For Solazyme, a Side Trip on the Way to Clean Fuel

They graduated, and the backpacking trips grew shorter and further between. Mr. Dillon went on to earn a Ph.D. in genetics and a law degree, and ended up working as a biotech patent lawyer in Silicon Valley. Mr. Wolfson received law and business degrees from New York University and eventually started a software business. But the two still got together every year. And they kept talking about the company that, they imagined as time went on, would use biotechnology to create renewable energy.

“These were delusional rantings of kids,” said Mr. Wolfson, who, like Mr. Dillon, is now 42.

Then Mr. Dillon found microalgae, and delusional became real. Microalgae, a large and diverse group of single-celled plants, produce a variety of substances, including oils, and are thought to be responsible for most of the fossilized oil deposits in the earth. These, it seemed, were micro-organisms with potential. With prodding, they could be re-engineered to make fuel.

So in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon’s garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.

Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.

Sold under the brand name Algenist, the product, costing $79 for a one-ounce bottle, would seem to have nothing in common with oil refineries and transportation fuel. But along with other niche products that the company can sell at a premium, it may be just the thing that lets Solazyme coast past the point where so many other clean-tech companies have run out of gas: the so-called Valley of Death, where young businesses stall trying to shift to commercial-scale production.

For years, policy makers, environmentalists and entrepreneurs have trumpeted the promise of harnessing the power of the sun, wind, waves, municipal solid waste or, now, algae. There has been some success. Since 2007, United States energy consumption from renewable sources has grown nearly 35 percent, and now accounts for about 9 percent of the total, according to the Energy Information Administration.

But the gains have been punctuated with prominent failures. Once-promising clean-tech ventures that attracted hundreds of millions in federal support — like the solar panel maker Solyndra, the cellulosic ethanol maker Range Fuels and the battery supplier A123 Systems — have failed. While ethanol, derived from crops like corn and sugar cane, has become a multibillion-dollar industry, it threatens to drive up the price of those plants for food and cannot yet replace conventional fuel. The next generation of biofuels, based on nonfood plants, is still struggling to take off.

Venture capital, which once gushed to renewable-energy start-ups like crude from an oil well, has slowed. In contrast to software-based companies like Instagram or Facebook, these new energy businesses burn through staggering amounts of capital over many years for research and early-stage equipment before even demonstrating their promise, much less turning a profit. Worldwide in 2012, venture capital investing in clean technologies fell by almost one-fourth, to $7.4 billion, from $9.61 billion in 2011, according to the Cleantech Group’s i3 Platform, a proprietary database.

“These are very high-innovation, capital-intensive, long-term businesses, and new-energy technology is a very new field,” said David Danielson, a former venture capitalist who is assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Energy Department. “We need a new model for how these projects are going to get financed and commercialized.”

In other words, clean-energy companies can’t rely only on the classic venture-capital approach in which investors demand a fat, fast return. Mr. Danielson said that to succeed, companies need a combination of government research-and-development grants, industrial partnerships and a willingness to pursue higher-value product lines en route to entering larger, but lower-margin markets.

“The problem with a lot of clean-tech deals is that they have been about the way you make things in high volume or in production, which means you can’t prove out the ideas unless you build factories and actually make things in volume,” said Andrew S. Rappaport, a venture capitalist who is a board member of Alta Devices, a solar film start-up.

That company is one of a handful that, like Solazyme, is pursuing niche markets for its core product, in its instance developing fast-charging cases for smartphones and tablets, until it can produce low-cost, commercial quantities of solar materials for homes and businesses. A Bay Area start-up called Amyris, meanwhile, has shifted its genetically engineered yeast toward chemicals and cosmetic ingredients as it tries to build a biofuel business.

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Clean Your Phone and Its Camera

Smartphones spend a lot of time in hand, where they can pick up germs and dirt. Wiping down the phone regularly with an antibacterial cloth intended for use with touch screens can help keep it clean. Many office supply stores like Staples or Office Depot carry disposable wipes for use on phone and tablet screens.

If your phone has a camera and your photos have been looking blurry, you can clean its lens with a microfiber cloth or other wipe for use with camera lenses; a cotton swab moistened with distilled water can also take off stubborn grime. Whatever you do, though, do not spray the phone with industrial cleansers or use cleaning wipes designed for household chores, because these can damage the screen and other parts of the handset.

Willis Whitfield, Clean Room Inventor, Dies at 92

Half a century ago, as a rapidly changing world sought increasingly smaller mechanical and electrical components and more sanitary hospital conditions, one of the biggest obstacles to progress was air, and the dust and germs it contains.

Stray particles a few microns wide could compromise the integrity of a circuit board of a nuclear weapon. Unchecked bacteria could quickly infect a patient after a seemingly successful operation. Microprocessors, not yet in existence, would have been destroyed by dust. After all, an average cubic foot of air contained three million microscopic particles, and even the best efforts at vacuuming and wiping down a high-tech work space could only reduce the rate to one million.

Then, in 1962, Willis Whitfield invented the clean room.

“People said he was a fraud,” recalled Gilbert V. Herrera, the director of microsystems science and technology at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. “But he turned out to be right.”

Mr. Whitfield, who worked at Sandia from 1954 to 1984, died on Nov. 12 in Albuquerque. He was 92. The cause was prostate cancer, his wife, Belva, said.

His clean rooms blew air in from the ceiling and sucked it out from the floor. Filters scrubbed the air before it entered the room. Gravity helped particles exit. It might not seem like a complicated concept, but no one had tried it before. The process could completely replace the air in the room 10 times a minute.

Particle detectors in Mr. Whitfield’s clean rooms started showing numbers so low — a thousand times lower than other methods — that some people did not believe the readings, or Mr. Whitfield. He was questioned so much that he began understating the efficiency of his method to keep from shocking people.

“I think Whitfield’s wrong,” a scientist from Bell Labs finally said at a conference where Mr. Whitfield spoke. “It’s actually 10 times better than he’s saying.”

Willis James Whitfield was born in Rosedale, Okla., on Dec. 6, 1919. In addition to his wife, his survivors include his sons, James and Joe; a sister, Amy Blackburn; and a brother, Lawrence.

Mr. Whitfield became fascinated with electronics as a young man and received a two-year degree in the field after high school. He served in the Navy late in World War II, working with experimental electronic systems for aircraft. In 1952, he received a bachelor’s degree in physics and math from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Tex.

By 1954 he was working at Sandia, which was involved in making parts for nuclear weapons and at the time was overseen by the Atomic Energy Commission. Mr. Whitfield’s duties soon included contamination control. By 1960, he had established his basic idea for the clean room.

“I thought about dust particles,” Mr. Whitfield told Time magazine in 1962. “Where are these rascals generated? Where do they go?”

The clean room was patented through Sandia, and the government shared it freely among manufacturers, hospitals and other industries.

Mr. Whitfield’s original clean room was only about six feet high, built as a small, self-contained unit. Some modern electronic devices, including the iPhone, are now built in China in huge clean rooms in structures that are more than a million square feet. Workers wear protective clothing, and other anticontamination methods have been added, but they still depend on Mr. Whitfield’s approach to suck up dust.

“Relative to these electronics, the particles are just massive boulders that would short out all of your electronics and make them not work,” Mr. Herrera said. “The core technology, just the cleaning part, hasn’t really changed a lot.”

Mrs. Whitfield said she was often been asked if her husband was a particularly fastidious man, and she always noted that he tended not to put his shoes away. He did live in a tidy house, though, and colleagues say he never tired of getting out a flashlight and shining it sideways across his coffee table to illuminate the prevalence of tiny dust particles that most people never notice.