In the middle of the 2000s, American energy policy, venture capital and university science briefly agreed on one idea: the next great transportation fuel would come not from corn kernels or oil wells, but from the stalks, leaves, wood chips and grasses that farms and forests produce in huge quantities and mostly throw away. Dozens of companies were founded to turn that plant waste into ethanol. One of the most scientifically interesting came from western Massachusetts. Its name was SunEthanol, and its whole strategy rested on a single bacterium found in the forest soil near the Quabbin Reservoir. The company called it the Q Microbe.
This article covers the full story of SunEthanol: the science behind the Q Microbe, the people who founded the company, how it was funded, its rebranding as Qteros, its commercial strategy, the reasons it struggled, and what its history teaches about the economics of advanced biofuels.
What SunEthanol Was
SunEthanol, Inc. was a biofuels technology company founded in 2006 in Amherst, Massachusetts, to commercialize a process for making cellulosic ethanol, which is fuel-grade alcohol made from the non-edible, fibrous parts of plants rather than from sugar or starch. The company began in 2006 as a spin-off from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and changed its name in 2008. Under its later name, Qteros, it moved its headquarters to Marlborough, Massachusetts.
What set SunEthanol apart from most of its competitors was its technical approach. Most cellulosic ethanol developers at the time used a multi-step industrial process that relied on large amounts of purchased enzymes. SunEthanol wanted to replace most of that process with one naturally occurring organism that could both break down plant fiber and ferment the resulting sugars into ethanol in a single vessel. This approach is called consolidated bioprocessing, or CBP. The organism was the Q Microbe, a strain of the bacterium Clostridium phytofermentans.
The Scientific Origin: Susan Leschine, Thomas Warnick and the Quabbin Soil Sample
The company’s roots go back to a microbiology laboratory at UMass Amherst led by Professor Susan Leschine, who had spent years studying bacteria that decompose plant material in soils and sediments. These microbes matter in nature because they recycle the carbon locked in dead plants, which makes them a key part of the global carbon cycle. They also caught the attention of energy researchers, because any organism that can efficiently take apart plant fiber could, in principle, be put to work in a biorefinery.
The bacterium was isolated by Thomas Warnick, a member of Leschine’s lab, from forest soil collected near the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. The Quabbin, a large reservoir that supplies water to the Boston area, is surrounded by protected forest, an environment rich in decaying wood and leaf litter and therefore in microbes adapted to eating it. The organism had not been described by science before, and Clostridium phytofermentans was recognized as a new species in 2002. The species name roughly means “plant fermenter,” which describes exactly what made it valuable.
In congressional testimony, Leschine explained why this isolate stood out. She said it decomposes nearly all of the components of biomass and produces ethanol as its main product. Most cellulose-degrading bacteria make a mix of acids and gases. An organism that both eats almost the whole plant and favors ethanol as its end product was exactly what a fuel company needed.
Why the Q Microbe Was Considered Special
Leschine and her colleagues documented several traits that made the Q Microbe look promising for industrial use.
A broad diet. Plant biomass is not a single substance. It is a mix of cellulose, hemicellulose (including xylan), pectin, starch and lignin. Many microbes can digest one or two of these but not the rest. Leschine’s team found that pectin, starch, xylan and other hard-to-digest plant polymers posed no problem for the microbe, and she described it as a true generalist. In practical terms, a generalist organism could convert more of each ton of feedstock into fuel, which directly improves yield and economics.
Its own enzyme system. Breaking cellulose into sugars requires enzymes called cellulases. In conventional processes these are produced separately, often by fungi, and bought or manufactured on site at significant cost. The Q Microbe makes its own. Leschine’s 2008 USDA seminar presentation noted that, according to analysis of the genome sequence, the Q Microbe produces a multi-component cellulase system that is not organized into a cellulosome, with no evidence of scaffoldin-like proteins. This distinguished it from other well-known cellulose-degrading clostridia, such as Clostridium thermocellum, which use large cellulosome complexes.
Close attachment to plant material. The same research showed the Q Microbe associates closely with cellulose and grows as a biofilm on it, which suggested an efficient way of attacking solid biomass.
A carbon-friendly profile. Leschine said the process by which the microbe makes ethanol is carbon neutral and could even be carbon negative, depending on the biomass used.
There is also an interesting later twist. Leschine has pointed out that close relatives of the Q Microbe live in the human gut microbiome, where they convert dietary fiber into health-promoting nutrients. That makes sense: the same skill of breaking down tough plant fiber is useful both in a forest floor and in the human intestine.
The Problem SunEthanol Was Trying to Solve
To understand why investors were excited about a soil bacterium, it helps to understand the central economic problem of cellulosic ethanol.
First-Generation vs. Cellulosic Ethanol
First-generation ethanol in the United States is made mainly from corn starch. Starch is easy to break into glucose, and yeast ferments glucose into ethanol very efficiently. The process is mature and cheap, but it uses a food crop, competes for farmland, and offers limited greenhouse gas savings compared with gasoline once fertilizer, farming and processing energy are counted.
Cellulosic ethanol uses lignocellulosic biomass instead: corn stover (the stalks and leaves left after harvest), corn cobs, wheat straw, sugarcane bagasse, switchgrass, miscanthus, forestry residues and wood waste. These materials are abundant, inexpensive and do not compete directly with food. The difficulty is that plants evolved over hundreds of millions of years to resist being eaten. Cellulose fibers are tightly packed in crystalline form, wrapped in hemicellulose and sealed with lignin, a tough polymer that blocks enzymes. Scientists call this resistance “biomass recalcitrance.”
The Conventional Multi-Step Process
A typical cellulosic ethanol plant of that era involved several separate stages:
- Pretreatment, using heat, pressure, acid, ammonia or steam to open up the plant structure.
- Enzyme production or purchase, to obtain the cellulases and hemicellulases needed for the next step.
- Enzymatic hydrolysis, where those enzymes convert cellulose and hemicellulose into sugars.
- Fermentation, usually with yeast, to turn the sugars into ethanol.
- Distillation and dehydration, to recover fuel-grade ethanol.
Enzymes were one of the most expensive parts of the chain. Qteros said its approach aimed to simplify the multi-step process and remove the need for expensive enzymes, which could account for roughly 30 percent of production costs. Estimates of enzyme cost per gallon varied widely across studies and years, but nearly every techno-economic analysis of the period identified enzymes as a major barrier.
Consolidated Bioprocessing: The SunEthanol Bet
Consolidated bioprocessing merges enzyme production, hydrolysis and fermentation into one step performed by one organism or a small microbial community. The concept had been discussed in the academic literature for years, with Lee Lynd of Dartmouth among its best-known advocates, and the U.S. Department of Energy considered it one of the most promising long-term routes to cheap cellulosic fuel.
Most CBP efforts took one of two paths. Some engineered a good ethanol producer, such as yeast, to make cellulases. Others tried to improve a natural cellulose degrader so it would make more ethanol. SunEthanol’s argument was that the Q Microbe already did both reasonably well in its natural state. Company executive Jef Sharp argued that optimizing a naturally occurring microbe let Qteros make ethanol without the long, costly genetic engineering needed to adapt a different organism.
The expected savings were considerable. Because the microbe’s own enzymes were judged sufficient, the costly enzyme step could be removed and production consolidated into a single tank, and Leschine said that low estimates put the cost reduction from this consolidation at 25 percent.
Founding and Early Years (2006–2008)
The Founding Team
SunEthanol was built by a mix of scientists and business people. Corporate records list its founders as Stephan Rogers, Jeffrey Hausthor, Susan Leschine, Jonathan Gorham, John Fabel and Jeffrey C. Sharp, with the company headquartered in Amherst. Leschine served as founder and chief scientist, while the business founders handled company building, fundraising and operations. Stephen Rogers would later play a central role again, at the very end of the company’s history.
The company licensed the Q Microbe technology from UMass Amherst. This model of university research being turned into a venture-backed start-up was common in the biofuels wave of the time, and it gave SunEthanol a clear scientific foundation and patent position from the start.
National Attention
SunEthanol quickly became one of the most visible cellulosic ethanol stories in New England. Leschine testified before the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in 2007, at a hearing on the future of biofuels. In her testimony she said SunEthanol was working to take the technology from the lab to the marketplace and develop an economically viable process using the Q Microbe to produce renewable transportation fuel from biomass. National newspapers covered the company, and the Washington Post profiled the microbe in October 2007.
Series A Funding
The first institutional money arrived in 2007. Contemporary reporting noted that SunEthanol received millions of dollars from several venture funds and other investors, including VeraSun Energy, then one of the largest renewable fuel producers in the United States. That first round totaled $3.6 million, and it included the Massachusetts-based investors Camros Capital and Long River Ventures, along with Battery Ventures.
The participation of VeraSun was important. It showed that a major corn ethanol producer saw cellulosic technology as a path to diversify its feedstock and protect itself against future policy shifts. With the first round closed, Leschine’s researchers began studying which forms of biomass the microbe preferred and optimizing pretreatment and fermentation conditions.
Collaboration With Harvard
SunEthanol also looked beyond its home university for scientific firepower. In June 2008 the company announced a partnership with Harvard University researchers to develop genetically modified bacterial strains that would make its process more efficient. This was a notable development. Although the company marketed the advantages of a natural organism, it recognized that commercial performance would likely require improving the microbe’s ethanol yield, ethanol tolerance and growth rate.
The Policy Backdrop: Why 2007 and 2008 Felt Like the Right Moment
SunEthanol’s timing was shaped heavily by federal policy. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 greatly expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard. Congress mandated 36 billion gallons a year of biofuels, of which 16 billion gallons had to be cellulosic ethanol of the kind the company was working to produce. These volumes were to be phased in by 2022.
The cellulosic mandate essentially created a guaranteed future market for a product that did not yet exist at commercial scale. Combined with high oil prices in 2008, concern about energy security, growing worry about climate change and the “food versus fuel” debate surrounding corn ethanol, it made cellulosic start-ups some of the most attractive targets in clean technology venture investing. Massachusetts political leaders were also keen to build a clean-energy industry in the state, and SunEthanol became one of their favorite local examples.
Rebranding as Qteros and the $25 Million Series B
In December 2008, SunEthanol announced two major changes at once: a new name and a much larger financing round. The company raised $25 million in Series B financing from a group that included BP and Soros Fund Management and changed its name to Qteros. The new name referred to its Q Microbe technology for producing liquid fuel from non-food plants and waste.
The announcement had political weight. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, a supporter of the clean-energy industry, revealed the funding and the new name at a clean energy conference. At the time, the company was based in Hadley, Massachusetts, near Amherst.
The Investor Syndicate
The Series B investor list was impressive for a company of that size. New investor Venrock led the round alongside existing investor Battery Ventures, and BP and Soros Fund Management joined as new backers, together with Series A investors Long River Ventures and Camros Capital. Venrock, originally the venture arm of the Rockefeller family, and Battery Ventures were well-established technology investors. BP brought the credibility and potential downstream reach of one of the world’s largest oil companies.
New Leadership From DuPont
Along with the money came a new chief executive. CEO Bill Frey had left his position as head of DuPont’s biofuels division to lead the company in June 2008. His argument for the technology was straightforward. He said the true value of the microbe lay in avoiding both the capital needed for enzyme production and the cost of the enzymes themselves.
With the new funding, Frey said Qteros planned to build a pilot plant and double its staff of about 20 over the following year.
The Licensing Business Model
Qteros did not plan to become a fuel producer that owned and ran its own large plants. Instead, it intended to license its technology to ethanol producers that wanted to move beyond corn into other feedstocks. This capital-light approach had clear advantages. Building a commercial cellulosic plant could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and a licensing model let a small technology company avoid that burden while potentially collecting royalties across many plants. The trade-off was that a licensing company’s success depended entirely on persuading other firms that its technology was ready to bet on.
Growth, Patents and Partnerships (2009–2011)
Valero Enters Through the VeraSun Bankruptcy
The financial crisis of 2008 hit the ethanol industry hard. VeraSun Energy, one of SunEthanol’s first strategic investors, filed for bankruptcy in late 2008, a casualty of falling ethanol margins and bad bets on corn prices. Its assets were sold off, and one of the buyers was Valero, the largest independent oil refiner in the United States.
In May 2009 Qteros announced that Valero had become a significant investor by acquiring certain VeraSun assets. The company now had two oil majors, BP and Valero, among its shareholders. At that time Qteros described its process under the brand “C3,” for Complete Cellulosic Conversion.
The Springfield Pilot Plant and Federal Support
Qteros also attracted public funding. The company announced it had received $2 million in U.S. government appropriations for a pilot plant and planned to locate that plant in Springfield, Massachusetts. Over roughly a year and a half, it had received four Department of Energy grants for technology development, and its lab team reported a 15-fold improvement in the productivity of its process.
A pilot plant is a critical step for any industrial biotechnology company. Organisms that perform well in flasks and small bioreactors often behave differently in larger vessels, where mixing, heat transfer, contamination and feedstock variability become serious issues. A licensing company in particular needed pilot-scale data to convince plant builders and operators.
A Change at the Top
In January 2010, Qteros replaced its chief executive. John McCarthy, an executive with experience in the bioenergy industry, took over from Bill Frey. Such leadership changes are common in venture-backed companies moving from research toward commercialization, as boards seek leaders with operational and scale-up experience.
The Q Microbe Patent
In March 2010, the company secured a key piece of intellectual property. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent based on the Q Microbe, developed by Leschine and Warnick, and Qteros was the exclusive licensee. The company reported that the microbe had been tested on a wide range of feedstocks, including wheat straw, sugarcane bagasse, switchgrass and agricultural residues such as corn stover, cobs and fiber.
Qteros also filed further patent applications on improvements to its organism and process. Published applications from the company covered topics such as controlling fermentation products through vitamin supplementation and biocatalysts that produce deregulated cellulases, which shows the direction of its research: tuning the microbe’s metabolism toward ethanol and boosting its enzyme output.
Series C and the Praj Industries Partnership
At the start of 2011, Qteros announced its most important commercial deal. In January 2011 the company closed the first $22 million tranche of its Series C financing, which it said would fund faster development and commercialization. Before this round, Qteros had raised nearly $30 million.
At the same time, Qteros formed a strategic partnership with India’s Praj Industries, a major ethanol technology company with plants installed in more than 50 countries, a deal that reflected Qteros’s licensing approach. Praj was a natural partner. It designed and built ethanol plants and could integrate the Q Microbe process into its offering for sugarcane and grain ethanol producers, many of whom had plenty of bagasse and other residues. For a licensing company, a partner with that global reach was exactly the channel it needed.
Decline and Restructuring (2011–2012)
Despite strong investors, patents, government grants and a major international partner, Qteros ran into serious trouble later in 2011.
Layoffs
In November 2011, news broke that Qteros had cut most of its workforce. Xconomy reported that the heavily funded company had laid off most of its staff, including CEO John McCarthy. A source told the publication that Qteros could not raise money and had been reduced to a skeleton crew focused on selling anything of value, with senior vice president Mick Sawka serving as acting CEO. Sawka declined to explain the reasons for the layoffs or give the number of people affected.
The 2012 Revival
The story did not quite end there. In late 2012, a group from the original SunEthanol team took control of what remained. Three of SunEthanol’s original founders announced a revival of Qteros, with Stephen Rogers, the former SunEthanol chief operating officer who had helped raise $35 million for the earlier start-up, as the new CEO. The company said it had finalized a licensing deal with UMass Amherst in November covering all products made with the Q Microbe, including chemicals.
The reborn company was much smaller. It aimed to raise $3 million to $5 million to redevelop its Q Microbe technology at a far smaller scale, with 12 employees. Rogers said there was no immediate need for lab or office space since the company would work with research partners, but it expected to open a small lab by mid-2013. The expansion of the license to include chemicals was a sign of a broader industry shift, as many biofuel developers moved toward higher-value biochemicals, where margins could be better than in commodity fuel.
After this point, the public record on Qteros becomes sparse. Investment databases now classify the company as inactive. CB Insights lists Qteros as dead and estimates total funding at about $48 million.
Why SunEthanol and Qteros Struggled
No single cause explains what happened to the company, and much of the internal decision-making was never made public. However, the wider history of cellulosic ethanol makes the main pressures clear.
The Scale-Up Gap
Consolidated bioprocessing was, and largely remains, a difficult technology to scale. Natural cellulose-degrading bacteria such as clostridia are strict anaerobes, often grow more slowly than industrial yeast, and tend to tolerate lower ethanol concentrations. Low final ethanol concentration in the broth increases distillation energy costs, which can wipe out savings from avoiding enzymes. The Q Microbe also produces other compounds besides ethanol; Leschine’s own research listed propanol, propionate, acetate and lactate among its fermentation products, and every carbon atom diverted to these products reduces fuel yield. The 15-fold productivity gain Qteros reported was real progress, but the distance between a promising lab organism and a reliable commercial process is very large.
Falling Enzyme Costs Undercut the Value Proposition
The Q Microbe’s main selling point was eliminating enzyme costs. During the same years, enzyme makers such as Novozymes and Genencor (later part of DuPont) invested heavily in cutting the cost of their cellulase products and reported major reductions. Every improvement in commercial enzymes narrowed the advantage that a CBP organism could offer. A technology defined by what it removes from the process is vulnerable when the thing it removes becomes cheaper.
The Financing Climate
The global financial crisis of 2008 and the collapse of several high-profile cellulosic projects made investors far more cautious about the sector. An industry outlook published in late 2011 noted that finding investment for second-generation biofuels had been difficult for everyone, and it named Qteros among the cellulosic technology developers facing that situation. Building first-of-a-kind plants required capital that venture funds alone could not supply, and project finance lenders wanted proven performance at scale, creating a classic chicken-and-egg problem.
Low Oil and Natural Gas Prices and Policy Uncertainty
The shale revolution changed the energy outlook in the United States in the early 2010s, reducing the sense of urgency around energy independence. The cellulosic portion of the Renewable Fuel Standard also never matched its statutory targets, because commercial production lagged far behind. The Environmental Protection Agency repeatedly lowered the required cellulosic volumes, which weakened the guaranteed market that had attracted investors in the first place.
The Licensing Model’s Hidden Risk
Licensing kept Qteros’s capital needs lower than those of plant-building rivals, but it also meant the company could not prove its technology at commercial scale on its own terms. Licensees and partners understandably wanted demonstration data before committing to large projects, and generating that data required precisely the kind of capital that became hard to raise.
A Sector-Wide Shakeout
Qteros was far from alone. A 2012 list of biofuel casualties noted that Coskata had cancelled its plans for cellulosic biofuel from biomass after shelving a planned $100 million IPO. Range Fuels closed its Georgia plant after receiving substantial federal support. KiOR later went bankrupt after its Mississippi facility failed to reach expected output. Mascoma, the best-known CBP developer and a close competitor of Qteros, eventually moved toward selling engineered yeast to the corn ethanol industry before its assets were sold. Even the large commercial cellulosic plants built in the mid-2010s by major players struggled, and several were idled or sold within a few years.
SunEthanol in the Context of Its Competitors
SunEthanol’s place in the industry is easiest to understand by comparing approaches.
Enzymatic hydrolysis with yeast fermentation was the mainstream route, pursued by large companies with access to enzyme suppliers. Its strength was the use of well-understood yeast; its weakness was enzyme cost and process complexity.
Engineered-yeast CBP, the main route of Mascoma, aimed to get yeast to make some of its own enzymes. Yeast offered industrial robustness and high ethanol tolerance but limited natural ability to digest cellulose.
Thermochemical and hybrid routes, such as gasification followed by catalytic or microbial conversion, as pursued by Range Fuels and Coskata, avoided enzymes entirely but faced their own engineering challenges.
Natural-organism CBP, SunEthanol’s route, started from a microbe that already degraded biomass and produced ethanol, then sought to improve it. Its strength was the breadth of the microbe’s natural abilities; its weakness was that natural cellulose degraders are rarely industrial workhorses.
Each approach made sense on paper. In practice, all of them ran into the same hard realities of feedstock logistics, scale-up risk, capital intensity and competition with cheap fossil fuel.
The Scientific and Industrial Legacy
Although SunEthanol never operated a commercial plant, its story left a meaningful legacy.
Contributions to microbiology. Clostridium phytofermentans became a well-studied model organism for plant biomass degradation. Its genome was analyzed in detail, and research on its enzyme systems and metabolism added to scientific understanding of how anaerobic bacteria break down plant matter. The organism has since been reclassified by taxonomists under a different genus name, Lachnoclostridium phytofermentans, reflecting broader revisions in clostridial classification, which is a useful detail for readers searching the scientific literature.
Insight into the gut microbiome. The connection Leschine later highlighted between the Q Microbe and fiber-fermenting bacteria in the human gut shows how research driven by energy goals can feed into entirely different fields such as human health.
A case study in university commercialization. SunEthanol is a textbook example of a university spin-off that moved quickly from discovery to venture funding, national publicity and strategic partnerships with oil majors and global engineering firms. It also shows how dependent such companies are on financing cycles and policy stability outside their control.
Lessons for today’s bioeconomy. Modern developers of sustainable aviation fuel, renewable chemicals and engineered microbes face many of the same challenges Qteros did: proving performance at scale, competing with cheap incumbents, and depending on policy mandates. The SunEthanol story suggests that a strong biological discovery is necessary but not sufficient. Process economics, scale-up capital and patient investors matter just as much.
Timeline of Key Events
- 2002: Clostridium phytofermentans, isolated from Quabbin Reservoir forest soil, is recognized as a new species.
- 2006: SunEthanol is founded in Amherst, Massachusetts, as a UMass Amherst spin-off to commercialize the Q Microbe.
- 2007: The company closes a $3.6 million Series A round with backers including VeraSun Energy, Battery Ventures, Camros Capital and Long River Ventures; Susan Leschine testifies before Congress.
- June 2008: Bill Frey, formerly head of DuPont’s biofuels division, becomes CEO; a research partnership with Harvard is announced.
- December 2008: SunEthanol renames itself Qteros and raises $25 million in a Series B led by Venrock and Battery Ventures, with BP and Soros Fund Management.
- 2009: Valero becomes a significant investor through VeraSun assets; Qteros plans a pilot plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, supported by federal appropriations.
- January 2010: John McCarthy takes over as CEO.
- March 2010: A U.S. patent based on the Q Microbe is issued, with Qteros as exclusive licensee.
- January 2011: Qteros closes a $22 million first tranche of Series C financing and partners with Praj Industries.
- November 2011: Most staff are laid off, including the CEO.
- Late 2012: Original founders led by Stephen Rogers revive Qteros on a small scale and finalize an expanded license from UMass Amherst.
Frequently Asked Questions About SunEthanol
What was SunEthanol?
SunEthanol was a Massachusetts biofuels company founded in 2006 to commercialize cellulosic ethanol technology based on the Q Microbe, a bacterium discovered at UMass Amherst.
What is the Q Microbe?
The Q Microbe is a strain of Clostridium phytofermentans, a soil bacterium that can break down most components of plant biomass and ferment them into ethanol. Its name refers to the Quabbin Reservoir area where it was found.
What is consolidated bioprocessing?
Consolidated bioprocessing is an approach in which a single organism produces the enzymes that break down plant fiber and also ferments the resulting sugars into fuel, combining several industrial steps into one.
Is SunEthanol the same company as Qteros?
Yes. SunEthanol changed its name to Qteros in December 2008 when it announced its Series B financing.
Who invested in SunEthanol and Qteros?
Investors included Venrock, Battery Ventures, Long River Ventures, Camros Capital, Soros Fund Management, BP, VeraSun Energy and later Valero Energy.
Did SunEthanol ever produce ethanol commercially?
No. The company advanced its technology through laboratory work, grants, patents and pilot plans, but it never operated a commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant.
What happened to the company?
Qteros laid off most of its staff in late 2011 after struggling to raise money. A smaller version was revived by original founders in late 2012, but the company is now listed as inactive in investment databases.
Conclusion
SunEthanol began with a genuinely remarkable discovery: a bacterium from a Massachusetts forest that could digest nearly every part of a plant and turn it into fuel. That discovery, combined with ambitious federal mandates, high oil prices and a wave of clean-technology enthusiasm, turned a university lab project into a company backed by top venture firms, two oil majors and a global ethanol plant builder. As Qteros, it raised tens of millions of dollars, earned patents, attracted government support and formed international partnerships.
Yet the company ran into the same obstacles that defeated most of the cellulosic ethanol pioneers of its generation: the enormous difficulty of scaling a biological process, falling costs for competing enzyme technology, a harsher financing climate, cheaper fossil energy, and a federal mandate that never delivered the market it promised. The history of SunEthanol remains one of the clearest illustrations of both the promise and the hard economics of turning plant waste into fuel, and the science behind the Q Microbe continues to inform research on how microbes break down the plant world.
