Biofuels Make a Comeback

“Make something people want to buy at a price they can afford. Hardly a revolutionary business strategy, but one that the American biofuels industry has, to date, eschewed. Now a new wave of companies think that they have the technology to change the game and make unsubsidised profits. If they can do so reliably, and on a large scale, biofuels may have a lot more success in freeing the world from fossil fuels than they have had until now. … Instead of ethanol, [today’s biofuel producers] plan to make hydrocarbons, molecules chemically much more similar to those that already power planes, trains and automobiles.”