NEWS OF THE WEEK
JET FUEL FROM WOOD GETS LIFT Red Rock plans to use Velocys microreactors for its biomass-to-fuels plant. VELOCYS
BIOFUELS: Start-up Red Rock hopes to succeed where others have failed
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PLAN TO MAKE JET FUEL and diesel from
Oregon’s wood waste has attracted funding and strategic help from venture capital firm Flagship Ventures. Red Rock Biofuels plans to begin construction this summer on a $200 million Fischer-Tropsch facility in Lakewood, Ore., that will produce 12 million gal of fuel per year. But efforts by other firms to make biofuels from wood have failed. Last year, KiOR filed for bankruptcy after it failed to continuously operate its catalytic cracking process in Columbus, Miss. And Range Fuels was unable to produce ethanol from wood chips at its facility in Soperton, Ga. The plant was sold at auction in 2012. Red Rock was started by two former executives of Pacific Ethanol, a corn ethanol producer that operates four plants in the western U.S. Last September, Red Rock was chosen to receive a $70 million grant from the Departments of the Navy, Agriculture, and Energy for a facility to produce military-grade renewable fuel.
ONE FOR THE ROAD CHEMICAL SENSING: NIH offers prizes
for less obtrusive alcohol biosensor
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shirt might be the next alcohol biosensor, if Kathy Jung has her way. Jung is a program director at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism (NIAAA), which last week launched a $300,000 competition to build a less obtrusive alcohol biosensor than ones currently available. Such a device could make alcohol research easier, assist alcohol abuse treatment professionals, and improve monitoring for patients with medical conditions that are exacerbated by alcohol. Currently, the criminal justice system requires some offenders to wear bulky, black biosensors to monitor their alcohol use. NIAAA-funded scientists have tried to use these ALCOHOL MONITORING SYSTEMS INC.
NIH is seeking wearable alcohol biosensors that are less obvious than the clunky black boxes used today.
CHUNKY BRACELET or a fancy button-down
CEN.ACS.ORG
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Also that month it signed an agreement with Southwest Airlines to deliver 3 million gal of renewable jet fuel per year starting in 2016. Red Rock cofounder Jeff Manternach says the company is taking no technological risks. “We build and operate facilities. We have no Ph.D.s and no lab coats,” he says. Indeed, Fischer-Tropsch technology was developed by Germany during World War II to make transportation fuels from biomass. In Fischer-Tropsch reactors, a carbon-based feedstock is gasified at high temperature to yield carbon monoxide and hydrogen. This synthesis gas is then catalytically recombined to produce long-chain hydrocarbons. Today, Fischer-Tropsch reactors are found in huge coal- and natural-gas-based plants but are not generally economical at the smaller scale appropriate for biomass. Red Rock’s solution is to use microchannel reactors made by the Battelle spin-off Velocys. The reactors’ high surface-area-to-volume ratios speed up reactions and decrease heat-transfer limitations, Velocys says. Although Red Rock has momentum behind it, building a full-scale plant is fraught with risk, cautions Gerald Kutney, forestry biofuels expert at the consulting firm Lee Enterprises. “You can’t go from relatively small scale and then build a commercial plant from there,” he says. “Each stage comes with its own challenges.”—MELODY BOMGARDNER
sensors for research involving the general public, such as college students or those in alcohol treatment programs. But many potential participants balk at wearing those sensors because the devices are so obtrusive. “Things will just explode if we have a sensor that is more acceptable for patients and practitioners,” says Brown University’s Nancy Barnett, who studies ways to help people stop drinking. “This prize is exactly the kind of boost that I think the field needs.” Beyond research and treatment, Jung thinks there could also be a market for alcohol sensors among companies that want to verify their employees’ sobriety or even among conscientious drinkers who want to know when they have had one too many. “People are so willing to monitor everything right now,” she says. The recent jump in the market for personal sensor technology led NIAAA scientists to think the time is right to encourage sensor developers to turn their attention to alcohol biodetection. The competition is for a wearable, discreet device that can monitor alcohol consumption in real time and send the resulting data to a computer or smart device. NIAAA will award $200,000 for first place and $100,000 for second. Prototypes are due Dec. 1, and the agency aims to announce a winner in February 2016. “The sky’s the limit,” Jung says. “Please surprise us.”—ANDREA WIDENER
MARCH 23, 2015
