Announcements

Compares current state of biofuels to the Internet before it exploded – “We Know Nothing.”

Los Angeles, CA November 17, 2009 – OriginOil, Inc. (OOIL), the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform algae, the most promising source of renewable oil, into a true competitor to petroleum, announced that the company’s CEO, Riggs Eckelberry, addressed an audience of biofuels executives and scientists on the industry’s direction in a keynote speech at the Next Generation Biofuels Feedstocks USA conference.

In the opening day presentation, Eckelberry compared today’s biofuels industry to the state of the Internet in 1992, asserting that “We Know Nothing,” and that biofuels will explode just as the Internet did in 1994. He observed that biofuels are being unfairly compared to other technologies that will take trillions of dollars and decades to put in place.

He urged the audience to “change the conversation,” adding that “only biofuels can deliver New Energy, right now! The proof? My existing car can run on New Energy.” Eckelberry advocated replacing Old Energy’s centralized approach with a New Energy distributed system, and suggested that OriginOil’s Distributed Partnership Model could be part of the solution.

“Using a scale sensitive business model is of great interest and OriginOil’s business partnering model is fundamentally different,” said Tom Hintz, SeaHold’s managing partner and chair of the opening day sessions. “The current large scale high capital cost plants will face a challenge from OriginOil's ‘black box’ approach, so different from the traditional one of large-scale single site models.”

During the event, which occurred in San Francisco from November 16-17, 2009, Eckelberry joined speakers from Solazyme, Monsanto, National Science Foundation and Sandia National Labs, among many others, in addressing the future and sustainability of biofuels in the fight against global warming.

Held at Le Meridien Hotel in San Francisco from November 16-17, the Next Generation Biofuels Feedstocks USA conference covered various developments in Algae, Jatropha, Cellulosic and Wood Based Ethanol, Camelina, Biobutanol, Miscanthus, Sweet Sorghum, Drop in Fuels, Bio-Oils and Synthetic Fuels. For more information, visit the event website. To view Riggs Eckelberry’s presentation from the conference, click This is 1992.