Fuel Maker Start-Up Making Strides

Re: my depressing previous post on the DOD's as yet unsuccessful attempt to make a fuels market via vehicle and aircraft certification, here's a local company (local to my home town of Boston, that is) that's making some early but significant progress towards becoming a future fuel provider.

GreatPoint Energy is taking a run at turning the coal-to-fuel gasification process into a real business. This CNET article by clean tech reporter Martin LaMonica provides a good overview. Note: the end product GreatPoint is shooting for here is natural gas, not jet fuel or diesel. But they still provide a good example of some of the challenges, as well as the potential rewards, that await companies that pursue similar paths.

Potential Coal to Liquids (CTL) Game Changer?

The DOD consumes 75% of the energy used by the Federal government, and the Air Force is by far the largest consumer of energy in the DOD.  Hence, the Air Force and DARPA have been searching for alternatives to jet fuel derived from oil for several years and the work continues. Among the challengers to oil are fuels derived from oil's biomass precursors like foliage, wood, food waste, sugar cane, switch grass, algae, etc. Nature would eventually turn these things into oil for free, as long as we could wait a couple hundred of million years. However, we don't have quite that much time.

 The Air Force has turned its attention to making fuel from other fossil forms, including natural gas and coal, and almost (but not quite) constructed a CTL fuel facility at Malmstrom AFB (covered here). 

The problems with CTL processes to date are several, and include price and the amount of pollution (including CO2) created by the process, even before the fuel is burned. This Wired magazine article describes a breakthrough made by Professor Ben Glasser in Johannesburg, South Africa. Here's the short take:

The traditional process uses carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen as the ingredients in the molecular soup that gets turned into hydrocarbons. The process uses just CO2 and hydrogen. Glasser's new production method allows them to set a lower limit on the amount of energy that would be needed to transform solid coal into fuel. The very best possible CTL process would require 350 megawatts of input to make 80,000 gallons of fuel; the current process uses more than 1,000 megawatts.

Glasser's work may make CTL more cost competitive with regular oil ... and thereby make things harder on biomass-based fuels from an economic point of view.  But it's important to keep things in perspective. Whenever renewable energy or synthetic fuels come up, oil industry types like to keep things real by invoking the S word. S stands for Scale. The Air Force uses 2.5 billion gallons of jet fuel per year, and that's only 10% of US yearly jet fuel use. You do the math.

No Go for Air Force Coal-to-Liquid at Malmstrom

The Air Force is betting the house it can find non-oil forms of liquid fuel to power its planes, manned and unmanned. As you're probably well aware, over the past 18 months it has been busy certifying that the entire inventory is OK running on a mix of 50/50 JP8 and synthetic fuel derived from natgas. Having our planes be able to run on other other fuels is one thing, having enough of the alternate fuel to make a difference is quite another.

To that end, the Air Force had been trying to stand-up a plant to test the feasibility of turning coal into liquid fuel in high volume. Unfortunately, it appears that initiative is dead, at least for now. Here are the reasons the AF gave for why they decided to kill it, according to this Air Force Link article: 

• Possible conflicts with the wing's mission, including degradation of security in the vicinity of weapons storage area; 
  
• Interference with existing missile transportation operations; and,
  
• Issues with explosive safety arcs and operational flight safety
  

What I'd like to know is: other than these issues, was the plant going to work? How much fuel was it going to make and how much would it have cost per gallon when all the costs of construction and operation were factored in? The reasons given for termination mask information on what the Air Force thought of the utility of this proposed facility. It's not a good sign.

DARPA CTL BAA Lottery Open - Get Your Winning Entries In !!!

Actually, it's going to take a lot more than luck to win this one. So far, the very best coal to fuel approaches have proven far too expensive and far too dirty from a CO2 perspective to inspire DOD to go into large scale production. But the prize is great, as the BAA description notes, the US has  proven coal reserves enough to provide liquid fuel to power DOD for thousands of years.

DARPA's Stratetic Technology Office (STO) has a new BAA opportunity on the street called "Coal To Liquids" with an ID number of DARPA-BAA-08-58. Posted 4 Sep 08, the dates competitors need to keep in mind are:

• Proposal Abstracts are due by 4:00 pm ET, September 24, 2008 (just elapsed, though I'm sure some leniency will be shown to truly killer, if somewhat tardy, abstracts)
  
• Initial Full Proposals are due by 4:00 pm ET, November 12, 2008
  
• BAA closing date is one year from date of publication
  

All you've got to do, besides delivering timely proposal documents with all the i's dotted and t's crossed, is describe a new process DOD can use to produce JP-8 grade jet fuel at costs much lower than today's approaches, and that don't produce nearly as much CO2. If you have an idea for how to do this, don't be shy, the clock is ticking in more ways than one.