Food and energy costs, together with healthcare, are arguably the three most important factors in how well we thrive on planet Earth. While healthcare costs certainly continue to rise, it is food and energy costs that are most volatile. Food and energy costs seem to fluctuate the most during periods of emergence and spread of…
Some in the electric vehicles industry predict that we will have almost 150 million electric vehicles in service by 2030. This is fifteen times the number in use in 2021. Many automakers indicate that within a few decades, the current combustion engines will be completely gone. This is a good thing for the green economy…
Can you improve ethanol revenues by 50-75 CPG? Corn ethanol can be a highly profitable business when a plant can reduce its Carbon Intensity. Which CI reduction alternatives can provide the best return on capital? Negative C.I. Ethanol is coming! Business opportunities to increase CI revenue include: Crop waste-based energy supply, CHP for power and…
Biochar for wastewater treatment, both municipal and industrial, is a good alternative as such multistage process accommodates a constantly changing influent. One of the most critical steps in the process is the aeration basin in which microbes work in conjunction with an adsorptive media such as biochar. Biochar’s porosity makes it ideally suited to this…
As part of a technical due diligence effort, the team is often requested to perform a Technical Readiness Assessment. This will assign a score to the technology, known as the Technical Readiness Level (TRL). Originally developed by NASA in the 1970’s, it was adopted by the US DOD in the early 2000’s, followed by the…
When developing an industrial fermentation process, the choice of the production organism dictates much of the large-scale fermentation characteristics in addition to the nature of research and development and process development. Well characterized strains with a large genetic manipulation tool set, such as Escherichia coli, can rapidly deliver R&D goals, yet E. coli tends to…
What is the difference between carbon dioxide remediation and removal in biogas? Both are processes that change the raw biogas to another useful form, but there is a distinction. Carbon dioxide removal is a form of remediation, but it is a more sophisticated and costly step in the “cleanup” of biogas. Normally, the reason to…
Biogas is a gas mixture developed from naturally occurring processes in nature. Basically, bacteria that exist in our world digest organic material, and the by-product of their digestion is biogas. Biogas is a mixture mainly of methane and carbon dioxide, but invariably contains many other compounds. Some of the more significant compounds are considered contaminates,…