During a visit to New Delhi Wednesday, Mr. Hamilton told The Wall Street Journal that countries such as India and China were looking to reduce their reliance on imported crude oil, making them strong natural candidates to increase their use of biofuels they can produce at home to help meet their burgeoning energy needs.

With their vast tracts of agricultural land, Asian countries in general are sitting on huge piles of potential biomass such as bamboo leaves or other plant waste like bagasse, a byproduct of sugar cane processing. To date, converting such waste into cellulosic sugar that can be processed into fuels for running cars or powering industrial plants has proved too difficult to achieve on a commercial basis.

But Renmatix is pioneering a technology that uses so-called “super critical water”– water heated to a certain pressure and temperature –to break down plant waste into a form that can be easily used to make biofuels.

Mr. Hamilton said several companies in India, Malaysia and Thailand had expressed an interest in licensing agreements for the development and production of biofuels using Renmatix’s technology, Mr. Hamilton said.

Biofuels derived from corn and sugar cane plants have long been used in the U.S., Brazil as well as Asia, although producers often have to compete with food producers for the land on which the crops are grown.

Two of the largest energy guzzlers in Asia, India and China, have been looking to step up their usage of renewable energy and green fuels. The biggest challenges likely to confront both nations are devising a viable process for collecting biomass across vast and varied landscapes, and developing ways to sort and store the material before it goes into processing plants, industry officials say.

Previous | Next