president of BIOeCON. "BIOeCON has developed a simple non-energy intensive way to make the woody biomass accessible to catalysts and convert to a bio-oil product with significantly improved product properties compared to other thermal-chemical processes."

Doug Cameron, Khosla Ventures' Chief Scientific Advisor: "BIOeCON has a strong R&D network and solid scientific fundamentals. We have done a thorough evaluation of the technology and research programs and believe this can be a breakthrough technology."

"Securing funding from a strategic and visionary venture capital company like Khosla Ventures is a major step forward", says Rob van der Meij, CEO of KiOR Inc."Khosla's experience and expertise in technology startups is unmatched in the industry and we are looking forward to the acceleration that Khosla Ventures no doubt will bring."

KiOR's concept and approach is unique and has the potential to become a large scale, widely applied technology, that can improve energy availability and sustainability to both the developed and developing world. The BCC technology unlocks the energy of vast amounts of biomass waste and converts it into a high valued energy product. This will not only reduce net carbon dioxide emission, but can also improve the energy independence of many countries.

Funding
Khosla Ventures. Amount is believed to be $1.4 million.

Technology
The following section is from technologyreview.com

The most effective method of converting biomass into fuel is to subject it to high temperatures and high pressure to produce synthetic gas, or syngas. In the presence of a catalyst, the syngas reacts to produce fuels such as ethanol or methanol (used as an additive in biodiesel). But this is a costly process, and catalysts able to withstand the high temperature of the syngas are expensive and frequently toxic.

Attempts to produce fuel by directly exposing agricultural cellulose to a catalyst have had little success because most of the cellulose is trapped inside plant stems and stalks. O'Connor says that while the Bioecon researchers are developing new catalysts, their "biomass cracking" process is the real breakthrough. Using proprietary methods, they have been able to insert a catalyst inside the structure of the biomass, improving the contact between the materials and increasing the efficiency of the process. While O'Connor won't go into details, he says that the most basic version of the technique might involve impregnating the biomass with a solution containing the catalyst; the catalyst would then be recrystallized. "What we're doing now is improving the method to make it easier and cheaper,"O'Connor says.

Such a method would eliminate the need for the superhigh temperatures and toxic catalysts used in other thermochemical methods for cellulosic-biofuel production. While O'Connor says that he is still improving Kior's catalyst, his first versions are different kinds of modified clays, which are both cheap and environmentally friendly. The product is high quality as well, containing less acid, oxygen, and water. These characteristics make it suitable for burning as heating oil or for use in petroleum refineries, which can use existing processes and equipment to convert it into the longer hydrocarbon chains of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Bioecon has produced lab-scale quantities of its biocrude, a few grams at a time, from materials such as wood shavings, sugarcane waste, and various grasses. While the input material affects the yield somewhat, O'Connor says that the output is "all very similar, so we do not have a real preference." This means that the process can work around the world, with whatever biomass is locally available, almost year-round.

Kior is already in talks with at least two oil companies to establish partnerships to further develop the technology. It is starting a pilot plant with one company that should produce around 20 kilograms of biocrude a day within six to twelve months, says Kior CEO Rob van der Meij. If all goes well, the process could scale up to production of hundreds of kilos per day by 2009, and refined versions of Kior's biocrude might be blended into gasoline or diesel by 2010. In addition to being renewable, these fuels would have lower sulfur and nitrogen content, which should decrease smog in cities such as Los Angeles and Houston.

Because of its ability to slide into the existing petroleum refining and delivery infrastructure, the technology has a huge cost advantage, says O'Connor. It could also be adopted much more rapidly, according to Khosla. "If you can do a solution that's compatible with the oil companies and their current refineries, it becomes much easier for them to get comfortable with it, "he says. "Getting them into the game would be a big addition."

Steve Deutch, a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, says that the little information Kior has released about its process is plausible enough, but that until the details are available, the company's claims are "not really possible to evaluate. "The main challenge for Kior, or anyone working on cellulosic fuels, Deutch says, is to develop a process simple enough to bring close to the sources of biomass--farms. "Collecting biomass and getting enough of it in one place to make a difference is a problem in the biomass world,"Deutch says. "Trucking costs can become exorbitant. You want to preprocess it at the farm and then ship a high-density, high-energy intermediate to processing plants."