Vinod Khosla on the Technology Pathway to Biofuels by Vinod
Khosla (Green Tech Media) Part 1: Production technologies: where
are we? The financial crisis of 2008 set back a number of
projects and slowed actual construction of pilot and demo plants
like it did in all industries, be they biofuels or traditional
fossil energy projects. That, coupled with the negative press
for corn ethanol, slowed progress and funding of biofuels to a
crawl, causing delays of up to two years in many business plans.
But despite these challenges, entrepreneurs have persevered and
in many cases are further along than expected in achieving
practical economics that now justify their first commercial
units (FCUs). FCUs are particularly hard to fund given that they
are first-of-a-kind technology, and there is now a risk-averse
capital funding environment. Further, FCUs are generally of
smaller size than the optimal scale commercial plant, are not
“value engineered” (the goal of the FCU should be, in my view,
cash break-even or better,