Apr
3
A Biofuel Process That Works
April 3, 2008 | 4 Comments
Ever Cat Fuels Corporation has its pilot plant for biodiesel up and running at a 50,000-gallon annual rate. Later this year with a new facility completed the capacity will grow another 3 million gallons annually. Ever Cat is using a process named Mcgyan after the three scientists who devised the process. But the story goes back another step. To a kid in college.
Brian Krohn while a student at Augsburg College and studying chemistry started a summer research project seeking to come up with a new way to make biodiesel. His basic ideas applied to the summer research triggered his professor, Arlin Gyberg to encourage contact with an alumnus Dr. Clayton McNeff, a Vice President of StarTec Corporation. The gentlemen enrolled the StarTec chief scientist Dr. Ben Yan, who applied Brian’s ideas and research results and created a new chemical reaction, one not seen in the chemical science literature before. That propelled McNeff to found Ever Cat Fuels.
Things have been moving fast, really fast. The announcement was just last month, March 7th, 2008, and the plant is already running. One realizes that the announcement was subject to thresholds in the patent process. At the same time, the plant was brought on line, inspected by other industry analysts, and set for new construction with plans for licenses or perhaps plant design sales.
The most gracious part of this is that the three men whose names were used to form the process name have seen to it that Brian Krohn is credited for his part. While no details are released about Brian’s economic status in this, it speaks volumes of high character about the three men that Brian is in the spotlight for the past month. The light was so bright that the information as it applies to the rest of us is almost shadowed out. I congratulate Brian and send my respects and admiration to the team for such a grand display of character and integrity. This builds a lot of credibility into the due diligence we do before writing a post.
The analysts who have been invited to look over the process are impressed by how well the design works in utilizing the chemical reaction innovation. The graphic shows the stream of alcohol and oil entering the reactor and exiting as biodiesel fuel and recyclable alcohol. The next stages of separation and cleaning yield a ready to use fuel product.
The process relies on feedstocks that can be as varied as alcohols from single carbon methanol, ethanol and up to three carbon propanol. The oil side can source from the full range of plant and animal based oils as well as waste products. While not exceedingly cheap, these products are in a growth phase and can be improved to the higher energy density of middle distillates like diesel, jet and home heating oils. Alcohols while good and achievable chemicals from current plant growth need the boost to higher energy density both to enter the fuel supply system and to keep value in consumer’s investments in fuel using machines.
Sharp readers know that plant based oils will need reforming and refining steps to get up to current fuel standards. The hard data to compare this process with current biofuel refining is still an issue to be explored. It’s likely that as the algae production industry grows which will generate a large volume of oil, competitive reforming and refining techniques will become more important.
Ever Cat offers these points for comparison:
- Flexible feedstock; animal or plant sources of lipids can be used. Current waste products can be turned into fuel.
- No use of strong acids or bases in the process.
- Fast reaction times (seconds).
- Cheap feedstocks such as waste grease and animal tallow as well as a variety of plant oils can be converted to biodiesel.
- The metal oxide based catalyst is contained in a fixed bed reactor thereby eliminating the current need to continuously add catalyst to the reaction mixture thereby reducing the amount of waste produced.
- Unwanted side reactions with free fatty acids producing soaps are eliminated, thereby reducing the amount of waste that must be disposed of properly.
- Insensitive to free fatty acid and water content of the feedstocks.
- The catalyst does not poison over time.
- The process flows super critical alcohol and oil feedstocks through a tube reactor packed with sulfated metal oxide microspheres. This produces biodiesel in seconds with virtually no waste stream. The un-reacted alcohol and any residual fatty acids are recycled through the reactor making the process entirely continuous and able to achieve 100% conversion.
The activity performs a catalytic conversion of triglycerides and free fatty acids into fatty acid methyl esters. At the end there is one other problem, the separation of the alcohol and the biodiesel. Whether distillation or another means are used is still out for improvement.
An assessment offers that the three lightest alcohols and most any plant or animal oil can be used. The running costs don’t seem worrysome and may be quite competitive. The issues about separation may be of a cost matter, distilling alcohol from biodiesel is a matter with no easy to find comparison to water separation. Lastly the algae industry is working feverishly to drive to algae species with the minimum need for reforming and refining as well as gross oil production.
Nevertheless, plant oils and alcohol production is already a worldwide effort. As more becomes known about how this process can be applied from jatropha to soybean across the planet a better idea of its value will become known.
For today its all champaign and caviar for Brian Krohn and the team who built out his research into a commercial way to produce biodiesel. Good work!
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[…] Nogrid.us wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt Ever Cat Fuels Corporation has its pilot plant for biodiesel up and running at a 50,000-gallon annual rate. Later this year with a new facility completed the capacity will grow another 3 million gallons annually. Ever Cat is using a process named Mcgyan after the three scientists who devised the process. But the story goes back another step. To a kid in college. Brian Krohn while a student at Augsburg College and studying chemistry started a summer research project seeking to come up with a […]
[…] “A Biofuel Process that Works” […]
Perhaps the use of micro-spheres is the innovation here … but supercritical extraction of methyl and ethyl esters is nothing new. This statement isn’t meant to down play the significance of an industrial process that can help our energy crisis, but rather to temper the media in it’s ability to accurately report items of scientific interest. Interesting yes, but not impressed until this reported in a peer reviewed article.
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