Green Tech

Micro-crops of algae grown in man-made open-air ponds.

(Credit: PetroAlgae)

PetroAlgae has signed a memorandum of understanding to license its proprietary technology for producing and harvesting algae for fuel to Indian Oil, the company announced this week.

The Melbourne, Fla.-based company has developed bioreactors and harvesting methods for converting algae grown in open-pond freshwater farms into biodiesel.

The first phase of its partnership with Indian Oil will involve building a test facility to see whether PetroAlgae's production method is scalable. Once that has proven to be successful, Indian Oil plans to build a commercial production facility that could produce 200,000 tpa (tonnes per annum) of biodiesel. That facility would also produce a protein byproduct from the process that could be sold for use in making animal feedstock.

The Indian Oil-PetroAlgae deal lends further support to the notion that India's ambition is to rival Brazil as the world's largest exporter of biofuel in the coming years. Global biofuel use is expected to double by 2015, according to a recent report by Hart Energy Consulting, and many Big Oil players have been focusing efforts on getting a footing in that arena.

Until recently, most of the Big Oil interest in algae biofuel has been in the form of investments thrown at pilot projects, start-up companies, and research institutions. But the past few months have seen prominent partnerships with more clearly laid-out commercial ambitions.

In July it was announced that Exxon Mobil is investing over $600 million to produce biofuel made from photosynthetic algae in conjunction with the Calif.-based biotech firm Synthetic Genomics (SGI). Martek Bioscience, which initially was selling its fermented algae as a baby food additive, announced in August that it had signed a deal with BP on microbial biodiesel production from algae fermentation.

While algae start-ups seem to have weathered the economic investment drought, as PetroAlgae's own board head John Scott predicted in May, it remains to be seen which method for growing algae will win out.

There is an ongoing debate over whether it's more cost-effective to grow algae by fermentation or photosynthesis. The PetroAlgae deal with Indian Oil puts another mark in the photosynthesis column.

A tanker carrying liquefied natural gas that was made from harvesting the naturally occurring gas produced from the decomposition of organic trash.

(Credit: The Linde Group)

Trash collection giant Waste Management and the Linde Group petroleum engineering firm have partnered to create a plant that makes liquefied natural gas (LNG) from landfill gas, both companies announced this week.

Linde designed and operates the plant which is located close to Waste Management's Altamont Landfill near Livermore, Calif.

"The opening of the world's largest landfill-gas-to-LNG plant right here in California is a milestone and a testament to our commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now that the technology has been proven, we look forward to seeing its adoption spread so more vehicles can run on garbage," Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement.

Contrary to what might be inferred from Adams' enthusiastic sound bite, the project is not the utopistic dream of incinerating any old trash in a DeLorean for fuel, nor has either company claimed this. What the project does show is an idea that reduces pollution in two ways. The renewable source for fuel is also a naturally occurring gas that would have otherwise released itself into the atmosphere.

Waste Management collects the gas that is produced from the naturally occurring decomposition of organic trash in its Livermore landfill. The Linde plant then purifies and processes that gas into LNG. The LNG is then used to fuel some of Waste Management's fleet for collecting trash and recycling. Those vehicles, of course, having been slightly modified so that they can run on LNG.

While the plant has only produced about 200,000 gallons since it started operating in September, it has the capacity to eventually produce 13,000 gallons a day or 4 million gallons a year. That would be enough to cover the fuel needs of 300 Waste Management vehicles used for garbage and recycling collection, and save about 30,000 tons of emissions per year, according to company statistics.

This is not the municipal collection giant's first foray into trash-to-energy tech. Waste Management has been distributing solar-powered trash compactors and investing in various projects geared at converting waste in usable energy in several different forms.

GET's 5W-30 G-Oil.

(Credit: Green Earth Technologies)

Green Earth Technologies (GET) announced Wednesday that its environmentally friendly motor oil for cars will soon be available on shelves across the U.S.

The manufacturer of the biodegradable, carbon neutral motor oil made in part from the animal fat of beef slaughter byproducts has been waiting on certification from the American Petroleum Institute before selling its G-Oil to the public.

G-Oil has received API starburst certification, a symbol put on a product's packaging to signify it meets specific standards and is recommended for use by leading vehicle manufacturers. GET's car oil was additionally granted the API service symbol donut, a seal signifying an oil product has "energy-conserving properties in a standard test in comparison to a reference oil."

Until recently, GET has only been selling a 2-cycle G-Oil and a 4-cycle 10W-30 G-Oil for use in small-motor things like lawn mowers and tractors.

Now that the API approval has come, GET, which will be showcasing new products at the AAPEX show in Las Vegas next week, says consumers will begin to see its G-Oil motor oil for cars and trucks at leading national chains. It already began selling its product at National Auto Stores, a Pennsylvania-based chain, as of October 1.

The announcement is not just good news for a company. If the majority of the general public starts buying motor oil that biodegrades rather than taints groundwater, it could have a meaningful impact on the environment. Used motor oil from a single oil change that is dumped into the ground can contaminate about 1 million gallons of fresh water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

But, of course, the motor oil has to work well with your car.

While the International Motor Sports Association's American Le Mans Series has adopted G-Oil as its official motor oil of choice, the real test will be whether or not the American driving public and car enthusiasts like how it performs in their cars.

While no formal announcement has been made, it's likely a deal is in the works with the retailers already carrying G-Oil for small motors. This would include chains like Amazon.com, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, and True Value, among others.

Start-up Coskata on Thursday is starting up a facility that can turn wood chips into ethanol, a step toward producing at large scale next year.

The "semi-commercial" plant in Madison, Pa., will use a variety of techniques to convert the cellulosic material in plants or even municipal trash into liquid fuel that's cheaper than gasoline, according to the company. Its method reduces greenhous gas emissions dramatically and uses less than half the water than is needed to process gasoline, according to the company.

A 1,500-gallon bioreactor at Coskata's demonstration ethanol facility.

(Credit: Coskata)

It plans to test a number of different feedstocks at the Pennsylvania plant, called Lighthouse, and is now negotiating with feedstock providers for planned large-scale operations next year, Coskata CEO Bill Roe said in a phone interview. It is also designing a 50 million to 100 million gallon per year facility somewhere in the southeast U.S. that would use southern pine wood chips, he said.

The ethanol industry has slowed down significantly over the past two years with a number of producers shutting operations in the face of falling gas and commodity prices. Corn ethanol has also been accused of having questionable environmental benefits. Meanwhile, there still aren't commercial-scale second-generation ethanol operations with use nonfood, cellulosic biomass for fuel.

Roe said Coskata's demonstration facility will give it a technical and engineering blueprint to scale up. Financially, it intends to license its technology and to finance at least it first plant, he said. General Motors, a supporter of flex-fuel vehicles, is an investor and is testing its fuel.

Coskata's hybrid process combines different technologies, including a gasifier and a bioreactor that uses micro-organisms to produce ethanol.

At the Pennsylvania facility, Coskata will use a plasma gasifer from Westinghouse Plasma that converts biomass, such as wood chips, into what's called synthesis gas, a combination of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, Roe explained.

Then genetically optimized, proprietary bacteria digest the synthesis gas and convert it into ethanol. There is a third step for upgrading that liquid into fuel-grade ethanol, with a lot of the water being recovered in the process, according to the company. The greenhouse gas reduction compared with gasoline is 96 percent, it says.

The facility in Pennsylvania will be able to produce about 40,000 to 50,000 gallons per year. Once scaled up, the cost will range depending on the feedstock but it will be about $1 per gallon, Roe said.

"Because we have the ability to use a wide array of feedstocks, the cost point for this ethanol will be world class. It's a whole new game. If you're limited to one feedstock like a grain, you're probably setting yourself up for challenges," he said.

Two companies said Wednesday that they have developed a method for turning sewage sludge into ethanol.

Israel-based Applied CleanTech and Marlborough, Mass.-based Qteros created a joint development project that combines sewage treatment technology and a microbial process for converting biomass into ethanol.

Applied CleanTech's feedstock which can be used to make electricity or liquid fuels.

(Credit: Applied CleanTech)

The method can turn municipal solid waste into a fuel and reduce the amount of sludge processed by traditional treatment facilities, the companies said. Many researchers have been studying ways to extract usable energy from sewage sludge but there are not any commercial operations that make liquid fuel.

Applied CleanTech's core technology, which is already used in treatment plants, extracts the biosolids from raw sewage, which is a way to reduce the overall amount of wastewater that needs to be treated.

In its partnership with Qteros, the biosolids are used as a feedstock to produce ethanol. Qteros, founded two years ago, is developing an ethanol-making process in which a naturally occurring microorganism digests the cellulose in biomass and turns it into ethanol. It's an alternative to the traditional multistep, enzyme-based method.

"Our customer is every municipality that has a waste water treatment plant," said Jeff Hausthor, Qteros co-founder and senior project manager, said in a statement, adding that the process reduces the expense of operating waste water plants.

Global biofuel use is expected to increase twofold by 2015 and Brazil will remain the world's top exporter of biofuel, according to a report released Wednesday by Hart Energy Consulting.

The U.S. is expected to see the largest increase in biofuel use per country, increasing its current consumption by more than 30 percent, according to data from the "Global Biofuels Outlook: 2009-2015" report.

The overall increased use of biofuel in many countries around the world will make a dent in the world's consumption of traditional gasoline, according to Hart.

"Global ethanol demand will represent 12 to 14 percent of the global gasoline pool by 2015," said the report.

On the supply side, Brazil is expected to increase its production capacity by 30 percent and double the amount of biofuel it currently exports, remaining the world's largest biofuels exporter. Germany will continue to be Europe's largest producer of biofuel.

In terms of which kind of biofuel will make it to the forefront of production, Hart predicted that palm oil biodiesel, rapeseed biodiesel, and first-generation ethanol will dominate.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the biofuel industry will thrive as much as some would have the public believe, according to the report.

"Out of the approximately 170 next-generation biofuels projects around the world that are in some stage of development (operational, under construction or proposed), only 30 percent of those are actually expected to be operating during the study time frame, and many of those are still in the pilot project stage," said Hart.

Hart also said that while India is expected to see tremendous growth in biofuel production, it saw its predictions of soon outpacing Brazil as the leading exporter as too optimistic.

Other countries predicted by the report to significantly begin contributing to the world's biofuel production by 2015 are: Argentina, China, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Hart's report is based on data the company collected concerning existing biofuel plants in "operational, idle, or shut down" modes, biofuel projects in progress, government policy developments concerning biofuel regulation, and capacity projections from both governments and individual companies.

Artist's rendering of what an Eco-Pod configuration could look like on the old Filene's Basement site in Boston's Downtown Crossing.

(Credit: Howeler Yoon Architecture)

Howeler Yoon Architecture has proposed that an algae farm and vertical garden be erected at the old Filene's Basement site in Boston's Downtown Crossing.

The prefabricated design of interlocking pods containing algae-incubators on the inside and plants on the outside would be a temporary structure until the city of Boston, the site's owners, and the new owner of the bankrupt Filene's Basement chain agree on what to ultimately do with the historic Washington Street real estate.

But it's not just a one-off idea for the Filene's Basement spot.

Howeler Yoon, which is collaborating with Squared Design Lab, proposes placing its Eco-Pods on transition real estate throughout the city instead of leaving the sites to lie fallow while developers and officials spend months working through zoning, financial, and legal webs.

The pods, which are used as incubators for growing algae for biofuel, can be configured in several ways depending on the needs of a given site. Individual pods can also be rented out by researchers for algae-based projects, according to Howeler Yoon.

The spaces that form between the attached pods allow for planting and creating a vertical garden.

While the pods and their cranes look eerily futuristic, it's not such a far-out idea. The U.K.'s Institution of Mechanical Engineers released a report in August that suggested algae-cultivating buildings as one idea toward mitigating climate change. And just recently, PNC Financial Services Group unveiled a vertical garden spanning 2,380 square feet on the south side of its downtown Pittsburgh headquarters.

Clarification at 5:40 a.m. PDT October 1: Squared Design Lab is a collaborator on the project.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--No matter how you look at it, the big picture on energy trends isn't pretty.

A number of factors--a swelling world population with more people aspiring to higher standards of living, limited resources, and a pressing need to curb pollutants--mean that the world needs more efficient and cleaner sources of energy, according to a panel of experts at the EmTech technology conference here on Thursday.

A number of technologies can play a significant role in cleaning the massive energy industry, but the innovations in energy face a far more complicated path to market than other technologies, like computing, they said.

"It takes patient investment from some large technology companies," said Uma Chowdhry, chief science and technology officer of DuPont. "Why are (clean energy technologies) hard? Simply because they require more technology breakthroughs. And we have to recognize there's inertia in the system."

After the oil shock of the 1970s, a number of technologies were developed, such as solar photovoltaics or synthesis gas production, but were abandoned as oil prices dropped along with government research funding.

Today, many of those technologies are being revived and improved upon, but there still remain a number of risks, including the high capital costs of making products which, in the case of electricity and liquid fuels, are commodities, said Jim Matheson, a venture capitalist at Flagship Ventures.

There's also a funding gap for young companies that have developed technologies, such as improved biofuels processes, but need financing to test that their products can be made as designed. As a result, many people say it's not clear that the billions of dollars in venture capital will deliver the returns they expect.

"The reality is in this sector you have to actually deploy something to realize full value," said Matheson. "The challenge is not so much in the innovation piece--it's a deployment challenge."

Energy is also a heavily regulated industry. Negotiations around cap-and-trade carbon regulations are expected to continue for months, which makes it difficult for investors to place their bets, said Steven Isakowitz, the chief financial officer from the Department of Energy.

The DOE will be disbursing tens of billion of dollars in loans and grants over the next few years in an effort to "fill the breach" left by risk-averse banks and to jump-start energy innovation. Evaluating which companies and technologies receive money is an admittedly very difficult task and the DOE has a patchy track record, said Isakowitz.

"One of the challenges is the hype can swing things way too hard. At one point it was fusion, at another, superconductivity would be the answer," he said.

Important technologies
Still, panelists said there are a number of technologies that look promising because there's a clear need when viewed on a global scale.

Dupont's expertise in material science applies in a number of areas, including industrial efficiency, solar, and in bio-based materials, such as corn-derived plastic, said Chowdhry.

BP is investing in cleaner ways of extracting oil and gas and in biofuels through start-ups and university research. It is also working on carbon capture and sequestration, where carbon dioxide from coal plants or other sources is stored underground. The cost of that technology is very high and there's "no product," which means that it will only take hold if government regulations put a price on carbon emissions--a position that BP supports, Eyton said.

Both BP and DuPont have abandoned hydrogen storage research because the technical challenges are so high.

As part of its sustainability portfolio, Flagship Ventures, meanwhile, has invested in biofuels, water purification, and waste-to-energy companies.

Chowdhry said she is optimistic that many of the energy challenges can be met through innovation, particularly in materials and bio-based processes, such as synthetic fuels made from plants.

But all the panelists said that there needs to be coordination between large corporations, technology start-ups, financiers, and the government for them to take hold in the market.

BP's Eyton noted the concerns over the supply of energy may be brought to a head, politically and socially, by other closely interlinked environmental issues.

"The scarcity issues we face are far broader. Energy intersects quite uncomfortably with a whole lot of other natural resources like food, like water, like land. And I think it's possible that the first crisis we face in terms of a lack of something may be one of those," he said.

Research on nuclear energy and hydrogen has yielded what backers say is a technology that could replace U.S. oil imports with biofuels made from agricultural by-products.

Scientists at Idaho National Laboratory have been working for the past year and a half on a process to convert biomass, such straw or crop residue, into liquid fuels at a far higher efficiency than existing cellulosic ethanol technologies.

A scarce resource for fuel?

(Credit: Idaho National Laboratory)

Rather than one single development, the technology--named bio-syntrolysis--ties together multiple processes, but it has electrolysis, or splitting water to make hydrogen, at is starting point. When combined with a carbon-free electricity source, the approach could deliver a carbon-neutral biofuel, according to models done at INL which has done research for decades in nuclear energy.

Bio-syntrolysis is one of a dizzying number of technologies being developed with the hopes of replacing gasoline, although none have successfully been done at scale. Researchers at INL recognize there remain technical barriers, but its recent computer models show that the technique has better potential than today's biofuel processes.

The key advantage is that bio-syntrolysis would extract far more energy from available biomass than existing methods, said research engineer Grant Hawkes. Using traditional ethanol-making techniques, about 35 percent of the carbon from wood chips or agricultural residue ends up in the liquid fuel. By contrast, the bio-syntrolysis method would convert more than 90 percent of that carbon into a fuel, he said.

"That means if you gather up a kilogram of biomass from a field, you're going to get two and half times the liquid fuel from bio-syntrolysis than you would from cellulosic ethanol. If biomass is a precious commodity, this way you'll get more out of it," Hawkes said.

An often-quoted Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy study (click for PDF) estimated that the U.S. produces enough biomass to meet 30 percent of the country's liquid fuel. INL researchers say the higher productivity of its technology would cover more like 60 percent, nearly as much as the oil that the U.S. imports.

"This is the only process available that will give us all the liquid fuel we currently need that's carbon neutral with the all the biomass that's available," he said.

Although it's a compelling vision, there are a number of technical hurdles to making bio-syntrolysis commercially viable and environmentally beneficial.

To reduce carbon emissions significantly over other biomass-to-liquid processes, the INL technology requires a lot of carbon-free electricity--1,000 megawatts of electricity would yield enough 25,000 barrels of fuel a day, enough for almost one million people, according to INL models. A full-size nuclear reactor could produce 1,000 megawatts, but even large-scale wind farms or solar plants are substantially smaller.

The approach also relies on tying together different technologies, some of which are relatively immature in terms of commercial deployment. Making familiar biofuel processes cost effective is hard enough: after years of research and pilot projects, ethanol from wood chips or grasses still isn't produced at commercial scale.

Innovation in integration
Hawkes coined the term bio-syntrolysis to represent the combination of technologies researchers have been working with. To make a liquid fuel, they are using biomass to make a synthetic fuel via electrolysis of water.

Here's how it would work: a high-temperature electrolyzer would split steam into oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen would be fed to a biomass gasifier, a machine that heats agriculture waste at high temperatures to produce synthesis gas, a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, along with the hydrogen from the electrolyzer, would be fed to a refiner to make liquid fuels that could replace gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.

A schematic of how carbon-neutral biofuel can be produced using a combination of existing technologies.

(Credit: Idaho National Laboratory)

The biggest technology breakthrough in this design is the high-temperature electrolysis, which originally came from a program to study how nuclear reactors could be used to make hydrogen. But hydrogen-powered vehicles face a number of obstacles, including on-board storage and the infrastructure to cleanly produce and to distribute hydrogen.

By contrast, if the hydrogen was used to make hydrocarbon fuels, they could be distributed through the existing channels and be used with existing autos, including hybrid-electric vehicles.

The jump from hydrogen research to biofuels happened when Hawkes thought to make biomass the heat source for INL's high-temperature electrolysis, rather than the heat from a nuclear reactor. By making that switch, the electrolyzer can operate on biomass and electricity alone, rather than rely on a nuclear reactor.

"We feel each that each one of these technologies is individually proven but nobody has ever taken them and hooked them together to make one process," said Hawkes.

There are some commercially available biomass gasifiers and a few facilities turning synthesis gas into liquid fuel using coal as a feedstock. But coal-to-liquids has a high carbon footprint, even compared with gasoline, said Hawkes. If a renewable or carbon-free source, such as hydro power, can be used through bio-syntrolysis, the resulting fuel would have very low emissions, he said.

Storing hydrogen on plants
So far, INL researchers have done experiments using available commercial products and they have modeled the overall efficiency on computer. To build a high-temperature electrolyzer, they have purchased commercial fuels cells and modified them to work in reverse, so they produce hydrogen and oxygen from electricity.

"There is no need for any great discovery but there is a need for development of materials and electrolyzers and just the will the put all the different sources together," said Steve Herring, a research fellow at Idaho National Labs.

The projected cost of the fuel would be $2.50 a gallon to produce, which is not cheaper than today's gasoline. But the primary advantage is the fuel is domestically sourced, low-carbon, and available at a predictable price, Herring said. One of the rationales for the technology is that biomass to make fuel will become a scarce commodity, making techniques that can squeeze more energy from existing crops more compelling.

INL researchers imagine that a single location to collect biomass, run the gasifier and the electrolyzer. Fuel could be refined on site or shipped to existing facilities. The ash from the gasifier would contain many soil nutrients, such as potassium, that could be redistributed onto the fields that the biomass was collected from.

Why not simply use the hydrogen from the electrolyzer in fuel-cell vehicles? Hawkes and Herring said that the technical limits on hydrogen right now make this an approach that could be deployed without having to wait for technical breakthroughs in hydrogen vehicles.

"It's our observation that the best way to store hydrogen is to hook it onto a carbon atom from biomass now and make it a hydrocarbon fuel," said Hawkes.