I cover the forces and innovations that shape our energy future.
Image: Cool Planet
First, let’s start with the investors. Heavy hitters GE, Exelon, NRG, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Google are just some of the companies who have put money behind the venture. Then there’s the management team. These are serious players from the communications, finance, and fuels industries. The chief technology officer – Mike Cheiky – who came up with the company’s technology has over 50 patents, two World Economic Forum Energy awards, and has founded six start-ups.
So much for the bona fides, what does Cool Planet do? Well, they make gasoline from organic materials such as trees, grass, or corn cobs. The company can manufacture gasoline in modular plants, and their long-term goal is to produce it at $1.50 a gallon. Their first $50+million, 10 million gallon-per-year manufacturing facility is now being built in Louisiana.
But what may be even more important is the residual ‘waste’ that results from the creation of gasoline. That waste is essentially the carbonized remainder of the biomass they heat up, from which the vapors were extracted and liquefied into gasoline. This co-product is called biochar, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you may well soon. Biochar is defined by the
International Biochar Initiative (yes, there is such a thing; the IBI has 400 paying members from 34 countries) as “a solid material obtained from the carbonization of biomass.”
Biochar – when blended with soil – has the unique ability to vastly improve plant harvests while reducing the amount of water and fertilizer needed. According to the IBI, biochar also has appreciable carbon sequestration that is measurable and verifiable. Cool Planet’s biochar is the first product to be certified by the IBI.
I spoke to two executives from Cool Planet to find out more about the whole business, and what the company was up to. Mike Rocke, vice president for business development explained that because of the properties outlined above “We aren’t carbon neutral, we can be carbon negative.”
Here’s how the process works, according to Rocke:
We take any non-food biomass, we grind it up and then we use pressure and heat like mother nature does, and we do it in minutes versus years, to drive all the reactive gases out of the biomass. Then we take it through a catalytic column, and then out of that we get fuel – floating on water – and biochar.
Unlike ethanol – which is mainly produced from corn in this country – CoolPlanet doesn’t have to use food to make fuel. Rocke comments, “We could use all of the dead trees in Colorado with the beetle-killed wood, to avoid forest fires, and we could make fuel and biochar to help recover the land.”
In fact, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced in November a grant of $9.8 million to the Colorado State University to work with Cool Planet in helping to convert some of the 42 million acres of diseased wood in western forests into fuel and biochar.
The process is flexible. It’s not just wood that can be used as a source of fuel “We can use any cellulose – switchgrass, for example or woody products like ligno-cellulose.” And the manufacturing plants are relatively flexible as well, since they can be built in a modular fashion, much smaller than the typical investments in the gasoline industry.
The plants are low capex – these are low cost units. They are eventually planned to go in cargo containers and you can ship them anywhere. Our Louisiana facility, which will be Cool Planet’s 1st commercial site, will cost $56 million and yield 10 million gallons a year in capacity. It will be ready by Q3 of 2014
The long-term goal is to scale manufacturing to get the plants into the $20 million range, and Rocke notes, “We should be able to put out gasoline at cost of $1.50 when we get to scale. We’ve already presold our fuel to the big majors to blend with existing fossil in order to lower their carbon footprint.”
In creating this mix of products, Cool Planet has faced more than one arched eyebrow. Rocke noted that one of the major oil companies initially looked at the fuel, which has been verified by independent research labs to be 99.98% the same as gasoline, and thought it was a traditional ancient hydrocarbon product.
They thought it was fossil because of the gas-chromatograph test and said ‘we’ll come back in two weeks and tell you where it was from’ (oil companies can test random samples and tell you what part of the world they originate from and their age). They came back and apologized because they had done a carbon 14 dating test and said ‘this is new.’ We said, ‘yes, we told you that.’ Then they responded – we can now tell you the fuel came from corn cobs.’
Rocke commented that the ability to create valuable biochar as an additional product was somewhat accidental. “Originally we were going to put this stuff back in the ground as coal. We didn’t know what we had with biochar.”
In the early stages of development, the biochar they created was actually killing the plants they tested it on. Then Cool Planet realized the trick was to actually apply less energy to the production process (called fast pyrolysis).
We use a minimal amount of energy – everybody else (other competitors) heats it up real hot and creates gases and reclaims the gas, but they tend to over-heat it. We use a minimum of energy and out comes this biochar at the end.
A number of approaches were necessary to get to the right outcome, with the input of agronomists, botanists, and microbiologists to optimize the impact on plants.
Rocke noted that there was a good deal of initial trial and error.
There has been a lot of work. The first time we created biochar three years ago we created a herbicide. We are now the first company certified the by Int’l BioChar Initiative. With this whole rhyzosphere, you need a symbiotic relationship between microbes and bacteria to fix nitrogen. You create cable-ready condos for microbes at the root level of plants. Not only do we have condo-ready move in, it comes with running water.
Rick Wilson, the executive responsible for the Cool Planet biochar operations, observed that the entire biochar industry is relatively new.
There have been a lot of false starts in marketing biochar. The product has to work every time, and that was not the state of the technology. We generally saw that people cooked biochar too high and it didn’t work very well.
Wilson noted that Mother Nature’s biochar is a forest fire.
A dead tree turns into a dead zone for a while, and then just takes off and the forest flourishes. All our IP came from looking at interaction with soil. If you overcook, you remove organic compounds that the microbes need. The function of biochar is to nurture symbiotic microbial populations. We discovered we need to not only do cooking right, but fix the chemistry before we put it in the soil. That’s the one-two punch that allows us to get pretty profound results 100% of time, not only in yields but faster growth rates. We tell farmers to reduce fertilizer use and water use by half.
Cool Planet is focusing on higher value crops like strawberries – which are worth 40 times as much per acre as corn. The company is currently engaged in field trials in row and orchard crops in both California and Florida, and they are testing in dairy as well, where European experiments show that small amounts of biochar can improve the health of animals while increasing milk output.
The company put me in touch with David Holden, an expert in agricultural field development research with a very long, 40- year resume, to discuss the results of the field trials to date. Holden is your quintessential cautious and understated researcher. He has to be, since he runs 120-140 agricultural trials every year on different products and applications, and people rely on him for accuracy and reliability.
Holden indicated that he first started trials of biochar in California in late May, on tomatoes and peppers, with strawberries and celery to come next. Applying a rigorous process “to avoid the possibility of cherry-picking the data,” he’s looked at biochar applications with normal fertilizer levels, as well as levels reduced by 20% and 40%. Likewise, he has tested with traditional applications of water, as well as applications reduced by 20% and 40%. He observed plant growth, nutrient uptake, soil depletion, and general levels of plant response. And so far, Holden has been impressed. He noted that with the biochar, a number of trials demonstrated higher than standard yields even with reduced fertilizer and water use. He also spoke like a true scientist. “With this early data, I would say that it was ‘significantly beneficial’ when we used the biochar.” Holden also commented “I would just say from a general perspective that I am impressed with the due diligence they (Cool Planet) are applying in developing the data for their product.”
So, while it’s still relatively early days for Cool Planet, things look pretty good to date. They are building their first modular gasoline plant in Louisiana, and they are still undertaking their field trials in California, and so far the results appear promising. The economic value associated with fuel production may be quite significant. And the value of the biochar could have profound implications as well. Holden insinuated that if the data continue to be positive, the economic opportunity could be immense just in this country alone. “In the US, we are the best in the world at producing food. Farmers don’t waste money, and they know what they are doing. If they see benefit in this, they will spend the money.”
Cool Planet: A Company That Makes Biochar And Gasoline - Forbes
