100 MPG Car Guys Getting Into Biofuels

Mike Cheiky, founder of Transonic Combustion, is going to take the wraps off his latest venture soon.

The company, called CoolPlanetBioFuels (see nondescript, vague Website here) promises to deliver “revolutionary technology to maximize fuel energy from cellulosic biomass.”

Although it’s tough to guess, I will speculate that the company has come up with a way or a machine to break down cellulosic plant matter in a more energy efficient manner by cooking it at high pressures.

Cellulosic material, otherwise known as wood, largely consists of three substances: cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Cellulose can be converted to sugars, which can then be converted to alcohol for cars, in a fairly straightforward manner. The challenge lay in getting to it. First, you have to get through the lignin. Lignin is a tough substance that serves as a plant’s walls. We have coal, which is fossilized plant material, because the lignin outlasted the microbes trying to get to the plant’s cellulose.

Lignin can be removed with steam or acid, but that takes energy. Any system that can accomplish that task with less energy will be in high demand in the future. (For some companies doing interesting things with lignin, check out Zeachem and Coskata. After breaking down the plant matter, Zeachem turns cellulose and hemicellulose into acetic acid and cooks the lignin for hydrogen. Later, it all gets combined into ethanol. Coskata meanwhile breaks up plants into synthetic gases.)

So why would I guess CoolPlanetBioFuels is working on machines rather than more specifically a fuel? Because Transonic is a high-pressure company. It has come up with an injection system similar to those that are put in diesel cars for regular gas cars that let the vehicles get 100 miles per gallon.

The strange part here is that Transonic is still in the conceptual stage so it’s a bit unusual to have the founder move onto something else. Transonic has created a car that uses its part and it has been talking to major manufacturers, but it’s not in mass production. That could mean that Transonic is getting new management to help it scale or that it may have hit a plateau for the moment.

Venrock and Khosla Ventures, by the way, invested in Transonic.