The Senate voted yesterday to kill corn ethanol subsidies. Michael Grunwald says government favoritism towards that fuel has held back more promising biofuels companies:
The company is called Solazyme, and it re-engineers algae to turn just about any kind of feedstock — sugar cane, switchgrass, crop wastes, whatever — into jet fuels, diesel fuels, and just about any kind of oil. It’s leveraging the power of evolution—algae naturally produce oil — to create renewable low-carbon alternatives to petroleum that won’t divert so much farmland from food into energy.
These aren’t pie-in-the-sky ideas that might work someday; Solazyme is already starting to sell fuel to the Navy. It’s also making oils for nutritional supplements, skin creams, chemicals and other products. Today I got to eat chocolate ice cream made out of algae, with one third the fat and one tenth the cholesterol of regular chocolate ice cream. It tasted like chocolate ice cream.
The Dish 