Mississippi State’s Hernandez and French land $1.2 million research contract
August 7, 2009
STARKVILLE, Miss.—A Dave C. Swalm School of Chemical Engineering team has secured a $1.2 million research contract intended to commercialize an inventive process that makes biofuel from the oil of micro-organisms that grow naturally in wastewater. The money will fund the first of a three-phase commercialization process managed by General Atomics, an innovative research and development company that transforms and evolves technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. The first phase, a yearlong process, involves basic research, initial full-scale facility design, project management and logistical planning among General Atomics, Mississippi State and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The partnership gives Bagley College of Engineering microbiologist and scientist, Todd French, and colleague, Rafael Hernandez, a researcher and chemical engineer, access to more than 3 million square feet of engineering laboratories and state-of-the-art technology, not to mention connections with General Atomics and the Air Force’s own experts.
“We’re using a natural process using Mother Nature’s resources. Micro-organisms that are found naturally in wastewater treatment facilities will grow fat with oil when we add an inexpensive carbohydrate concoction,” said Hernandez. “As a result, society benefits in three ways, we’re provided with clean drinking water, fuel that will lesson our carbon footprint and it will decrease the waste added to landfills.”
The Air Force Research Laboratory is relying on long-range vision and planning when providing the financial backing for the project. The Air Force hopes the eventual payoff of financing the research and development will be in the form of lower fuel costs for aircraft operations.
Bobby Diltz is the technical lead for the Air Force Research Laboratory Deployed Energy Systems Group at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. “This research has a lot of opportunity on the way energy is developed, used and how it can lower cost and make a positive impact on a country that depends on foreign oil supplies,” said Diltz. “Plus, it will drive down the cost for our operations and what the taxpayers see, instead of paying hundreds of millions of dollars, we could be paying only hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
An added advantage of the biofuel research to commercialization project is that the Air Force has bases located across the country equipped with wastewater treatment facilities, providing the basic infrastructure, with little modification, to test and grow the microorganisms that produce the oil that makes the fuel.
“Think of the third world countries who today can’t afford wastewater treatment facilities and therefore can’t provide clean drinking water to their citizens,” commented Dr. Mark White, director of the Dave C. Swalm School of Chemical Engineering. “When Drs. Hernandez and French’s invention is commercialized, those countries could build a facility that provides clean drinking water, but also pays for itself by producing biofuel that they can use and sell for other energy systems, which by-the-way are safe for the environment.”
Kevin Downey, project manager at General Atomics, said that for the past four years GA has been conducting cutting edge research aimed at the production of biofuels from algae. Algae research is being performed in three principal areas, including pond algae and heterotrophic or tank algae. The third focus is MSU’s technology that uses a microbial consortium to generate oil from wastewater combined with algae for wastewater cleanup and additional oil production. Downey says the microbial consortium and algae complement one another because the algae consume carbon dioxide and remove nitrogen and phosphorus from the wastewater, while also producing oil and providing oxygen for support of microbial growth. The microbial consortium consumes the algae-produced oxygen and carbohydrates present in the wastewater to generate oil and produce carbon dioxide, which is in turn required for algae growth. The net result is a cleaner wastewater effluent and a biofuel product that can be subsequently converted to either biodiesel or jet fuel.
“This is a project that can potentially use the existing infrastructure throughout the country, when you consider that every municipality has a wastewater treatment facility. These facilities are geared towards cleaning wastewater sufficiently that it can be discharged into our rivers and oceans,” explained Downey. “That comes at a pretty steep price and the price is getting steeper all the time because of increasingly stringent guidelines for wastewater cleanup. The advantage of this technology is that you’re leveraging the existing infrastructure, taking advantage of the microbes that are already present, adding algae to help clean-up the wastewater and therefore provide a cleaner water for discharge and fuels for sale. It is a win, win situation.”
In a little more than a year experts hope to advance the project to phase two, which involves expansion of the technology to larger-scale equipment and application of test data to the full-scale facility design. If successful, the project will then go into phase three, which involves demonstration of a prototypic pilot-scale facility.
“I think we’re three to five years away from seeing this break into the market,” commented French. “When it does, we’ll have another alternative fuel source that helps keep America from being dependent on foreign oil and helps regulate oil prices.”