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1. POET to Produce Cellulosic Ethanol By the End of the Year
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2. T. Boone, Prop 10 and the Questionable Effect of Natural Gas Cars
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3. Animated Ethanol Molecule, Not Just For the Kids
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4. Fuel Cells: We Don't Need No Stinking Platinum
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5. Customize Algae Fuel With AXI
POET to Produce Cellulosic Ethanol By the End of the Year
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
POET, one of the larger producers of corn-based ethanol in the United States, says it will start churning out cellulosic ethanol by the end of the year. The company started construction on a $4 million pilot-scale cellulosic ethanol facility in Scotland, S.D., a few months ago, and now says that facility will be completed and operational within 2008. POET hopes the pilot-scale plant will help perfect the technology for a planned commercial scale plant named Project Liberty in Emmetsburg, Iowa, that will start construction in 2009.
The Sioux Falls, S.D.-based company’s announcement will likely make the numerous startups working on cellulosic ethanol a bit nervous, as one of the incumbent big players has set an aggressive time table. And POET has the advantage of being able to rely on its existing infrastructure of corn-based ethanol plants to move into the cellulosic game. The company is aiming to build its cellulosic plants adjacent to its existing corn-based plants, and will use waste corn cobs and corn kernel fibers from the adjacent plants to produce the cellulosic ethanol.
The setup assures the company a feedstock and helps it hedge against the uncertainty of cellulosic ethanol; it could ultimately not be an economically viable technology or a good investment for the company. And the company is definitely hedging — for POET’s 125 million gallon per year Liberty plant, supposed to be operation in 2011, just 25 million of that capacity is supposed to be for cellulosic ethanol. Integrating the plants will also make the cellulosic process faster and cheaper to market for Poet. Poet’s CEO Jeff Broin said in a speech for the announcement:
POET believes this approach is the fastest way to achieve the commercialization of cellulosic ethanol. You see, the challenge is not to produce cellulosic ethanol in the lab. Dozens of companies have done that already, including POET.
Poet also has significant funds to back its plans. It has its sales from its corn-based ethanol business and the DOE selected POET to receive up to $80 million in funds for the plant.
But POET is also facing a variety of hurdles. The price of corn has gone sky-high, hurting corn-based ethanol makers everywhere, so having cellulosic plants rely on corn as well could prove challenging. And, though the company has opened other corn ethanol plants this year, POET recently canceled plans for a plant in Glenville, Minn., due to permitting problems — the thin margins for corn ethanol obviously didn’t help keep those plans alive.
There’s also the fact that there are many other eager startups working on cutting-edge and innovative ways to produce cellulosic ethanol that have nothing to do with corn and the traditional ethanol industry. These newcomers, like Coskata, Synthetic Genomics and Range Fuels are turning to scientific breakthroughs like synthetic biology and genetics. Their valuable IP is getting backed by venture capitalists. They are also a lot more aggressive than POET and spending hundreds of millions on their plants. So, like so many industries that face monumental shifts, we’ll see how well the older POET does when facing the disruptive newcomers.
T. Boone, Prop 10 and the Questionable Effect of Natural Gas Cars
Katie Fehrenbacher - Policy
The LA Times story that knocked the green halo off T. Boone Pickens’ head, with its spotlight on Pickens’ funding of California’s Prop 10, generated a lot of heated comments from readers. This morning the Wall Street Journal takes a crack at the story and points out some more interesting details.
The Prop, which would gives thousands of dollars in rebates to natural gas vehicle buyers, as well as spending on R&D, will supposedly cost California $9.8 billion over 30 years and would come from taxpayer money. The WSJ says, if the prop passes, it could lead to a million natural gas vehicles for California; if the Prop is defeated then natural gas vehicle backers will have to compete — against cleaner alternatives like electric vehicles — for the $840 million in funds under law AB 118. In a vacuum natural gas cars sound OK, but it’s hard to justify spending on dirtier-burning natural gas vehicles when those funds are directly competing with “zero emission” alternatives, like electric cars powered by a solar grid.
So, the biggest issue with choosing to fund natural gas vehicles or not is the questionable emissions benefits. Yes, there is a national security and supply issue that is answered by natural gas vehicles, but the WSJ quotes a California Energy Commission study: When natural gas replaces gasoline, greenhouse gases are reduced by just 20 to 30 percent. When natural gas is used instead of diesel in trucks, greenhouse gases are reduced just 10 to 20 percent. If diesel is almost comparable, then it makes more sense to fund that as a stop gap as that infrastructure is already in place. The article also points out that the natural gas vehicle benefits over gasoline have dropped over the past two decades as newer internal combustion engines have become cleaner and more efficient.
The WSJ says together Pickens and Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon have spent $3.7 million supporting the proposition. Previously Pickens had been isolated as the only backer of the prop. Chesapeake Energy’s claim to fame is that it’s the “third-largest overall producer of natural gas in the U.S” — so it’s not surprising that the firm would invest to get this passed. Earlier this week it also came out that Pickens is getting into natural gas vehicle development, too. Pickens and the natural gas distribution company he founded, Clean Energy Fuels, joined with the Perseus fund to invest $160 million into building a natural gas vehicle.
Animated Ethanol Molecule, Not Just For the Kids
Katie Fehrenbacher - In the Lab
The animation isn’t the end unto itself. Crowley has visually mapped it out to help researchers eventually bioengineer a version of Cel7A that could be useful for cellulosic biofuel production. In nature, Cel7A turns cellulose into simple sugars at a pace that’s good enough for plants, but not quite fast enough for an industry that wants to pump gallons of the end product into our fuel tanks. Engineering the enzyme could deliver an efficient way to churn out biofuels from cellulosic — and more importantly, non-food feedstocks.
Crowley’s research is being funded by the NREL to the tune of $1 million a year over five years. He’s working with researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Cornell University, Forest Products Research Lab, Scripps Research Institute and the University of California at San Diego. The work could not only help deliver innovations for biofuels, but will likely produce computer science work in the form of codes and algorithms that will help researchers do similarly complex supercomputer-based modeling.
Fuel Cells: We Don't Need No Stinking Platinum
Celeste LeCompte - In the Lab
Prices for platinum have dropped more than 30 percent in recent weeks, to around $1,478.80 an ounce, off a high of more than $2,100 an ounce earlier this year. It’s part of an overall slide in commodity prices, from corn to precious metals to crude, taking place as global supply chains respond to a slowing U.S. economy.
But platinum prices are still high and supply isn’t expected to keep up with demand — a major point of concern for fuel cell companies, which use platinum as a catalyst for converting hydrogen gas into electricity and water. It’s also a point of innovation as researchers and firms have scrambled to find a way to replace (or at least reduce) the expensive material in their designs.
Hydrogen fuel cells have two main reactive surfaces: an anode, which splits oxygen, and a cathode, which splits the hydrogen gas. Both electrodes typically use platinum to catalyze the reaction, but a team of Australian researchers has developed a way to outfit the cathode with a conductive, Gore-Tex-like material to replace the platinum. The Monash University researchers told Greener Design they’re optimistic about ditching platinum in the anode as well:
“However, the way the conducting polymer works as [a] catalyst make us believe that it should be possible to design a conducting polymer that suits the hydrogen oxidation reaction,” said Monash’s Dr. Bjørn Winther-Jensen.
The Monash team’s work is related to that of researchers at MIT, who have devised a way to use cobalt in an anode-side reaction that mimics photosynthesis, as well as Japanese automaker Daihatsu Motor, which said last year that it had developed a similar polymer-based approach. (So far the company hasn’t made any additional announcements.)
Other companies are working on the cathode problem: Japanese company Hitachi Maxell is looking to blend platinum with gold as a way to cut prices and boost efficiency. The new catalyst is just 2-3 nanometers in size, allowing the company to pack more reactive surface area into the fuel cell stack. However, the Maxell approach may not be as helpful at cutting costs if the U.S. economy continues to slide, since gold prices tend to go up as the dollar goes down. (Still, we’d take gold’s current $814 per ounce over $1,400 per ounce any day!).
Researchers at Brown are also experimenting with nanotechnology to improve platinum’s performance as a catalyst (this time without adding gold into the mix.) By blending the pure metal with two compounds, the team has created “nanocubes” that, like Maxell’s gold-blend catalyst, boost the platinum’s reactive surface area.
Such initiatives are slow going, however, and platinum is unlikely to become a cost-effective option for fuel cell manufacturers any time soon. Nor for the beleaguered U.S. auto industry, which uses platinum as the active ingredient in catalytic converters; each converter can use four to seven ounces of the pricey material. The auto industry accounts for as much as 50 percent of global demand for the metal, according to Reuters, and growing numbers of cars on the road in China and India are likely to increase pressure on existing resources. Mazda and Nissan have both developed catalytic converters that use nanotechnology to reduce the amount of platinum used by 50 to 90 percent.
Customize Algae Fuel With AXI
Craig Rubens - Startups
AXI says it has a technology that allows it to customize algal strains to its, or the distributors’, liking. There are basically three main areas of innovations that can add to the algae to fuel world: there’s the tweaking of algal strains, the development of bioreactor systems and the commercialization of fuel production. AXI joins players like Seambiotic, Aurora Biofuels and Solazyme who are all focused on developing superior strains of algae.
This means AXI doesn’t have to dabble with messy bioreactors or fuel fermenters that other startups are using to make biofuels — if it doesn’t want to. Instead, many on our list of startups could actually be customers for AXI’s algae strains. Rose Ann Cattolico, developer of the AXI technology at the University of Washington, said in a statement that its methods for developing “growth and productivity traits” will help the algae fuel industry improve output.
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