BP Partners With Martek To Distribute Biofuel

BP, an oil company based out of London, announced today a joint venture with Martek Biosciences to develop microbial oils to produce biofuel. BP will invest $10 million in the project which will expand over several years to improve the process of converting sugar to biofuel. 

Martek, based out of Columbia, Md., engineers biofuels from algae and other microbial sources. BP will aid in making the oils commercially available, as they successfully distributed over 1 Billion gallons of ethanol last year. Martek will provide their algae based technologies and other research to produce a low cost, large scale biofuel process via fermentation which will be funded and distributed by BP Alternative Energy.

Martek has reported that the product has already been tested in the field, but the company still faces the challenge of adapting it to a demanding biofuel market.

“As an alternative to conventional vegetable oils, we believe sugar-to-diesel technology has the potential to deliver economic, sustainable and scalable biodiesel supplies,” said BP Biofuels CEO Philip New in a press release.

Martek’s algae to biofuel production process has the ability to reduce the release of greenhouse gases up to 80% or 90% in contrast with currently used fossil fuels. 

The agreement allows both parties to retain IP owned before entering the partnership, however IP produced during the partnership will be retained by BP with the stipulation that Martek gains exclusive licenses to some applications.

BP has contributed over $1.5 billion to biofuel research, engineering, and distribution spread out through Europe, Brazil, and the United States since 2006.

Special thanks to cleantech.com for the above quotes, for more information please view the article on their website.