Microvi's Biogas-To-Liquid technology has been awarded a grant from the US DOE

Biogas is a product of anaerobic digestion of waste organic sources such as animal manure or food wastes. Its primary components are methane and carbon dioxide (tipical composition: 50–75% CH₄, 25–50% CO₂, 0–10% N₂, 0–5% O₂, 1000-2000 ppm H₂S), potent greenhouse gases. Currently, much of the world’s biogas is used in direct combustion systems to produce electricity. Alternative choices are the use in stationary or mobile internal combustion engines and its injection into a natural gas pipeline previous upgrading.

However, biogas has also the potential to be the starting point for liquid biofuels and renewable chemicals. It can expand the range of products from biorefineries and waste treatment facilities. For example, biogas upgraded to biomethane can be converted to synthetic gas to produce fuels and chemicals via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

And there are new processes under development. A groundbreaking biocatalytic technology that converts methane and carbon dioxide from biogas into valuable liquid chemicals, has been awarded a grant from the US Department of Energy (see press release). This new technology is based in Microvi’s MicroNiche Engineering Platform Technology™ and has great promise to avoid the pitfalls of conventional Biogas-To-Liquid processes. Microvi is an industrial biotechnology company based in the San Francisco Bay Area that develops next-generation bioconversion technologies in the water, wastewater and chemical industries. MicroNiche Engineering, the company’s core discipline, is a synthetic biology approach that achieves remarkably reproducible kinetics for almost any biocatalytic process.