VentureBeat

Want to fill up your Volkswagen or Hummer on renewables, as Arnold Schwarzenegger does? Biodiesel, a vegetable-oil based variant on petroleum diesel, is your fuel. As we pointed out last week, the fuel doesn’t get as much attention as high-tech biofuels like cellulosic ethanol and “green” gasoline. However, substances called furanics may help bring biodiesel back into the spotlight.

Furanics, while not actually identical to biodiesel, might as well be — they burn in diesel engines quite well. Two researchers at the University of California, Davis say that a process they developed to reduce plant matter to furanics could be more efficient than existing methods for making cellulosic ethanol.

That should be a red flag for the ethanol industry, because furanics would use the same sort of feedstocks that current cellulosic ethanol processes do — woody materials like switchgrass and pulped timber. But cellulosic ethanol has proved difficult to make, requiring energy-intensive processes to break down the stiff cellulosic fibers. Professors Mascal and Nikitin say they’ve hit on a simple process to directly convert cellulose into furan.

A couple more details are at Chemical & Engineering News, while the full study was published in Angewandte Chemie, an international journal of chemistry.

Interestingly, it appears that Chevron Technology Ventures, the oil giant’s venture investment arm, helped fund the UC Davis researchers with a grant. Chevron isn’t the only oil company interested in furanics; as Gas 2.0 points out, Shell spun off Avantium to commercialize the same biofuel.

Separately, it’s beginning to look like jatropha will work well as a feedstock for regular biodiesel. Following our article on Innovation Fuels last Thursday, another company has announced funding to work with the oil-producing plant. Globes is reporting that Galten, an Israeli startup, has taken $10 million in funding led by Xpert Financial Group.

Where Innovation is looking to grow the plant in Asia, though, Galten has laid its chips on Africa, with a lease on 500,000 acres in Ghana. According to their own calculations, if all of the land were planted, it would be enough for a significant 600,000 tons of oil per planting, which transfers fairly directly to biodiesel.

Apprion, a Moffet Field, Calif. company that makes wireless integration systems for harsh environments like industrial plants, has raised a new round of funding led by a strategic investment from cellular giant Motorola.

Plants are a little different from your standard wireless environment — temperature extremes, toxic chemicals and dangerous equipment are all par for the course, and the average worker isn’t exactly lugging around a laptop. That being the case, the requirements for networking are a bit different. Sensors, cameras, RFID tags and walkie-talkies all need to mesh together, which can be difficult if they’re all made by different companies.

Like a Cisco for the manufacturing world, Apprion does the work of integrating different wireless applications together and providing centralized controls and visualization, providing a brain for the growing nervous systems of sensors and monitors scattered around modern foundries, pharmaceutical plants, refineries and other facilities.

The opportunity to become the go-to company for Apprion’s kind of product isn’t small, according to CEO Mike Bradley. He says there are about 76,000 plants with 100 or more employees, the size at which they are likely to want networks in place. Systems for each of those plants range from $100,000 to $1 million dollars.

A number of other companies are working on wireless equipment and sensors to go into industry, hospitals, businesses and even the growing, green sort of plants. Motorola itself makes communication equipment for construction and industry workers, including cell phones and walkie-talkies. However, there are relatively few companies working on tying all those pieces of equipment, including RFID sensors, together in a software interface.

The exact size of the investment wasn’t disclosed, but Apprion raised $12 million in its first round, and has now taken a total of $23.5 million. Motorola led, and was joined by existing investors Chevron Technology Ventures, Anvil Investment Associates, Advanced Technology Ventures and Allegis Capital.