Shock Wave: Cavitation shaking up ethanol with revenue upside

December 3, 2010 |

In Ohio, Arisdyne Systems has pioneered technology that can increase ethanol production by 10 percent, or reduce the use of catalyst by 25 percent in biodiesel production. Taken across the US ethanol fleet (outside of POET, which uses its own proprietary system to achieve, potentially, a 5 to 10 percent improvement in productivity per gallon), that could translate to roughly 1.8 billion additional gallons of ethanol for the same delivery of corn, barley and wheat bushels. The technology? Hydrodynamic cavitation.

Hydro…what?

OK, imagine you take some liquid and push it through a pump to get higher pressure, and then direct it through a nozzle to increase the speed (up to this point, think garden hose). Now, make that nozzle really tiny tiny – the more you increase the speed, the more you lower the pressure. Make it low enough, it boils (that’s why there’s no water, for example, flowing on Mars – it all boiled off). When it boils, it forms a series of small cavities, and when the bubbles implode, they send out a shock wave. The process of formation and collapse is called cavitation.

Conditions in the collapsing cavity can reach 5000°C and 1000 atmospheres. The implosion takes place during the cavitation process in milliseconds, releasing tremendous energy in the form of shockwaves. The power of these waves generated by the cavitation process disrupts anything in their path.

The yield opportunity in ethanol

OK, here’s where it works for ethanol. When you introduce a controlled cavitation into, say, a corn slurry at an ethanol plant, the shock waves destroy all particles in their pathway and the cell structure – making large particles into smaller ones. That increases the overall surface area and – voilá – you expose more starch surface area to enzymes, resulting in more reactivity as enzymes convert starches into sugars.

It works somewhat the same in biodiesel – which is why you need less catalyst. In ethanol, you get a 3-5 percent lift in yields.

But, as they say at Ginzu knife commercials, wait, there’s more. When corn famers deliver to ethanol plants, a percentage of the kernel consists of corn fiber. That usually ends up as low-cost animal feed. With cavitation, you can destroy that fiber’s cell structure and release sugars that are available for cellulosic conversion, if you have the right enzymes.

Overall, you can increase a standard ethanol yield of 2.7 gallons per bushel to around 2.85 gallons with the cavitation of the existing starch, and bump that up to 3.0 gallons per bushel with the cellulosic fiber.

The corn fiber opportunity

“There were problems I always saw with cellulosic ethanol,” said Arisdyne CEO Peter Reimers, a former ADM exec, “I couldn’t figure out how farmer would commit land to grow switchgrass or poplar and face a loss of income – were there enough farmers in a given area who could forego a crop return at the end of the year, even after the cost of fertilizer and seed or seedlings. And how could a plant hedge the costs of the feedstock. In cellulosic ethanol, it seems to me that the low hanging fruit is the corn kernel comes with the existing delivery, with 10 percent fiber that ends up in the animal feed. The idea is not new – but an application of our technology is to utilize that stream to improve yield.” The technology is available on a licensing basis.

In June, Corn Plus licensed the patented cavitation system, and is reporting public yield improvements of 4 percent without grinding additional corn, making investments in new capital, consuming large amounts of power, or degrading process capacities. Arisdyne and Corn Plus have been working together to install a retrofit system at the Winnebago plant, which conducted a test at full capacity over a period of two months without any interruption.

The company reports that it has “a handful of  ethanol plants at commercial under test.”

Over at Pursuit Dynamics

Another cavitation technology, from Pursuit Dynamics, has been available for some time on a royalty basis. The Pacific Ethanol Boardman plant, and an ICM-built facility, Marquis Energy, will be operationally testing the recently improved PDX Ethanol Reactor System.

“PDX believes that the total addressable universe of Generation One corn-based ethanol plants in the US comprises those manufactured by ICM and Delta-T. In aggregate they number 120 out of the 180 existing US plants and account for most of the 12 billion gallons per annum that is estimated to be produced annually in the US. PDX has set a target of rolling out PDX’s products to 60 of the ICM and Delta-T plants over the next two to three years.” PDX’s stock has tripled in the past year, and PDX.L is now trading at 703 pence in London, an all-time high.

Overall, it looks like cavitation is making strong progress, and the recent addition of former ADM President and COO Paul Mulhollem as Arisdyne’s board chair is another indicator of the momentum in the sector. Among Arisdyne’s initial investors are Morgenthaler, Chevron Technology Ventures, Early Stage Partners and Reservoir Venture Partners.

The Digest’s Take

Though PDX’s high share price and run-up may be as much a product of thin trading as the promise in the sector, we’ll be unsurprised to see a number of new customers in first-generation ethanol taking advantage of the yield improvements with strong crush spreads in ethanol making investments easier to justify. Competition will come from two directions: the do-nothing ethanol producer, which is becoming a rarer species; and those who opt for competing technologies such as a biobutanol conversion in partnership with Cobalt Technologies, Gevo or Butamax. It certainly is shaping up as a transformational year fro first-generation ethanol.

For more perspective on the opportunities available to first-generation ethanol projects, see our 10-part series, the Bioenergy Project of the Future.

More on Arisdyne, here.

Category: Fuels

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