greenhouse gas emissions, research next-generation feedstock for fuel production, and produce sustainable feed.
So the company appears to be winding down at least some of its operations. Carbon Capture’s founding CEO, Paul Engh, did not return my call yesterday seeking information about the company’s status.
“Carbon Capture is really Paul Engh,” says Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology (SD-CAB). “He’s got a couple of people working for him, but he’s basically a single guy.”
The company first listed its Calipatria property for sale roughly a year ago, Mayfield says.
Meanwhile, Synthetic Genomics says it is renovating the desert site, and plans to begin algae production there within the next 60 days. In addition to the algal ponds, Synthetic Genomics says it also plans to design and build some photobioreactors that will be used to test and scale up production of engineered strains of algae.
“Over the last year [Silicon Genomics] has been making steady progress in identifying and modifying a variety of strains capable of producing a broad range of products for all of our algae programs, including our food and nutritional products program,” Synthetic Genomics’ founding CEO J. Craig Venter, says in the company’s statement. “The new facility will help us test these strains and production processes in a larger and more real world setting.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow
