Energy BioSystems (The Woodlands), a Texas-based oil purification company, announced last month that its first plant employing a biotechnological process for removing sulfur from oil will be running in 2001. At a cost of $60 million, the company has developed a process (Nat. Biotechnol. 14, 1705, 1996) to remove sulfur from oil using recombinant Rhodococcus, a bacterium ideally suited to the task because it thrives at oil–water interfaces. A small commercial plant is under construction for Petro Star (Valdez, AK) that will process 5,000 barrels a day by 2001. According to Daniel Monticello, vice president of R&D, Energy BioSystems also plans to use its biotechnology process to extract useful sulfur compounds from oil, "If you run [the desulfurization process] all the way to the end, the bacteria will make sulfate...but by doing some metabolic engineering we've been able to truncate the pathway to produce an intermediate...a building block for detergents."