FUELS & LUBES INTERNATIONAL
Quarter Four 2014
34
November, is projected to produce
12 kilotons (26.4 million pounds)
per year. Brown declined to give
details about projections beyond
that. He also declined to name his
oil company partners.
Novvi LLC is a joint venture
between USA’s Amyris, Inc. and
Brazil’s Cosan S.A. Industria e
Comercio - the world’s largest pro-
ducer of sugar cane - created to de-
velop, produce, market and distrib-
ute high-performance base oils and
lubricants from renewable sources.
Novvi, based in Emeryville, Calif.,
USA, draws from the strength of
both companies, applying Amyris’
synthetic biology platform to
produce targeted hydrocarbon mol-
ecules from plant sugar and Cosan’s
feedstock capabilities, supply and
distribution infrastructure.
By applying Amyris’ synthetic
biology platform to modify yeast
to produce targeted hydrocarbon
molecules, Novvi is able to create
base oils from plant sugar sources. A
standard fermentation process con-
verts the cane syrup to farnesene,
trademarked as Biofene™.
Farnesene is a linear-branched
olefin. Novvi’s base oil process
converts the farnesene into a base oil
using the same chemical process to
produce polyalphaolefin, a synthetic
chemical compound widely used in
synthetic lubricant formulations.
Biofene™ is then finished chemi-
cally to create premium base oils.
These base oils are designed to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions
by more than 80% when compared
with any conventional petroleum
base oils. In addition, they are
biodegradable, performwell in cold
weather with pour points as low as
-60
O
C and have high-performance
viscosity properties with viscosity
indexes above 120 cSt.
What sets Novvi apart from the
others is that the company is using
this core technology to convert the
sugar cane to a direct hydrocarbon
molecule in just one step. No one
else is doing this. There is no other
renewable hydrocarbon base oil in
the market either.
“You don’t compromise on the
environment. You don’t compro-
mise on performance, and you don’t
compromise on the economics. We
can be just as good or better than a
petroleum product,” Brown said.
“Our biggest challenge is the
fact that the lubricants industry is
not known as an innovative indus-
try and does not like change. They
need to believe that the technology
is real and can do what we say it
can and that there’s a big enough
demand to start buying and
using it,” he said.
These base oils are
designed to reduce
greenhouse gas
emissions by more
than 80%, when
compared with any
conventional
petroleum base oils.
