Antecy

The company Antecy is not just appeared out of nowhere, actually, it arose from a logical following step, a step that co-founder Paul O’Connor and his team consisting of people from the development industry who have worked for petrochemical companies such as Shell and Akzo Nobel had to take after they succeeded to convert biomass into bio-fuels and chemicals in an efficient and successful way. This company named BIOeCON was founded in 2006 and in 2007 it started a Joint Venture named KiOR. This Joint Venture went public in an IPO and is now traded on NASDAQ. At this moment KiOR has started its first commercial plant in Columbus, Mississippi, and is producing cellulosic gasoline and diesel from forestry wastes. In 2010 BIOeCON entered into a Joint Development Agreement, this time with a state owned oil giant from Brazil called Petrobras. The project named BiCHEM is focused on developing an technology for the production of high value chemicals and fuel additives from agricultural wastes. This technology is now being scaled-up by an international R & D team at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. After the establishment of KiOR, BIOeCON founder Paul O’Connor decided that the next logical step from bio-based fuels would be solar fuels and so he founded in 2010, together with his companion Sasa Marinic, the company Antecy with the goal of developing technologies for renewable and sustainable energy production. After all, biomass is nothing more than million years of solar radiation stored via biomass like plants and trees into fossil fuels like natural gas, coal and oil. So actually, Antecy does the same as what nature does, namely producing a fuel with help of the energy of the sun, only more efficient. While biomass is able to absorb approximately 1–2 % of the sun’s radiation and after converting it to a fuel, there is only 0.6 – 1.2 % of the solar energy left. PV on the other hand can absorb approximately 23 % and after converting it using the Antecy technology there is still more than 10 % of the solar energy left and we must keep in mind that the efficiency of PV still shall improve the coming years.