Game-changers: Could electrofuel euphoria exceed natural gas glee?

December 7, 2012 |

Microbial mats at Yellowstone contain chemotrophs - key among the terrestrial organisms that inspire researchers working on electrofuels

The first patent issued out of ARPA-E’s electrofuels program suggests that this technology class is heading for the short-list of “next big thing” in energy conversations.

Today, we look at Ginkgo Bioworks and its electrofuel technology.

DLA Piper’s Global Energy Summit kicked off in Southern California yesterday, with as good a collection of energy worthies in attendance as one finds anywhere these days.

To foster a free dialogue, the meeting was held “off the record” – but since the actual agenda is widely available online, it is not unfair to the participants to reveal what any user of Google can discover, that there was quite a bit of discussion of how to play cheap natural gas.

It would be also unremarkable to note that the release this week of the Energy Information Administration’s annual outlook – and projection that the US will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbons and may become a net energy exporter in the next several years — did not go unnoticed by the participants.

Or, that participants were aware of the fast-spreading meme that the US now finds itself in a position to meet Kyoto carbon obligations it has done so much to avoid undertaking, while the EU may well miss their targets despite all the Europeans have done to take on obligation and design a path for compliance.

In short, like a lot of meetings these days, it was about transformations in energy platforms and politics that could, can, should and are shaking up thinking in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow. Not to mention the bourses in New York, London and elsewhere where capital forms.

It’s inevitable that we’ll be talking about shale gas and tight oil in many hallways for some time to come, as the discoveries pile up, and as the whup-whup of flaring gas rippling in the Dakota wind replaces the bark of the prairie dog as the sonic signature of the west northern plains.

The “Five Years From Now” effect

But it wouldn’t be unfair to point out that the natgas story has been a long time coming — that, by now, it is the impact and not the technology which is creating shock and awe — and that if we have learned anything about “five years from now” it is that energy technology will find a way to surprise us.

Five years ago, the conversations were about cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, importing liquified natural gas, cellulosic ethanol, hopes for a global climate deal, and Kyoto mechanisms. Today, the conversation has changed.

Conclusion? Innovation and market forces can trump statism when it comes to creating energy outcomes, if the innovation is sufficiently game-changing.

So if we are fair to the future, we ought look at game-changers that might be on the horizon – and in the bio-space, one to continue to watch are the electrofuels.

The electrofuels

These are the class of biobased technologies, currently supported primarily in academia and through ARPA-E research, that focus on biological processes that bypass photosynthesis and its 1-4 percent solar efficiencies. These are microorganisms that draw their energy from chemical compounds instead of sunlight, yet, like terrestrial plants, synthesize organic compounds from carbon dioxide and seawater.

It’s a fair observation that solar energy is so abundant that nature never really had to make photosynthesis very efficient. You can cover the world in plants with a miniscule photosynthetic efficiency and evolution doesn’t really select robustly for it.

Yet photosynthetic efficiency (or the lack thereof) creates certain barriers when it comes to generating liquid fuels at comparable costs to fossil fuels.

By contrast, deep down at the bottom of the ocean, a different set of conditions prevail. Chemical energy, whether it is from methane seeping from the ocean floor or hydrogen sulfide venting from black smokers- well, it is in short supply, and woe betide the organism that doesn’t utilize its share efficiently. Chemotrophs, as they are known, have evolved some remarkable efficiencies – they are energy camels.

They are some of the oldest forms of life out there – in fact, most people now think they are the oldest forms of life, going back at least 3.5 billion years in the fossil record.

So, why all the recent hub-bub?

Well, though cyanobacteria developed a taste for carbon dioxide, e.coli bacteria never really did. Accordingly, companies and technologies that program e.coli to produce a range of chemicals and fuels (like LS9, to use a well-known example), feed sugar to the bacteria, which keeps the technology reliant on, and limited by, photosynthesis.

Ginkgo Bioworks, DNV, and making fuel from water and CO2

So, along comes Ginkgo Bioworks, which under an ARPA-E grant is bypassing photosynthesis and engineering E. coli to directly use carbon dioxide (CO2) to produce biofuels.

If E. coli doesn’t naturally metabolize CO2, so what? goes the thinking — Ginkgo Bioworks is manipulating and incorporating the genes responsible for CO2 metabolism into the microorganism. By genetically modifying E. coli, Ginkgo Bioworks will enhance its rate of CO2 consumption and liquid fuel production.

Ginkgo Bioworks is delivering CO2 to E. coli as formic acid, a simple industrial chemical that provides energy and CO2 to the bacterial system.

And, you might ask, how is that exactly an “electrofuel”? Ah, through a partnership with DNV, which has developed a demonstration-scale reactor to produce formate via electrolysis, as a means of CO2 utilization, via its ECFORM process.

The ECFORM technology

In this system, there are “two electrodes, the cathode and the anode, across which an electrical voltage is applied. The two electrodes are placed in two different chambers, separated from each other by an ion exchange membrane. A suitable electrolyte is introduced into the cathode chamber along with CO2 . The electrolyte comes into contact with the cathode, and the dissolved CO2 is electrochemically reduced to the desired products. This electrical circuit is completed by the complementary oxidation reaction occurring in the anode chamber.”

What makes this process, potentially, transformative? It’s high level of efficiency, for sure. The formic acid process requires the participation of only two electrons, uses up approximately 2500 kWh/ton for its production via electrochemical CO2. To put that in dollar terms, about $175 per ton of formic acid (in terms of the energy needs of the system, using the latest prices from some solar bids – not inclusive of the cost of the reactor system, so don’t get too excited) – with future efficiencies obviously in the cards as reactor design improves. But it is already in the ballpark of the kinds of costs that can be part of the conversation about the future of fuels.

More about ECFORM, here.

The first ARPA-E derived electrofuels patent

What makes this a conversation for now, instead of pencilling in a think in around 2025? That’s not hard to answer. This morning, Ginkgo BioWorks is announcing that the USPTO has issued a Notice of Allowance for U.S. Patent Application Number 13/285,919 entitled “Methods and Systems for Chemoautotrophic Production of Organic Compounds.”

This is the first patent approved in the Electrofuels space and represents a significant milestone delivered under Ginkgo’s $6.6M ARPA-E contract begun in 2010.

“We are very pleased with the advancement of our Electrofuels patent estate through the USPTO, which cements Ginkgo’s leadership in the commercialization of Electrofuels technology,” said Jason Kelly, co-founder at Ginkgo BioWorks. The inventions embodied by this patent relate to methods and compositions for enhancing the chemoautotrophic properties of microbes for the production of valuable products, including fuels.

Ginkgo CEO Jason Kelly contends that the combination of Ginkgo’s engineered microbes and DNV’s demonstration-scale reactor technology represent the largest step towards scale-up of Electrofuels production to date — and the Digest will not disagree.

Ginkgo and DNV will present the successful results of their work at the ARPA-E Electofuels Workshop, next Monday (December 10th) in DC.

The potential impact

Well, consider it this way. We talk about the transformative impact that ten cent cellulosic sugars (that is, cheap and abundant) would have on the bio-space. That works out to around $200 per ton – that’s the magic figure. Now, I have mentioned the energy input costs in terms of the latest costs for green electrons from solar PV. The energy costs from wind and natural gas can go lower – tossing in the production tax credit that wind currently receives – driving the energy inputs for formic acid down as far as $83 per ton. Figure $30 per ton for the CO2, and there’s room to believe that there might be a game-changer in this equation, down the line.

Remember, this system is entirely divorced from food crops, or crops of any kind, or sugars, and divorced from photosynthesis itself. You can locate it anywhere CO2 is found, you don’t need sunlight, no open pond required. Now, the coal industry is currently shipping as much coal to the EU and China as it possibly can, but one of these days the coal industry, which is getting seriously whacked by low-cost natural gas in the US, might well look to salvage its base here with a transformative technology that takes its dread output, CO2, and monetizes it.

After all, the cheapest feedstock in the world is the one you would pay someone to take off your hands, and here in Digestville we suspect that Big Coal would pay more than little by way of a honorarium to any Wizard of Oz who marched into town and removed the CO2 burden from coal’s shoulders, while improving coal’s economics.

Time to break out the bubbly – time for euphoria? Not by the longest shot. But it is time to keep an closer eye on the technology class – for dreams can be fiction, but patents are cold, hard things.

More on the Ginkgo story.

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