• Home
• Page

LS9, Inc.

About LS9
LS9, Inc., the Renewable Petroleum Company™, is a privately-held industrial biotechnology company based in South San Francisco, California developing patent-pending biofuels made with the power of synthetic biology.

LS9 DesignerBiofuels™ products are customized to closely resemble petroleum fuels, engineered to be clean, renewable, domestically produced, and cost competitive with crude oil.

LS9 is the market leader for hydrocarbon biofuels and is rapidly commercializing and scaling up DesignerBiofuels™ products to meet market demands, including construction of a pilot facility leading to commercial availability. While initially focusing on fuels, LS9 will also develop sustainable industrial chemicals for specialty applications.

LS9 has the financial backing of venture capital firms Flagship Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company's scientific advisory board (SAB) includes leaders in the fields of synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, microbiology, enzymology, genomics, bioinformatics, and chemical engineering.

TECHNOLOGY
Petroleum, on which modern day society was built and is now dependent, is a diminishing resource with increasing environmental, political, and economic disadvantages.

The ideal alternative would be chemically identical to petroleum, allowing broad and rapid adoption, derived from renewable resources, scalable to support current and future demands, domestically derived, and cost competitive without subsidies.

LS9 has developed Renewable Petroleum™ technologies to meet this need.
Pushing the frontiers of synthetic biology and industrial biotechnology, LS9 has created industrial microbes that efficiently convert renewable feedstocks to a portfolio of "drop in compatible" hydrocarbon-based fuels and chemicals. LS9's unique technology provides a means to genetically control the structure and function of its fuels, enabling a product portfolio that meets the diverse demands of the petroleum economy.

LS9 has developed a new means of efficiently converting fatty acid intermediates into petroleum replacement products via fermentation of renewable sugars. LS9 has also discovered and engineered a new class of enzymes and their associated genes to efficiently convert fatty acids into hydrocarbons. LS9 believes this pathway is the most cost, resource, and energy-efficient way to produce hydrocarbon biofuels and petroleum-replacement products. This translates into efficient land and feedstock use and directly addresses tensions between food versus fuel production.

Technology Diagram