The Biofuels Center of North Carolina has announced a partnership with HCL CleanTech, an Israeli biofuels technology company founded in 2007 by two researchers from Tel-Aviv. HCL CleanTech will open its corporate offices in Oxford on the North Carolina Biofuels Campus and a biofuels manufacturing plant in Durham.
Eran Baniel, HCL CleanTech’s CEO and president, says that his company is intending to invest “millions of dollars” moving the company to North Carolina and building the manufacturing facility. No one from either HCL or the Biofuels Center has disclosed any financial details of the investment.
In May of 2009, HCL CleanTech raised $5.5 million in a financing led by venture capital firms Khosla Ventures and Burrill & Co. Other investors included the company’s founders, Ari Eyal and Avraham Baniel, both industrial chemical research scientists, and Zohar Gilon, the company’s lead seed investor. At the time of the initial financing, HCL CleanTech stated that the proceeds fund construction of the pilot plant in the United States, to be finished in 2010 and more research and development in Israel.
HCL CleanTech has developed a process to convert woody biomass into fermentable sugars and advanced biofuels that is reportedly more efficient and less expensive than other popular conversion technologies. HCL CleanTech commissioned a study by a U.S. chemical engineering company. The study indicated that the cost of manufacturing ethanol using HCL’s technology would be less than $1 per gallon.
In a press release, Eran Baniel stated “Looking forward to the commercialization of our process, we hope that with state and county assistance, and a successful pilot, we might provide the pulp and paper industry [in North Carolina] with a new opportunity.”
The Biofuels Center of North Carolina is funded by the North Carolina General Assembly to develop large capacity statewide production of biofuels. The Biofuels Center is a private nonprofit corporation created to work with biofuel companies towards reaching the goal of 10 percent of North Carolina’s liquid transportation fuels coming from biofuels and be produced within the state of North Carolina by 2017.
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