By Pacific Coast Business Times Staff Monday, September 6th, 2010

Camarillo-based Cool Planet Biofuels has raised another $3 million and leased 50,000 square feet of space to propel the development of a biofuel system it says could produce usable gasoline with a negative carbon footprint.

Cool Planet plans to use its newly leased space to start building what it dubs its “biomass fractionators.” Where traditional biofuel processes use fermentation to produce ethanol, Cool Planet’s fractionators use heat and mechanical forces to produce gasoline and biochar, a kind of solid-carbon charcoal.

The biochar can be buried or used as an additive to make soil more fertile, according to experts. Because making gasoline from biomass is already carbon neutral, sequestering the carbon in biochar underground makes Cool Planet’s process carbon negative, said Mike Rocke, the company’s vice president of business development.

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