All of the algae companies as well.. Like I mentioned elsewhere, I was a part of a biofuels company in the Bay Area that eventually went belly up.
KiOR cost Vinod Khosla tens of millions and was extremely embarrassing as the company was sued by the SEC for fraud, the total loss was something like $650M. Craig Ventor doesn't even mention Synthetic Genomics any more, total loss there was close to $100M. Solazyme IPOed a few years back, has since lost 90% of their stock's value and have an accumulated deficit approaching $700M. Aurora Algae lost $150M and went out of business. Algenol has spent about the same without any revenues of note. Sapphire raised something like $350M, including $100M from the DOE for biofuels but have slowed operations significantly and are now focusing on fish oil. LS9 raised $81M and was eventually sold for $40M. Amyris went public awhile back as well and has since lost over 95% of their market cap. Their accumulated deficits are well over a billion dollars now.
If I had to guess, I'd say in the biofuels space, about $3-$4 billion has been set on fire in the past decade.
But you can't fault them for trying, and it sounds to me like this fund isn't investing necessarily with a high likelihood of making money, hence the 20 year time frame.
Despite what Elon Musk says, fuel cells aren't dead in the slightest. Yes there has been some stagnation in innovation from the major players, buy there has also been some significant and ground breaking improvements in fuel cell efficiency in the past few years.
At least one company that I know of, Loop Energy, has proven (independently verified) fuel cell tech that will soon make cargo trucks 0-emissions. (Note: My brother was the lead engineer and basically developed this)
