Viewing posts tagged "Biofuel"

Mascoma Lands Deal With Chevron to Produce Lignin, Ethanol

Mascoma, which wants to develop microbes that can convert woody biomass into ethanol, has signed a pretty important deal with Chevron Technology Ventures.

Under the deal, Chevron will supply feedstocks to Mascoma, and then Mascoma's microbes will convert the material into ethanol and lignin, the tough material that protects plants. Chevron will then evaluate the results.

To survive and thrive, biofuel startups will invariably have to partner with the major fuel companies. Chevron already has an R&D alliance with Solazyme, which makes algal biodiesel. Shell has deals with 70 or so different alternative fuel companies, according to sources. Mascoma recently underwent some management changes. CEO Bruce Jamerson became chairman and also chairman of Frontier Renewable Resources, which is trying to raise money to build a plant in Michigan based around Mascoma's microbes. Mascoma is currently looking for a CEO.

The lignin angle is interesting. Ligning keeps microbes from gobbling up plants. It is why we have coal: the lignin outlasted the microbes and the cellulosic material fossilized into coal over millions of years. It's a high-energy material. Some ethanol companies plan to burn lignin to run their own plants. Others transform it thermochemically and add the byproducts back into the ethanol mix.

Mascoma is trying to engineer microbes that can handle two stages of the ethanol process: breaking up wood chips and grasses into lignin, hemicellulose and cellulose and then turning the cellulose into ethanol. The company is not there yet but it is making process, Jamerson told us recently.

Startup Watch: Fuel Sugar From Designer Energy

Designer Energy is focused on one thing: degradation.

Of cellulosic material, that is. The company, which grew out of university labs in Israel, has come up with biological mechanisms to break down cellulosic plant matter and convert it into sugar. The sugar will then get sold to fuel companies.

"Sugar is the new oil," said Tali Somekh, a partner at Musea Ventures, which invested in the company. "The bottleneck of the ethanol industry is the production of sugar."

The company reflects the growing horizontal-ization of the greentech market. Until now, companies have largely been forced to, or chosen to do, everything themselves. Many solar cell manufacturers also make their own panels. Electric car makers sometimes produce their own batteries or other components. Biofuel makers don't concentrate on fuel or distribution: They also often have to raise their own crops. In essence, these companies have to be farmers, biologists, chemists and petroleum distributors at the same time. Not easy.

That will begin to change as companies get forced to specialize. Algae iconoclast Solazyme (which grows algae by feeding it sugar) has said it will buy sugar in the open market rather than raise it itself. Somekh isn't saying a lot now, but more about the company could come out in the future. The firm works with a number of scientists in Israel and in the U.S. It also put money into solar thermal maker HelioFocus.

Microbes, Somekh added, are great sugar producers, in part, because they don't have legs. To defend themselves, animals can run. To get food, predators can kill things. Plants and microbes by contrast secrete really obnoxious chemicals. One of the classics is Trichoderma, the soil microbe from the Philippines that can eat through the canvas in tents.

Utility Trucks at LAX to Guzzle Biodiesel in 2012

Rentech, which makes biofuel from a modified version of the Fischer-Tropsch process, has signed a deal with eight airlines to provide their ground utility trucks at Los Angeles International Airport with 1.5 gallons of fuel annually. That's enough to handle all of the the needs of ground service trucks, according to Rentech.

The deal will go through in 2012, when Rentech's plant will be complete.

The deal marks another step in the slow, but steady, slog toward biofuels, and it makes sense. Unlike cars, utility trucks at an airport never stray far from home. Thus, a centralized biodiesel pump can serve them. It also allows the city to tout its green credentials and help U.S. businesses with local operations.

Will the trucks emit tailpipe fumes? Yes, but since the carbon originally came from terrestrial sources instead of underground, it's relatively carbon neutral. In a carbon trading world, that's another plus.

Rentech's fuel is made with biomass. Fischer-Tropsch was originally conceived in 1920 to convert coal to liquid fuel. The coal process has always been expensive and dirty, which explains why only the Third Reich and embargo-addled Apartheid South Africa were the only two nations to heavily rely on it. In F-T, the feedstock is heated to high temperatures, converted to a synthetic gas and ultimately turned into a liquid. A couple of other new age ethanol companies like Range Fuels are exploiting thermochemical processes, but biological remediation (i.e., having super microbes chew up plant matter into fuels) appears to be more popular with startup investors and entrepreneurs.

$90 a Barrel Oil Is the Floor for Cellulosic Ethanol, Says Study

The good news: Oil doesn't have to rise that much more for cellulosic ethanol to become economically viable.

The bad news: You people in the labs have a lot of work ahead of you.

Sandia National Labs will soon release a report on cellulosic ethanol and what sort of barriers need to be knocked down so that cellulosic can become at least a 75 billion gallon a year business, according to the Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog. The study states that cellulosic can't become competitive with oil unless oil stays above $90 a barrel.

While that sounds high, it isn't stratospheric. Oil is at $70 now and many economists predict a persistent rise in price as economies improve in China, India and the U.S. (The U.S. consumed 137.8 billion gallons of petroleum in 2008 and overall demand for petroleum and substitutes will likely increase.) 75 billion gallons of cellulosic could cut petroleum-associated emissions by 25 percent.

To get there, however, will require scientific breakthroughs. "Producers have to get better at squeezing more juice out of the same amount of biomass, and they have to make sure they’ll have all those plants available in the first place," Keith Johnson of the WSJ wrote. And, of course, most cellulosic ethanol companies are still in the press release n' prototype stage.

The full report should be an interesting read.

Biofuel Maker Codexis Eyes Carbon Capture

Codexis, one of the many companies that hope to harness the magic of biology to produce fuel, wants to do carbon capture too.

Alan Shaw, CEO, says that the company has an enzyme that could be implanted into smokestacks to reduce airborne carbon dioxide, according to Reuters. Most likely (i.e., my best guess), the enzyme would bind it to another substance to transform it into something that wouldn't pollute the atmosphere or that could be easily sequestered, perhaps a solid. The alternative would be to break it into carbon monoxide. Not so choice.

General Electric is a shareholder.

Other companies are also working on the mineralization of carbon dioxide. Skyonic in Texas has a system that turns carbon dioxide into sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda, while Carbon Sciences turns it into calcium carbonate. Both companies have to add minerals into the process, but they reactions also take energy. Potentially, and ideally, a biological-inspired catalyst would reduce the amount of energy required in a reaction.

The controversial green cement company Calera is working on a similar problem: taking carbon dioxide and turning it into carbonates. Calera, however, has denied it has a biological angle.

This is not an easy chemistry experiment. Whoever cracks it could earn billions. In any event, Codexis is a good company to watch, if even just for the amusement value. Shaw likes to speak his mind.

"Oil and gas and diesel are the fuels of today and the internal combustion engine is the transportation of choice today," he said at the Western Energy Summit at the end of July. "The internal combustion engine will stay, although the fuel will change... The electric car for me is a bit of a dream."

Peak Oil Coming in 2020, Says IEA’s Top Economist

Peak oil – the moment when global oil production reaches its maximum and then begins a gradual, yet inevitable decline – could be here already, according to some analysts. Or it could be decades away, as most of the world's top government energy agencies say.

Now Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, is saying that the globe will see oil production peak in 2020 – about a decade earlier than most official government predictions.

British newspaper The Independent published an interview with Birol on Monday that laid out that prediction, along with statistics that show that the world's 800 largest oil fields are seeing a 6.7 annual decline in production, worse than the 3.7 percent decline the agency estimated in 2007.

The prospect of peak oil is a critical one for the modern global economy, since almost all transportation fuel needs, and a good part of the rest of society's energy demands, are filled by petroleum products.

While a peak in production doesn't imply that the oil will run out at that time, it does imply that increasing demand won't be able to be met by increased production, which could lead to a drastic spike in the price of oil.

That could stall or even reverse any upturn for the global economy, Birol said, given that the alternative – to find "the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias" in new oil supplies – seems unlikely.

"Many people think there will be a recovery in a few years' time but it will be a slow recovery and a fragile recovery and we will have the risk that the recovery will be strangled with higher oil prices," he told The Independent.

It isn't the first time Birol has brought these facts, including his prediction that peak oil production will occur in 2020, to the media's attention. He presented similar information in an interview with the Guardian newspaper in December.

In that interview, he also predicted that oil production from countries that aren't part of OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – will plateau and decline in the next three to four years, leaving OPEC nations, primarily those in the Middle East, in increasing control of the world's oil supplies.

Birol isn't the only highly placed energy watcher worried about shrinking future global oil production. The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration has downscaled its projections for how much oil the world will produce in 2030 in its most recent report on the subject, according to a June article in The Nation magazine.

The agency's most recent International Energy Outlook report for 2009 predicts that global production of conventional oil will reach 93.1 million barrels per day in 2030, a drop from its 2007 prediction of 107.2 million barrels per day by 2030, that article states. The world produced 81.5 million barrels per day in 2006.

That would leave "unconventional" sources of oil, such as the oil sands of Canada and Venezuela, oil shale deposits in the Western United States and "ultra-deep" offshore oil deposits like one slated for development off the coast of Brazil, to make up the difference.

Biofuels could help ease a shortfall as well, but so far they make up only a tiny fraction of the world's fuel supply. Production of so-called "next generation" biofuels made from non-food sources like grasses, agriculture and wood waste and municipal garbage has so far failed to meet expectations for growth in the United States (see U.S. Won't Meet Its Own Biofuel Mandate).

Critics of peak oil predictions say that they fail to take into account more optimistic estimates of the oil remaining in the earth, as well as the potential for technology to improve oil recovery from existing fields and to discover new ones.

(For a sample of these counter-arguments, read this Green Light post relaying some comments ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson made in February at Stanford University. )