Calling Tony Stark: Miniaturizing biofuels’ hot technologies

Scale-up, scale-up, scale-up. But what about scale-down?

The Digest looks at how some technologists are aiming to bring the machines to the biomass, and transforming costs and options along the way.

Scale-up — it’s the most exciting, yet dreaded phrase in advanced industrial biotechnology. It’s the period when a technology comes out of the lab and meets real-world conditions and industrial-scale challenges in feedstock aggregation, delivery into processing, the processing at meaningful throughout speeds and with material yield goals — and finally, the upgrading, cleaning-up, and shipping of product to generate the revenues which ultimately are the lifeblood of industry.

Yet, scale itself is a challenge in bioenergy not only because of the challenges of engineering, but because biomass itself resists scale. Unlike petroleum, which is liquid and aggregated to begin with, raw biomass is tough to economically transfer at long distance.

The problem? The impossibly high cost of sourcing sufficient biomass within, say, a 50-mile radius. After 50 miles or so – a little less, if small trucks are used, a little more if barges or rail are used — the economics of transporting raw biomass become impossible. Too much oxygen, too much water — the weight is a killer.

For that reason, many technologists are looking in the other direction: away from scale-up and towards scale-down, which is to bring the process closer to the biomass by making it more economically feasible to use smaller processing units.

Stark Industries points the way

Tony Stark (aided by some comic-book physics) took on the same problem: miniaturizing the non cost-effective, large-scale Arc Reactor (that, ahem, looks suspiciously like the ITER tokomak fusion reactor, sans the the heavy plasma containment shell, currently under construction in the south of France).  While Stark Industries’ Obadiah Stane is initially skeptical: “We built it for the hippies, it was never cost-effective,” Tony Stark creates a miniature Arc Reactor as the power system for his Iron Man Mark I, and all the subsequent suits he built.

Stark’s problem — how to turn something interesting at large-scale into something transformative at small-scale — well, that’s a real-world challenge in the world of new fuel technologies.

As Nexant’s Ron Cascone explained to the Digest, in explaining the technologies associated with hydrogen:

“The ‘Hydrogen Economy’  is one of the stupidest ideas that has ever been perpetrated on society. Hydrogen does not exist on the planet naturally per se….not even close.   It has to be [produced] using fuels or renewable energy (which can otherwise be directly substituted for those fuels instead). Therefore, we best should think of hydrogen instead as an energy storage and transfer strategy.  As such, it is the least efficient and convenient we could imagine.  It has lower energy density than almost anything else that could be used in a similar capacity.

“One reason this ridiculous scam persists is the Proton Exchange Membrane fuel cell conspiracy, in which we have invested vast public and private funds. This wimpy device is pathetic compared to the robust, fuel-agnostic, and entirely commercial (at grid-scale) Solid Oxide fuel cell and Molten Carbonate fuel cells. These can burn far more efficiently than ICEs, natural gas, LPG, gasoline, kerosene, or ammonia (the latter with zero carbon emissions). They have problems being applied in vehicles, but the cost / benefit ratio of adapting them can be relatively low, if we were honest about it.”

This perfectly frames the problem: take a technology that works economically and technically at scale, and try to apply it at vehicle scale — or, alternatively, try and develop a technology that works at small scale in the first place.

F-T reactors

We’ve had this problem for some time with Fischer-Tropsch reactors. At massive-scale — and by this we mean $1b+ investments in vast production plants with vast capacities in the thousands of barrels per day range, it works.

New to Fischer-Tropsch? This technology uses natural gas or synthesis gas (the latter is made by gasifying a feedstock into two constituents, carbon monoxide and hydrogen), flowing that gas feedstock over a catalyst as it cools back into a liquid, and thereby producing a target hydrocarbon fuel, such as diesel or jet.)

In terms of applying this to real-world aggregations of feedstock, F-T reactors have generally been utilized when a) massive quantities of basically free natural gas are handy or b) when conventional petroleum is simply unavailable (such as during embargoes or wartime). Biomass-based F-T reactors simply cost too much in terms of transporting all the biomass to make the system work at current scale.

So, along comes Velocys, and its F-T micro-reactors

Velocys enables modular gas-to-liquids (GTL) and biomass-to-liquids (BTL) plants to convert unconventional, remote and problem gas and waste biomass into valuable, drop-in liquid fuels. Microchannel technology is a developing field of chemical processing that intensifies chemical reactions. It enables lower cost, smaller and more productive processes by improving the heat and mass transfer performance and reducing the dimensions of the reactor systems. Mass and heat transfer limitations reduce the efficiency of the conventional large FT reactors.

Microchannel FT reactors are compact reactors containing thousands of channels with characteristic dimensions in the millimetre range. The FT process is highly exothermic, or heat generating.

In microchannel FT reactors process channels, filled with catalyst, are interleaved with water-filled coolant channels. The small-sized channels dissipate heat more quickly than conventional fixed-bed reactors with relatively larger tubes in the 2.5 – 10 cm (1 – 4 inch) range. As a result, more active catalysts can be used.

Velocys technology has been demonstrated in the field and validated via selection for customer projects. Velocys has been selected as sole FT supplier to GreenSky London, Europe’s first commercial scale sustainable jet fuel facility, being developed in partnership with British Airways. The Company has also been selected to supply FT technology for two commercial GTL plants in the USA of over 1,000 barrels per day.

Elsewhere in miniaturized synfuels

Maverick Synfuels and Plant Process Equipment formed a partnership in March to manufacture and sell small-scale Gas-to-Liquids methanol plants.  These skid-mounted modular plants can be rapidly deployed and are capable of producing between 3,000 – 10,000 gallons per day of ultra-clean synthetic fuels and chemicals from natural gas or methane-rich “waste gas”.  Maverick has the exclusive rights to sell and deploy these factory-built plants that convert potent greenhouse gases into guaranteed quantities of methanol.

As Maverick puts it, “Now, for the first time, waste gas producers have a financially attractive alternative to flaring or generating electricity.” Converting methane gas to methanol liquid is one component of Maverick’s “hub and spoke” distributed production strategy that builds on Maverick’s patented Olefinity technology.

Cool Planet is one of the stealthier technologies out there, and some deride it as making impossible yield claims. The company says that “our technology allows us to build smaller, significantly less expensive facilities closer to biomass feedstock, so we can expand rapidly, achieve lower scale-up risk and continuously innovate and improve with each distributed facility.”

Last December 2013, Cool Planet broke ground on the company’s first commercial facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, dubbed Project Genesis. The facility is designed to produce 10 million gallons per year of high-octane, renewable gasoline blendstocks, as well as biochar, all made from sustainable wood residues.

The facility will be located at the Port of Alexandria, on the Red River Waterway in Central Louisiana.

Small biomass power generation

In March, writing in the journal Biomass and Bioenergy, University of Missouri research team led by Tom Johnson, the Frank Miller Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics, found that creating a bioenergy grid with these small plants could benefit people in rural areas of the country as well as provide relief to an overworked national power grid.

“Transporting power through power lines to remote, rural areas is very inefficient and can be expensive for farmers and other rural citizens,” Johnson said. “Farmers already have access to a large amount of biomass material left over each year after harvests. If they had access to small biomass power plants, they could become close to self-sustaining in terms of power. If the grid was improved enough, they could even provide additional power to other people around the country, helping to stabilize the national power grid. This could help save rural citizens money and be a boon for rural economies.”

It works for islands, too. Last October, a micro-grid on Pulau Ubin island was tested for 30 households and businesses offering power provided by biodiesel and solar panels, rather than the traditional diesel that has so far powered the area. The Energy Market Authority is using the test bed to determine the impact of intermittent power, such as solar, on overall power supply. Using the mixed mini-grid costs 80 cents per kilowatt rather than $1.20.

Micro-grid distillation and generators

In March, JA Energy announced it had filed a patent to protect its Micro-Grid technology. The Company’s Modular Distillation Unit and Modular Electricity Generator combined can take simple sugars and convert them into electricity.

“For example, we can drop our system on an island in the middle of the ocean that has simple sugars available and generate electricity to create a modern-day city”

This system can operate outside the conventional infrastructure, known as the power grid, thereby creating the “Micro-Grid.” This Micro-Grid can revolutionize current land usage. “For example, we can drop our system on an island in the middle of the ocean that has simple sugars available and generate electricity to create a modern-day city,” says Gene Shane, COO of the Company.

Modular sugar production

Sweetwater Energy technology produces low-cost, concentrated sugars from multiple non-food plant materials to help meet the modern world’s increasing bioenergy and biochemical demand.

The technology uses a modular approach to produce sugars that are both less expensive for the end user and more environmentally friendly than today’s corn-grain based sugar extraction methods.

Last April, Sweetwater Energy announced that BioGasol completed delivery of its first commercial biomass pretreatment system. The cellulosic sugar producer will use the unit, a Carbofrac 10, in its demonstration facility to produce pretreated biomass for use in downstream processes. BioGasol’s reactor design allows for the cost efficient and highly controlled conversion of lignocellulosic materials, such as agricultural waste and wood, into replacements for conventional fuel and other oil-based materials – specifically, highly fermentable sugars suitable for producing bioethanol, bioplastics and biochemicals.

Hydrogen and power gen at small scale

In terms of the power value, you have something like the potential to make 500 pounds of syngas from the annual US household garbage pail, roughly enough to run a 12 KW generator. That wouldn’t exactly power an electricity-hungry Western lifestyle, but it’s enough to keep the lights, heat, AC, fridge, freezer and sump pump running in a 1500 ft home. And no 2 gallons of diesel fuel per hour to run the generator.

Now, you’re not going to see household-size conversion systems any time soon on the horizon on a cost feasible basis, but Sierra’s Pathfinder system appears to be making some waves with a skid-mounted, 10 ton-per-day system that it originally developed as a small demo unit to prove the viability of its technology.

“The DoD has been looking for small scale,” said Sierra Energy CEO Mike Hart in speaking with the Digest. “They’ve been funding development of our system — they’ve got 500+ installations around the world and a number of them have sever energy security and disposal challenges.”
Making the economics work for a small system just on power-gen is tough, says Hart.

“Electricity is the least valuable thing you can make. But there are lots of customers, it turns out, that are looking for small systems to start off. In some cases, they want a distributed solution, where they can place units around a city and generate 500 KW in each location. Until you have a working small scale system working in the community, there’s always going to opposition to “new”.

“A small, successful system in any community,” Hart adds, “is a huge step forward that allows people to see zero waste, and emissions well below running a nat gas plant. When they see it works, people want to make the next move up.”

The Iowa State Project

So, what about a hub-and-spoke approach? Densify biomass locally, then process it at massive scale elsewhere. One of the barriers to such a technology is simply the ability to effectively gasify bio-oil, in a refinery setting, into a workable syngas that can be catalytically converted into fuels and chemicals. And to prove out that the two-step process can work, economically – given that you have to pour in heat to make bio-oil, then heat it all over again in a refinery setting.

To answer those questions, the DOE launched a two-year, $1 million project with Iowa State University — and the Iowa Energy Center chipped in $450,000 over three years.

Mike Krapfl, at Iowa State, writes, “In the Iowa State project, biomass is fed into a fast pyrolysis machine where it’s quickly heated without oxygen. The resulting bio-oil is sprayed into the top of the gasifier where heat and pressure vaporize it to produce a combination of (mostly) hydrogen and carbon monoxide that’s called synthesis gas.”

The bio-oil gasifier went operational in June 2012 and has been converting bio-oil made from pine wood into synthesis gas. As the project moves beyond its startup phase, researchers will use bio-oil produced by Iowa State researchers and fast pyrolysis equipment.

The Bottom Line

The ideas are out there. Companies have been formed. Some, like Velocys and Cool Planet, have moved towards commercial deployment. Others languish.

It may be that the solutions will await a Tony Stark, as was the case with Arc Reactor technology.

William Ginter Riva: Mr. Stane. Sir, we’ve explored what you’ve asked us and it seems as though there’s a little hiccup. Actually, um…

Obadiah Stane: A hiccup?

William Ginter Riva: Yes, see, to power the suit… sir, the technology doesn’t actually exist. So it…

Obadiah Stane: Wait, wait, the technology? [puts an arm around him] William, William…[points at the giant arc reactor] Here is the technology. I’ve asked you to simply make it smaller.

William Ginter Riva: All right, and that’s what we’re trying to do, but… honestly, it’s impossible.

Obadiah Stane: [shouting] Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!

William Ginter Riva: Well, I’m sorry. I’m not Tony Stark.