The Sea Changers

“We built this company out of a garage in Palo Alto,” Harrison Dillon explains. Well, of course—doesn’t a Palo Alto garage figure into the creation myth of any self-respecting paradigm-shifting tech company? Solazyme, which the two Emory alums founded in 2003, does indeed aim to change the world, one barrel of its algae-created, clean-burning biofuel at a time. But don’t we want to be moving away from the internal-combustion engine and toward wind power and the like? “For the foreseeable future, we’re going to need fuels for things like aviation and marine applications and heavy equipment,” Jonathan Wolfson points out. “And you want something that really burns clean.” (The company’s biofuel does that and more—it can also be used as a cooking oil.) In January, the company, which now employs 40 at its South San Francisco headquarters, announced a partnership with oil giant Chevron, which has the infrastructure and know-how (and, apparently, foresight) necessary to bring biodiesel from the lab to the pump. And the mythmaking continues: As Harrison says, “When people ask me, ‘What do you do for a living?’ I get to say, ‘I develop renewable energy.’ It’s one hell of a motivating thing to get up and do every morning.”

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You don’t have to wait till Solazyme’s biodiesel comes to a gas station near you to drive more cleanly, Dillon and Wolfson say. Diesel has always been a more-efficient fuel than gasoline (read: better mileage, so you burn fewer gallons and produce less carbon dioxide), but the problem has been that most diesel engines didn’t operate cleanly enough to meet California’s strict emission standards. Which is why none of the major car companies have been offering diesel passenger vehicles for sale in this state during the last 10 years.) This past October, though, Mercedes-Benz introduced its 2008 E320 Bluetec diesel sedan, which is available for lease in California for roughly the same price as its gasoline-powered counterpart, the E350. According to Mercedes-Benz, the car’s V-6 engine combines the power of a traditional V-8 with four-cylinder-style fuel economy (according to the EPA, it gets 32 mpg on the highway; the agency arrived at that figure using this year’s newer, stricter standards)—and it burns cleanly enough to pass California’s smog tests.