In baseball, a triple play is the act of making three outs during the same play. Most triple plays are initiated by the shortstop. Because more balls tend to be hit to the shortstop than any other position on the field, it’s only natural the shortstop should be involved in triple plays.

In business, Larry Gross is a shortstop of sorts. He positions himself to be a part of the action and he has played the game in both Silicon Valley and in the Corn Belt. A former executive for computer technology companies Idealab and Cendant Software, Gross is now the CEO for EdeniQ Inc., an ethanol technology company that hopes to make a triple play to increase yields in the ethanol industry. EdeniQ recently began commercial trials of its Corn3 Yield Enhancement Program, which uses three separate-but-complementary technologies—improved yeast, a proprietary milling and mixing device, and enzymes—to increase yield at an ethanol plant.

Red Trail Energy LLC is one of the first ethanol producers to use EdeniQ’s Corn3 program. The company’s 50 MMgy ethanol plant near Richardton, N.D., has been making ethanol this year from what CEO Mick Miller says is essentially U.S. No. 3 Yellow grade corn—a high-moisture, low-weight, low-starch corn—as the result of a late start to last year’s growing season, cooler temperatures in the spring and summer, and a harvest season filled with heavy rains and early snow. “The crop just didn't mature,” Miller says, “so it's been really key for us to be able to hold—and actually increase—our yield as we move forward. One would expect that, running on a lower grade corn, you're going to see a significant yield loss. One of our goals is to alleviate that concern.”

Instead of trying to influence the weather for the health of the North Dakota corn crop, Red Trail has turned to EdeniQ for help, a company with a name that joins the concepts of edenic—of or pertaining to the Garden of Eden—and IQ, or intelligence.

Corn3 offers what EdeniQ says could be a 10 percent overall increase in yield for the ethanol producer or a tenth-of-a-gallon increase in yield from each phase of the technology.

The company says these increases have been proven at EdeniQ’s large-scale pilot plant in Visalia, Calif., and they are now being proven in commercial trials.

“As we all know, the industry's profitability is probably under more stress today than they ever expected it to be, which calls for innovative solutions and improvements in efficiency,” says Larry Peckous, vice president of sales for EdeniQ. Peckous has more than 28 years experience in the starch and biofuels industries. Most recently, he spent two years in China as principal scientist for Novozymes. “While a lot has been done in computer controls and enzymes, very little has been done to actually improve the yield of ethanol from starch,” he says. “EdeniQ has this suite of three different but complementary and additive technologies that each increase the amount of ethanol that you can obtain from a bushel of corn.”

Peter Kilner, vice president of business development for EdeniQ, explains. “The first phase is drop-in yeast that reduces byproduct glycerol formation and channels that into ethanol, so it optimizes fermentation. The second phase goes after some of the starch that is in large particles and that doesn't [normally] get converted. It reduces the size of the large particles, bringing up more surface area for the enzymes to get at all of the starch. That's done through a proprietary milling device called the Cellunator. That device also frees up the cellulosic fiber in the corn kernel, which enables our phase three, which is a proprietary cocktail of enzymes that gets at the cellulosic fiber, giving us a further boost in yield by converting that into ethanol.” Kilner brings business development experience to EdeniQ as a former executive for Catalytica Energy Systems Inc. and Arbor Vita Corp.

Company History
EdeniQ was formed in early 2008 out of AltraBiofuels Inc., an ethanol producer with plants in Goshen, Calif., and Coshocton, Ohio. AltraBiofuels made headlines in 2006 when it secured significant venture capital from several prominent private equity investors, among them Khosla Ventures and also Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Now head of EdeniQ, Gross is the former CEO of AltraBiofuels.

EdeniQ has been working with researchers at the Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., to identify the bacteria in the stomachs of termites that produce enzymes to break down cellulose in plants and to optimize the behavior of those bacteria, according to the Institute. The Worcester team has also been adapting EdeniQ’s proprietary strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, more commonly known as brewer's yeast or baker's yeast, to be more resistant to ethanol, enabling the yeast to ferment higher concentrations of the fuel. EdeniQ has also licensed technology from Tianjin University in Tianjin, China.

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