Articles written by Lee Enterprises Consulting Bioeconomy Expert(s)
By Dr. Gerald Kutney, Lee Enterprises Consulting The 150th anniversary of Confederation on July 1st is a time to reflect upon the country’s achievements; this article covers the evolution of the Canadian biofuel industry – including gaseous, liquid and solid biofuels, and biomass power – from 1867 to 2017. The foundations of the biofuel industry in…
Financing a biomass project? By the time a developer seeks non-recourse financing for a biomass project, the contracts for construction and major equipment procurement have usually been pre-negotiated and are on hold awaiting notice to proceed. Prospective lenders then scour these contracts for defects, paying particular attention to inconsistencies between the various contracts. Clean contracts…
By: Dr. Bernard Cooker, Lee Enterprises Consulting Summary Biomass-based green polymer and monomer projects, as reported in Chemical and Engineering News and Chemical Engineering Progress in Q1, Q2 2017 are surveyed. The focus here is on combinations of low raw material cost, commercial scale operation and high added product value, to maximize the profit opportunity. Introduction…
By Gregory T. Benz, Lee Enterprises Consulting Introduction Advanced fermentation processes, both aerobic and anaerobic, have been successful on an industrial scale for quite a long time, producing a wide variety of products. In most of these processes, if any gas has been added, it has been either air or oxygen-enriched air. In the advanced bioeconomy,…
By Lorenz Bauer, Ph.D., Lee Enterprises Consulting. The methanol and bioeconomies are two of the buzz words of the last decade. They had their origin in the “peak oil” scare and the predicted sky rocketing oil prices. They were further boosted by environmental concerns about pollution and climate change. Both economies are continuing to grow;…
Algae Biomass Productivity for Oil to Other High Value Products – Is It Still on the Horizon? By: Dr. Anju Krivov, Lee Enterprises Consulting, Inc. Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s vision of an algae oil machine fed with a bucketful of algae soup from a pond at one end spits out oil at the other – that…
By Lorenz Bauer Ph.D, Lee Enterprises Consulting “Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” Samuel Coleridge Managing the water in biomass processes like food production, fermentations, pyrolysis, and biodiesel production is critical to success. There is an increasing appreciation of the value of clean water. The value of water is…
By Gregory T. Benz Introduction Many agitator applications, such as blending of miscible liquids or suspending slowly settling solids such as starch and grain slurries used in ethanol production, may be classified as flow-controlled applications. That is to say, the process result depends on creating a certain characteristic velocity, Vb, which is calculated on a…