Bionic Fuel MWDP commercialization on track

A most important step in the way forward for Bionic's MWDP technology has just been achieved: Bionic Fuel received a letter of intent for the first commercial reactor. It will be fully assembled at the Smeral Factory in Brno, Czech Republic and rigorously tested against its specifications. We will publish a full record of the manufacturing and testing process on this website. After all formal certifications are completed the reactor will be disassembled and shipped to its final location at the project site in Hawaii.

The client, Aina Koa Pono LLC (AKP) plans to order a second batch of 12 reactors which will be combined in a cluster configuration and feed their oil to a biorefinery. Outputs will be ASTM diesel, high quality biochar and fuel additives. In January AKP has signed a 20-year off-take agreement with HECO, the Hawaiian power company.

See also the news on the BFT website.

TCDP Thermo Catalytic Depolymerization

Its been a long time since the last 2 posts, but after making a few changes to the basic idea of this site (which took us two and a half years) we are now back on course with explaining the basics about our microfuel technology and share with the interested public where we are going from here.

So this time I will give more background about thermo-catalytic depolymerization to prepare everyone for the next post, which will be about MWDP, microwave depolymerization, the technology invented in our group.

For those who went through my last posts it shouldn't be too difficult to follow this final chapter about the basics behind TCDP. For those who haven't I recommend to have a look back at the last post first.

I think the best way to explain TCDP is to go through the term word by word while analyzing their intended meaning. And finally I want to go a little bit into the possibilities and implications of a stable and reliable continuous process technology supporting TCDP to make it work on a large scale.

Depolymerization

Depolymerization is the contrary to polymerization, which means the building of large organic or carbon based molecules, called polymers, out of smaller building blocks. Therefore depolymerization means the break down or cracking of polymers into smaller molecules. In our context, the polymers are for example large organic molecules like cellulose, man made plastics or vulcanized rubber. When they are cracked in the proper way, the result will be a liquid mixture of molecules that has similar properties like the most useful oil products from fossil oil. Two things are required to do that: energy and a catalyst...

Thermal

Thermal means "through the application of heat", meaning the required energy is added to a process in the form of heat. This is actually complemented by pressure in some existing implementations, acting as an additional form of energy input for a transformation process. The total amount of energy input required for a certain chemo physical transformation then determines the energy efficiency of such a process. Energy efficiency is obviously a very important factor when it comes to assessing cost and environmental impact of a biomass to energy conversion.

Catalytic

Probably the very first successfully run TCDP process is documented in a patent application by the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben in the 1920ties. Metals like iron and copper where used as catalysts. At that time zeolites with their superior capabilities had not yet been discovered. Today they are the material of choice for this process.

A zeolite combines two important capabilities in one material: a molecular sieve in the form of a siliceous crystal structure and a metallic catalyst function (Aluminum oxide). The combination of both is essential for many of their uses. Oil refineries are using them for over 50 years to improve their product yields, but they are also used in many different production processes and form an important ingredient in modern washing agents.

For those who want to know more about zeolites, please go to Professor Geoffrey L. Price Zeolite Page and have a look at his description.

Now somebody might think: all you have to do is build a small reactor that allows you to mix your garden waste with zeolite, heat up the mixture to the right temperature and voila, the next day you have diesel for your car and biochar for next years vegetable.

 

Well, in principle this is correct, however, many have tried over the years to design a simple continuous reactor which can exactly do this. They have learned the hard way that there are some technical issues to overcome before you get there. We will get back to this in a future article about the technical hurdles in building such a reactor. 

Until then please visit us on Bionic World to have a look at our reactors.

BTL Biomass-to-Liquid for Dummies

Today I am writing about some of the basics behind Thermo Catalytic Depolymerization (TCDP) and Bionic's more advanced version Microwave Depolymerization (MWDP) or µBTL. In fact both processes are the latest in advanced pyrolysis technologies adding the improved cracking capabilities of zeolite catalysts and microwave application to a core process known for thousands of years. It was really hard to get started with this and I kept pushing it away. I am not a writer by profession so this doesn't look like great fun to me. But I do believe it is important to share some insight with my readers about the rather simple background behind these fascinating processes.

First of all we should learn a little bit about oil in general and petroleum or crude oil in particular. Luckily there is Wikipedia, where they have done a great job on those subjects. So please let me refer you to here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crude_oil
and ask you to come back...

Lots of interesting stuff, isn't it?

As far as crude oil goes, you have seen the two theories about the origin of fossil oils. After doing a lot of research I came to believe that both theories have true value of their own. Funny how they were used as a tool for the capitalist/communist confrontation during the cold war. I really can't see a problem in the coexistence of both theories. However, any resources from a possible abiotic origin would be generally so deep down towards the center of the earth that they won't be within reach for a long time to come.

Now I would like to draw your attention to the article on synthetic oil. Wikipedia is still a bit weak here. The Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process definitely is a synthetic process, but the extraction of crude oil from tar sands has certainly not the least to do with a synthetic process. It is mere separation of sand and tar (=crude oil) which is later refined in traditional petrochemical ways. What makes the process so expensive is the separation of tar and sand, not the subsequent refining. It should be noted here, that MWDP actually offers an environmentally much cleaner, and less "equipment eating" option for this separation. No water or steam needed, no steel consuming direct contact processing.

Let's move on to the closely related subject of synthetic fuel. If you went through at least most of the linked reading material above, things should get fairly easy by now. What we are primarily interested in here is Biomass-To-Liquids (BTL), while everything else gives us a great background, because we can see now how closely related all these processes actually are. We also find catalytic depolymerization (CDP) mentioned for the first time and a link to Jim Trounson's website on this subject.

Going through all that information establishes a good basis for what we are headed for. Please bear with me a little longer. Those of you who want to get some insight in the controversial and sometimes heated debates of the self claimed experts out there, get yourself a large cup of coffee and start reading this thread on the BioDieselNow forum. If you start your reading there you immediately run into thermal depolymerization (TDP) as some kind of alternative to CDP.

Now let's start shedding some light on the confusion I have probably created by now.

All BTL processes and technologies have one thing in common: They intend to convert organic substances from various sources (natural or artificial) into oil or fuel. Typical sources are all types of organic waste streams from biomass to plastics, paper and cardboard or any type of biomass deriving from energy crop. Converting hydrocarbons (oils, fats, proteins) is widely considered an easy task compared with the conversion of carbohydrates (fibrous and cellulosic materials) into fuel.

BTL processes can be easily separated into two classes:

• (1) Gasification of feedstock with a subsequent FT synthesis
• (2) Depolymerization including Pyrolysis

(1) Gasification plus FT breaks down organic feedstock in an initial gasification phase to a gaseous mixture called syngas containing mainly just the basic molecules (CO and H). In a second phase the gas is converted into synthetic fuel using the FT process.

(2) Depolymerization achieves the same result, however, by converting the feedstock molecules directly to the intended result without breaking them down to the smallest possible structure first, before resynthesising them back to the intended larger molecular structures. Therefore depolymerization can achieve the same result with a much smaller energy input. The tricky part is how to sufficiently control the reactions.

Depolymerization itself can be broken down further in thermal depolymerization (TDP) and thermo catalytic depolymerization (TCDP) which is in my opinion falsely often abbreviated into catalytic depolymerization (CDP). Pyrolysis can be seen as the most important form of TDP.

Adding a catalyst to basic TDP technologies improves the process in several ways: First the breaking down or cracking of the large feedstock molecules requires less energy and second, a modern zeolite catalyst assists in better control over the reactions. While metal oxides contained in the zeolites facilitate the reaction itself, its molecular sieve properties allow for control.

I am aware that this is an extremely simplified explanation of what is really happening in highly complex chemo-physical mass-reactions, but it is that primitive model that helped me to understand what's going on. After all, I do not consider myself a scientist.

If you look at the first patent I was able to identify that goes back to the early 1920ties, the process worked at the IG Farben laboratories with simple metal oxide catalysts. Zeolites and their special capabilities where not yet known at the time.

A well publicized implementation of TDP was done by Changing World Technologies Inc. (CWT) at a Carthage, Missouri plant where they produce oil from animal waste (turkey offal). Energy is applied to the process through pressure and heat. It can be assumed, that some hydrogenation is taking place in the first stage. CWT is a clear proof that the chemo physical process of TDP works, while it still has to overcome some technical problems.

There are quite a number of other implementations of TDP around the globe with less publicity. A very recent one in Germany MME Technology AG (website not available anymore as the company went into receivership) for example claimed to successfully process straw. It should be noted that straw is a mainly carbohydrate biomass feedstock. (After this article was written MME went into receivership. No project has ever been completed)

As I have tried to set up the big picture with this chapter, I will use the next one to explore somewhat closer the details of TCDP. So come back for more soon...