Oakbio and OSU Awarded $500,000 Grant to Develop System for production of Butanol and Plastics from CO2

PRLog (Press Release) - Apr. 21, 2014 - SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- The Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation (CCEMC) of Alberta, Canada announced today that it has awarded a $500,000 grant to Oakbio, a Sunnyvale, CA-based cleantech company, and The Ohio State University for their proposal submission; “Conversion of industrial CO2 emissions into biofuels and chemicals."

“The CCEMC is thrilled to support Oakbio in their leading efforts to convert industrial carbon dioxide emissions into biofuels and chemicals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process,” said CCEMC Chair Eric Newell.

“Butanol is a fuel and feedstock, and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are versatile plastics. Together these products are sufficient in volume of demand to account for the capture of a significant amount of globally produced CO2. The Oakbio process is intended to make that large scale capture and conversion of waste CO2 a profitable business,” said Oakbio President and Chief Scientist, Brian Sefton.

A collaboration with Prof. F. Robert Tabita of The Ohio State University to further  develop this n-butanol production platform is a key part of this proposal. “Synthetic biology principals will guide the further construction of optimized strains for product formation” said Dr. Tabita.

Key underlying technology for this work was developed under a grant from the Advanced Research Projects Administration Energy (ARPA-E), and performed at The Ohio State University.

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