Joule Unlimited, a biofuels startup located in Bedford, MA, announced today that it has pocketed $70 million in financing to put toward a facility underway in Hobbs, NM, that will demonstrate Joule’s process for converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuels such as diesel and ethanol.

The new money brings Joule’s funding total to more than $110 million, and comes from founding Joule investor Flagship Ventures, as well as new and existing investors whose identities were not disclosed. Joule will also use the new funding for its technology development and global expansion, according to the announcement. In April 2010, Joule raised $30 million in second-round funding from Flagship and other institutional investors.

The Hobbs, NM, site is expected to be up and running later this year, and is designed to demonstrate how Joule’s technology could scale up to thousands of acres for commercial production. Joule now has 11 patents, covering technology such as  an engineered bacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels from sunlight and carbon dioxide, and a method for producing ethanol at high volumes and high efficiencies.

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San Diego’s Achates Power, a startup developing a radical new design for a diesel-powered truck engine, is blowing its own air horn today about its progress in demonstrating significant improvements in the efficiency and performance of its engine.

Through a series of tests that began just over a year ago, Achates says its prototype has shown improved fuel efficiency, while also meeting the new EPA10 emission standards for heavy trucks, which seek a seven to 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2018. Achates says its independently verified tests show a 20-percent reduction in diesel fuel consumption when compared to the Power Stroke diesel engine that Ford introduced in April for its Super Duty truck line. (By coincidence, Xconomy San Francisco editor Wade Roush has a story today about efforts by ATDynamics of South San Francisco to help the trucking industry shave fuel costs by reducing drag.)

Achates has designed its two-stroke, “opposed-piston” internal combustion engine to be smaller, lighter, and more efficient that a conventional heavy-duty diesel engine with separate, in-line cylinders.

“If you’re in the industry, everybody knows that opposed-piston engines have the potential to be more efficient,” says Achates CEO David Johnson. “But the vast majority of engineers say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s all true, but you still have to meet these tougher emission standards.’ We did that more than a year ago, in September 2010, and we’ve consistently improved since then.”

Johnson previewed Achates’ engine design in a presentation at UC San Diego last year at the Xconomy Forum on the Rise of Smart Energy. Instead of cylinders that operate independently under a cylinder head, the opposed-piston design puts two pistons inside the same cylinder. Internal combustion occurs in the space between the two pistons as they come together, driving each cylinder outward, in the opposite direction, in what’s known as a two-stroke cycle.

Because Achates’ design has no cylinder head, the engine is lighter. And the dual-piston design means compression ratios are higher, so devices used to measure torque, or power, show the design gets more power for the same amount of fuel.

In a comparison with Ford’s Power Stroke engine, Johnson says its tests show similar emission levels out of the engine and reduced weight, cost, and complexity of the engine itself. Achates says its test also showed less than 0.1percent fuel-specific oil consumption, a measure of fuel efficiency within a crankshaft-design reciprocating engine.

“The most efficient engines on the planet today are … Next Page »

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Busy day for a couple of well-known cleantech companies around Boston. One public company has signed a big deal in China, while the other, an ambitious upstart, is carefully protecting its intellectual property as it heads toward large-scale commercialization.

—A123 Systems (NASDAQ: AONE), the Waltham, MA-based maker of lithium ion batteries, said today it has won a contract with China’s Dongfang Electric, a large manufacturer of wind turbines and power equipment. A123 will provide an energy storage system for Dongfang’s manufacturing facility in Hangzhou by the end of this year. Financial terms weren’t given. If all goes well, this will be A123’s first storage system installed in China.

A report in CNET today has more context on the deal: A123’s battery bank will be attached to a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine and diesel generator to test how well the batteries can smooth out the dips in wind energy production. A123 has car battery manufacturing facilities in China, but no grid storage systems there yet, the report says.

—Joule Unlimited, the Cambridge, MA-based biofuels startup, said today it has been awarded a pair of U.S. patents that cover its method for producing ethanol at high volumes and high efficiencies. The method involves genetically engineering “photosynthetic bacteria”—microorganisms that convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into ethanol without fermenting sugars from cellulose or other types of biomass. The patents (#7,981,647 and #7,968,321), which were granted in the past month, cover various enzymatic mechanisms that Joule has engineered into cells to maximize their ethanol productivity.

Joule has received plenty of media attention since it started in 2007. The company is also applying its method to produce energy in the form of diesel fuel, which could power trucks and planes. Joule has previously been awarded patents in the area of diesel production. The overarching idea is to replace fossil fuels, but most biofuels makers have found “they can’t compete on a cost basis,” said Joule senior vice president Troy Campione, on a panel at our XSITE conference last month. Joule, of course, believes it is different.

The company has a pilot plant in Texas that has been producing ethanol and is slated to start producing diesel later this year. Joule says it has also signed a lease for land in New Mexico on which it is building a demonstration-scale plant that will begin operations next year.

While the new patents should help distance Joule from some of its competitors, they don’t necessarily get the company to commercialization any faster. George Church, the Harvard geneticist (and chairman of Joule’s technical advisory board), was quoted in the New York Times in March saying, “It’s not a totally obvious organism and they’ve changed it pretty radically, so it’s not clear they can protect everything by patents.”

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Don Runkle has a bit of news for everyone. It’s engines, not batteries, that will make automobiles cleaner and more efficient. “We unabashedly say that we have the best solution,” says Runkle, the CEO of Allen Park, MI-based engine developer EcoMotors International.

The startup, which brought in $23 million in Series B financing this summer from Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures and Seattle billionaire Bill Gates, has designed an opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine that users fewer parts than traditional motors do and generates more power from each stroke of the engine, CEO Runkle says. He says the “opoc” engine is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than the motors already out there, and a more viable option than switching automobile fleets over to electrical power.

“You’re hearing lots of stuff on cleantech right now that is more efficient, but they miss the other three,” Runkle says, noting the size, weight, and expense of hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles has slowed the widespread adoption of the technology.

The EcoMotors technology comes from Peter Hofbauer, who helped develop and commercialize Volkswagen’s first diesel engine. He started working on the opoc engine in 2003, first for military applications, and the startup was officially launched in 2008 with $10.5 million in funding from Khosla Ventures. EcoMotors’ other two top executives, Runkle and president and COO John Coletti, also have experience developing engines at big automakers. Most of the firm’s development work is done at a facility in Livonia, MI.

EcoMotors’ opoc engine is built with opposing pistons, opposing cylinders, and a single crank in the middle. Together, the components work to create a combustion power event with every revolution, unlike existing 4-stroke engines that combust every other turn, Runkle says. (Check out this video from founder Hofbauer for a more in-depth explanation of the technology.) The arrangement results in lower friction and heat rejection, and the the engine has a higher power density—meaning power per size and weight—than anything else out there. “The holy grail of engines is power density,” says Runkle, who joined the company last year.

The company is developing a the sixth generation of the opoc engine module, which is long and narrow, and perfectly balanced on both sides, enabling multiple modules to be stacked for a most sophisticated engine. An automobile with two of the opoc units stacked could better adjust to fluctuating power needs in traffic, Runkle says. For example, a dual-opoc engine could shut off the power of one of the units while the car is moving at a lower speed, and fire up the second one as the car speeds up. This could be even further extended when paired with an electric motor—what Runkle calls a “tribrid system”—which could be the only part of the engine system running as … Next Page »

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Three Michigan cities are trying out new technology to make their buses greener thanks to $538,000 in federal stimulus funds and an Upper Peninsula company. Engineered Machined Products, based in Escanaba, MI, is installing mini-hybrid thermal conversion kits on 19 buses in Bay City, Battle Creek, and Saginaw. The technology, originally developed for the U.S. Army to make its fleet more efficient by reducing engine overheating, increases fuel economy by 3 to 10 percent, according to Engineered Machine Products. Fuel savings alone can amount to as much as $2,000 per bus annually, the company says.

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Joule Biotechnologies has been busy since we last spoke to the company’s leadership around the time it first started talking publicly in July. The Cambridge, MA-based company, which develops fuels and chemicals in a process that mimics photosynthesis, has been advancing toward commercialization. I got the update from Bill Sims, the firm’s CEO.

For starters, Joule has selected a site for its pilot ethanol production operation where there’s a lot of sun in the American southwest, Sims said. But he declined to specify the location of the pilot site because at least as of December 14 the company had not garnered a local government board’s approval for the operation. Barring unforeseen opposition to the facility, the company plans to announce the location in January. The pilot facility is important because it will help the firm gather more data to back up some of its lofty claims: That its process is capable of making ethanol at $50 per barrel and its annual yields could reach 25,000 gallons acre. The process has previously been demonstrated in small-scale lab experiments.

The pilot facility is expected to test how different photosynthetic organisms perform in the desert climate of the southwest as well as the impacts of different sources of water and carbon dioxide, Sims said. The photosynthetic organisms are used in the firm’s devices called SolarConverters, which will also contain CO2, brackish water, and nutrients. (Joule still won’t tell me what these genetically engineered photosynthetic organisms are exactly.) The converters are designed to capture sunlight, which is a key ingredient for converting the mixture into ethanol. The company’s technology—which it calls “Helioculture”—is noteworthy because it doesn’t require the use of drinking water, food crops such as corn or soybeans, or fermentation, like other methods for producing ethanol.

Joule still plans to link its industrial-scale production plants to facilities that produce lots of waste CO2 such as cement plants, but the firm’s pilot facility will not be connected to a major CO2 emitter because it doesn’t need to be in order to produce ethanol at the scale planned, according to Sims.

What does Joule mean by the “nutrients” and/or the “micro nutrients” it uses in its systems? (The company declined to reveal what these nutrients are back in July, and at least one reader pointed out that these nutrients could be expensive and drive up the firm’s costs of production.) Yet last week the firm told me that those nutrients are phosphorus, nitrogen, and various trace metals—all of which the firm says are quite cheap and abundant. Indeed, phosphorous and nitrogen are ingredients in most fertilizers and play important roles in plant growth, so it makes sense for them to land in Joule’s process that mimics photosynthesis.

However, the firm hasn’t been clear about how it’s going to finance all this work. Joule is only saying that it has backing from a top-tier venture firm in … Next Page »

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Sapphire Energy has tried to maintain a relatively low profile since it established its headquarters in San Diego—especially since last fall when the media seized on reports that Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment had joined a $100 million secondary round of venture funding for the algae biofuels startup.

So when Sapphire opened its San Diego headquarters for a public tour during the Algae Biomass Summit that was held here earlier this month, I jumped at the opportunity. The venture-backed company maintains a 70,000-square-foot facility on La Jolla’s Torrey Pines Mesa, and now has about 120 employees. The company’s labs look like a lot of other biotech labs in San Diego, aside from all the gyrating machines with flasks full of gently swirling emerald-green fluid. But there were two particularly interesting factoids about Sapphire that I learned during the tour.

The first was ironic: Sapphire officials explained that algae consumes 13 to 14 kilograms of carbon dioxide to produce a gallon of green crude oil, which is roughly equivalent to conventional petroleum-based crude—and just as suitable for making gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel. This is a good thing, as the fast-growing algae helps reduce atmospheric CO2.

So what’s ironic? Sapphire and other algae biofuel companies have to pump carbon dioxide into the algae they grow in their laboratories. Moreover, Sapphire spokesman Tim Zenk says one of the big problems that Sapphire is facing these days is getting enough CO2—at an affordable price—to support the company’s algae biofuels research and development efforts. The greenhouse gas is so crucial that Zenk says it limits the growth of algae if it’s in short supply.

Once algae-based crude is refined into a fuel like gasoline, though, it produces CO2 as a byproduct of combustion—just as any engine that burns gasoline, diesel, or aviation fuel produces greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, the argument is that algae biofuels are better for the environment because algae absorbs so much CO2 while it is growing, Sapphire officials estimate that algae-based fuels represent a 70 percent reduction in CO2 gases on a life-cycle basis compared to gasoline, diesel, or aviation fuel made from petroleum-based crude oil.

In the laboratory environment, however, CO2 gas is a valuable commodity. “You can buy carbon dioxide on the market,” Zenk says. “It’s heavily refined and used mostly by the food and beverage industry.” (The beverage industry uses dissolved CO2 to put the bubbly fizz into carbonated sodas.) But algae doesn’t need purified CO2. In fact, Zenk says the gas that goes up the smokestack at most utility power plants is 10 to 15 percent CO2—which is ideal for algal growth. As a result, some startups developing algae-based biofuels intend to … Next Page »

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The Automotive X Prize in Los Angeles announced today it has chosen its first 22 teams to compete for $10 million in prizes that will be awarded for developing super fuel-efficient vehicles (100 miles per gallon or equivalent is the nominal goal). Among this first wave of contenders are three Northwest teams: Bellingham, WA-based Avion; Kinetic Vehicles, based in Cave Junction, OR; and the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

—Avion has built an aerodynamic, diesel-powered, ultra fuel-efficient sports car. The company is led by Craig Henderson.

—Kinetic Vehicles has developed MAX, a turbocharged diesel-powered roadster. Its fuel comes from petroleum, biomass, or straight vegetable oil. Jack McCornack leads the operation.

—Western Washington University’s Vehicle Research Institute (VRI) has developed a series of cars called Viking, which run on gasoline, electricity, or biomethane and compressed natural gas. The VRI was founded by Michael Seal in the 1970s and is now headed by Eric Leonhardt.

The Automotive X Prize, which is sponsored by Progressive Insurance, will kick off its competition next year, holding stage races in several cities. More than 100 additional teams have signed letters of intent to compete so far, according to the X Prize website. The winners are expected to be announced in 2010. “The technologies reflected in this first wave of Registered Teams are as diverse as the teams themselves, and we look forward to hearing more about their individual ideas in advance of the 2009-2010 stage race competition,” said Julie Zona, director of team development and relations for the Automotive X Prize, in a statement.

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Sapphire Energy has not provided many details about its technology since CEO Jason Pyle stepped into the limelight six months ago to announce the San Diego startup has developed a revolutionary process for turning pond scum into high-octane gasoline.

“I have no intention of being secretive,” Pyle told me at the inaugural networking meeting of the newly formed San Diego Biotechnology Network, or SDBN. But after seeing the effects of the boom-and-bust cycle in two recent tech bubbles, Pyle says, “My goal is to maintain a serious and thoughtful approach in a frothy market. I don’t want Sapphire to get caught up in that hype.”

Keeping the media from hyperventilating, however, could be a tall order for a company developing technology with the potential to help the United States break its dependence on imported crude oil. And who can blame us?

At a time when U.S. gasoline prices were arcing beyond $4 a gallon nationwide, Sapphire said it had proven the feasibility of using algae to make “green crude” that can serve as an identical substitute for crude oil. Sapphire said its product, unlike other biofuels, could enter the pipeline at any petroleum refinery for processing into gasoline and other fuels.

The company calls it “the world’s first renewable gasoline.”

Sapphire’s process has been used successfully to make the three most important fuels, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, Pyle says, and all three products have been independently certified to meet fuel standards set by the American Society for Testing and Materials.

The prospects are electrifying, and interest in Sapphire has been extraordinarily high. Sapphire only added fuel to the fire, so to speak, when the company said in September it had raised $100 million in a second venture round from Bill Gates, Arch Venture Partners and others.

Aside from Sapphire’s corporate pedigree and the revolutionary potential of its technology, the company says its green crude is environmentally appealing because it will have no effect on global climate change. Sapphire says it’s technology is “carbon neutral” because its algae absorbs as much carbon dioxide as a car releases when its fueled by renewable gasoline.

In San Diego, Sapphire has been recruiting heavily for chemical engineers, lipids chemists, senior algal production scientists and other skilled workers at its headquarters on Torrey Pines Mesa. The startup currently has about 80 employees, Pyle said.

Sapphire’s CEO remained vague, though, about details of the company’s technology.

“We use genetic engineering, directed evolution, synthetic biology and (agricultural) breeding,” Pyle told me. But Sapphire’s approach specifically does not include fermentation, a technique adopted by some biofuels startups.

“All of our systems are photosynthetic,” Pyle says about a process in which algae “directly converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon products.”

Sapphire already has demonstrated that its technology is feasible, and is now working to show it also can work on an industrial scale, Pyle says.

“We’ve proven this from sunlight-to-gasoline, from soup-to-nuts, so we don’t have any questions about whether the technology works. The only question is about the cost of production.”

He adds that Sapphire’s near-term goals “are to test our existing organisms and to grow those organisms in pilot plants into green crude on a scale larger than we have here in San Diego.”

The company has established a test facility in Las Cruces, N.M., and has been drawing on the scientific resources of New Mexico State University to help develop its fuels.

In an interesting twist, Pyle says the origins of Sapphire began two years ago as … Next Page »

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Burnaby, BC-based NxtGen Emission Controls announced today it has closed a $15.4 million Series B round, led by Denver, CO-based Altira Group. Other investors included Itochu, an undisclosed Japanese auto maker, and return investors Yaletown Venture Partners, GrowthWorks Capital, BC Advantage Funds, and Polygon Financial Investments. NxtGen Emission specializes in “syngas” technology for reducing emissions and optimizing combustion of diesel, biodiesel, natural gas, and gasoline.

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The California Air Resources Board, which is responsible for monitoring and reducing vehicle emissions in the state of California, has picked Woburn-based GEO2 Technologies as one of three winners of the board’s annual Innovative Clean Air Technology Grants. GEO2 Technologies, which we’ve written about here, here, and here, was one of 62 applicants for just three grants awarded by the board, and will receive $185,000 to work on vehicle applications for its diesel particulate filters, which are made from a unique extruded microfiber material. “The grant to GEO2 gives us a chance to demonstrate a budding new technology that could reduce levels of California’s biggest airborne problem, diesel particular matter,” said CARB chairman Mary Nichols in GEO2′s announcement about the grant. 

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In Massachusetts alone, particulate-heavy diesel pollution helps cause 450 premature deaths, 700 heart attacks, 9,900 asthma attacks, and 60,000 missed work days every year, according to the Diesel Pollution Solution Coalition, a Boston-based environmental group. A bill before the state legislature would attack that problem by requiring all heavy-duty diesel vehicles owned, operated, or contracted by the state government to be retrofitted with the “best available” technology to reduce particulate emissions by the end of 2010.

Woburn-based GEO2 Technologies hopes to be one of the companies supplying such technology, and the company announced today that its microfiber-based diesel filters have passed an important environmental certification test in Switzerland, which could help pave the way for the company to sell the devices here and abroad. The VERT Filter Test, administered by the Swiss clean air authority and the occupational health administrations of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, is recognized by a growing number of environmental agencies as a standard for evaluating the effectiveness of diesel filters. According to GEO2, its filters captured 99.95 percent of diesel soot in the governments’ lab tests, meaning that they’ve earned VERT “Phase One” approval.

“By passing Phase One, GEO2 filters have demonstrated superior efficacy under rigorous testing conditions,” GEO2′s president and CEO Rob Lachenauer said in a statement. “As we’ve found, traditional filters currently on the market are big, heavy and expensive, which limits the pace of clean diesel adoption. GEO2 has created the first filtering media for retrofit diesel emissions control applications that meets both diesel emissions and operator’s fuel efficiency needs quickly, cost-efficiently and in a commercially viable way.”

Bilal Zuberi, GEO2′s vice president of product development (pictured above), said that passing the VERT Phase One test indicates that “there are no secondary toxic emissions in our system.” Zuberi said the company would release the results formally in a technical publication.

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The House of Representatives yesterday passed an energy bill that would require automakers to raise the fleet average fuel efficiency for passenger vehicles to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. It’s unclear what parts of the bill might ultimately become law, given strong opposition in the Senate and at the White House to other provisions such as the rescinding of tax breaks for oil companies and a requirement that electrical utilities generate 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources. But for the first time since the 1970s, it seems conceivable that carmakers will be forced to look at new technologies to reduce fuel consumption. And a blog post today by local cleantech executive Bilal Zuberi argues that diesel-fueled cars, of all things, should be part of the solution.

We’re not talking about your father’s noisy, soot-spewing diesel engines here. (My own father, in fact, had a diesel VW Jetta in the early 1980s that got great mileage but produced a frightening amount of black exhaust when you started it up. If you could start it at all—the Michigan winters tended to make the fuel turn to jelly, and for some reason you had to bring the battery indoors on cold nights, like a pet.)

No, Zuberi’s company, GEO2 Technologies of Woburn, is working on components for a new generation of low-RPM diesel engines that actually produce lower emissions—and get better mileage—than conventional gasoline engines. As we explained in an October profile, GEO2′s microfiber ceramic filters are designed to make current emissions control systems for diesel engines cheaper by combining two subsystems (the particle filtration system and the oxidation catalyst, which gets rid of unburned hydrocarbons) into one. That could speed the adoption of diesel technology in North America, which is way behind Europe and Japan when it comes to the spread of clean diesel.

Rather than promoting gas-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius, Zuberi thinks the regulators should push automakers to turn to the “best available technology” to improve fleet standards, including clean diesel. “Meeting the 35 mpg standard proposed in the new energy legislation currently before Congress will mean converting many high torque vehicles to diesel,” Zuberi argues. (By high torque he means SUVs, pickups, minivans, and large family sedans, which are heavier and therefore require more low-RPM power to accelerate.)

Zuberi, who is GEO2′s vice president of product development, gently knocks the media for not making the case for diesel clearer. “Work needs to be done to educate the public on how to evaluate the cost-benefit trade-offs when deciding on their next purchases: gasoline vs. hybrid vs. clean diesel. If not via the media, quite honestly, how is an average US consumer to know that ‘clean diesels’ have, on average, 20 to 30 percent better fuel economy than gasoline engines while providing better torque and performance and lower emissions?”

So, we’re doing our little part today. Go read Bilal’s post.

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Boston doesn’t have an auto technology cluster, but it’s big on cleantech—and it also has Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers. And who should know how cleantech and cars come together better than the proprietors of Cambridge’s Good News Garage and hosts of NPR’s Car Talk show? Not Congress, they figure. Yesterday, the folks in Congressman Edward Markey’s office announced that Tom and Ray have sent a letter to Congress arguing that the U.S. can meet 35 mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency standards in five years—almost a decade sooner than the watered-down compromise language currently under consideration.

“As any listener knows, Tom and Ray are where common sense begins when it comes to cars, and when they say reaching 35 miles per gallon is feasible and the smart play for the American auto industry, people should listen,” said Markey in a statement. The Massachusetts Democrat chairs Congress’s Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, to which the brothers Tappet addressed their letter of October 25.

“There are technologies aplenty that already exist that could be used to meet much higher CAFE standards,” Tom and Ray wrote. They then tick off 15 examples, from hybrid-electric diesels to higher-voltage electrical systems and common rail fuel injection, which is already used in diesel cars.

Tom and Ray note that the auto industry has traditionally resisted government regulations, claiming they would impose various hardships. Yet, the brothers write, “Every single time they’ve resisted safety, environmental, or fuel economy regulations, auto industry predictions have turned out, in retrospect, to be fear-mongering bull-feathers.

“Isn’t it time we (you?) stop falling for this 50 year-long line of baloney?”

You can read the letter here.

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What’s the common thread between the space shuttle’s thermal tiles, log-cabin mansions in Aspen, Play-Doh, pasta makers, and diesel engines? There is one—really—but to find out what it is, you have to pay a visit to GEO2 Technologies in Woburn. The clean-energy startup has turned an industrial warehouse just off I-95 into a giant kitchen-laboratory, complete with giant microwave, for baking advanced diesel-exhaust filters.

The three-year-old company has perfected a way to build these filters out of an unconventional material, ceramic microfibers like those used in the space shuttle’s tiles (of which more later). The technology could keep the air cleaner in diesel-crazy Europe and help diesel technology make a comeback among car buyers in the United States, who have shunned it for decades because of the filthy black soot generated when diesel engines start.

“The auto industry is a huge market undergoing tremendous pain from tightening emissions regulations,” Bilal Zuberi, GEO2′s vice president of product development, told me Tuesday before taking me on a tour of the kitchen-lab. But in the field of emissions controls, “there hasn’t been too much innovation in the area since the invention of the catalytic converter in the 1970s.”

Many diesel engines today, Zuberi explains, contain elaborate, multi-stage exhaust control systems to trap particulates and burn off the unburned hydrocarbons found in diesel smoke. But the more devices are added to these systems, the more backpressure the engine has to deal with, reducing fuel efficiency. The “holy grail” of emissions control, he says, would be a single high-porosity filter that traps soot and burns off the extra hydrocarbons without increasing backpressure.

That’s the specialty of the house at GEO2, which is privately held and has 27 employees. But how the company got there is a twisty tale. The inventors of the original technology behind GEO2 are Gordon Alward and Robert DiChiara, who were neighbors in California. According to Zuberi, one day several years ago Alward and DiChiara were discussing regulations in Aspen, CO, (where Alward had visited) requiring that woodstoves and fireplaces include expensive scrubber systems to reduce wood-smoke pollution. DiChiara, a Boeing engineer who works on heat-shield systems for hypersonic craft like the X-37 space plane, wondered whether light, porous, microfiber-based ceramic materials like those used to protect the space shuttle during atmospheric re-entry might work as scrubbers, capturing the particulates in wood smoke or engine exhaust. Alward and DiChiara wound up patenting the idea, and went to Boston Consulting Group, where Zuberi was a consultant at the time, for advice about starting a company around the technology.

There were a few problems. Existing microfiber-based materials were brittle, flaky, and hard to manufacture in specific shapes like those needed for engine parts. But Zuberi, who had joined BCG after earning a PhD in physical chemistry at MIT, and Rob Lachenauer, a 17-year BCG veteran, saw promise in the technology—not to mention a wide-open market. The four decided to launch GEO2 in 2004, with Lachanauer as CEO and Zuberi in charge of product development.

Most exhaust filters are designed as honeycombs of interlocking tunnels made of conventional ceramics. Zuberi and Lachenauer say the company spent more a year on an ultimately futile attempt to make these honeycombs by boring holes in big blocks of microfiber-based ceramics. The holes were too large and imprecise, and the process was wasteful, since more than half of the material in a bored-out microfiber block would have to be thrown away.

That’s when it occurred to Zuberi and Lachenauer that the process normally used with conventional ceramics, extrusion, might work better. But nobody had ever figured out how to blend ceramic microfibers into the Play-Doh-like consistency needed for the extrusion process, in which the material is squeezed through holes in a die, similar to the extruding discs used in pasta makers but with much more complicated geometries. So GEO2 experimented with different kind of microfibers and binding agents until it found the right blend. The company ultimately bought a whole assembly line of industrial-strength kitchen gadgets to make the filters, including a giant mixer, a torpedo-sized extruder, a 15-foot-tall microwave oven (to dry the extruded filters) and a large sintering oven (to fire them).

Not much is left of Alward and DiChiara’s original plan—but the concept is intact. “We wound up changing the materials, the manufacturing techniques, and the management team, but other than that, everything’s the same,” jokes Zuberi.

In GEO2′s finished filters, ceramic microfibers are cross-linked and bonded at the microscopic level by a glass-like ceramic glue, giving them a structure with high mechanical strength, high porosity, large surface area, and high resistance to thermal shock. This means, for one thing, that even as the filters load up with particulates, exhaust gas still has many paths to travel, lowering backpressure. It also means that the filters are strong enough to survive being heated up to the temperatures needed to oxidize the unburned hydrocarbons that accumulate from diesel soot, a process called regeneration.

As a result, a single structure made from GEO2′s material can act as both a particle filtration system and an oxidation catalyst—potentially saving car and truck manufacturers and their customers a lot of money. “These multifunction filters will be a huge thing in the marketplace,” Zuberi predicts.

Lachenauer says GEO2 is poised to sign mass-manufacturing deals with one or more makers of conventional ceramic honeycomb structures. And now that the company knows how to make its filters, there are many potential applications beyond diesel exhaust systems, Lachenauer says, including better catalytic converters for gasoline engines and filters for the incredibly polluting two-stroke engines in scooters, lawn mowers, and leaf blowers.

Zuberi believes that multifunction diesel filters may also be one key to a potential renaissance for diesel-powered passenger cars in the United States. “If you drive a lot in the city, sure, buy a Prius, but if you are going to do a lot of highway driving, a gasoline hybrid doesn’t gain you anything,” he says. “Meanwhile, diesel cars in Europe and Japan are getting 43 to 53 miles per gallon.” With technology like GEO2′s new filters, the perception that diesel engines produce dirty smoke will be overcome, and manufacturers will be able to improve emissions control without sacrificing profitability, Zuberi predicts. “It’s an easy sell.”

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