13
Mar
2009
Sustaining Sustainability
Business World
The renewable energy industry is built on dreams. One of the fondest of these dreams is to produce a renewable hydrocarbon fuel, so that we can continue driving our cars without feeling any guilt. It is a dream that fuels several hundred companies globally, a large number of them in the US. Industry observers consider Sapphire Energy, a 2007 start-up based in San Diego in California, as one of the hottest of these biofuel companies. Sapphire has apparently developed a process to produce hydrocarbons — petrol, diesel and aviation fuel — directly from algae using sunlight, and they are chemically identical to those derived from crude oil. Sapphire says it is a few critical steps away from supplying the fuel to petrol stations.
