Bixby’s Closed Loop Gasification Process

Many of you believe that clean burning coal is a myth, but im here to tell you that its not. Bixby Energy has already created a way to burn coal that produces zero carbon emissions. A few months back the owner of bixby (Robert Walker) Gave a speech here in seattle talking about bixby’s newest product, the closed loop gasification system. I wont try to explain what it is but here is the transcript of the speech he gave, explaining how it works. Its a bit to read, but its well worth it.

“Copy of Speech delivered October 17th, 2007 in Seattle by Robert Walker, President, Bixby Energy, Minneapolis at Caux Round Table – Global Dialogue

The Great Opportunity in Alternative Energy

As you will note on your program guide, the title of this session, Session 4, is “Business as the Solution; Global Warming and Other Challenges. What an appropriate title for my part of this discussion and I am pleased and honored to speak with you today about, not only the challenges that exist as a result of what we humans have done to this planet we live on, but in solving those challenges, the great business opportunities that are being created as a result.

Global Warming is a complex phenomenon, and its full-scale impacts are hard to predict far in advance. Each year scientists learn more about how global warming is affecting our planet, and many agree that certain consequences are likely to occur if current trends continue. It has been predicted that, even if we were able to stop using today the energy sources contributing to global warming, it would take 37 years for the effects we have already caused to begin turning around.

Though Americans make up just 4% of the worlds population, we produce 25% of the carbon dioxide pollution, the carbon emissions produced from burning fossil fuel on our planet – by far the largest share of any country. In fact, the United States emits more carbon dioxide than China, India, and Japan, combined. In addition, there is a growing body of evidence from research revealing that exposure to mercury emissions produced from burning coal can harm children and adults, causing a wide range of ills. Ladies and gentlemen, we have not taken very good care of this planet we live on and it is beginning to show. If we intend to make this a more environmentally friendly place to live in the future, our generation must take the attitude that we didn’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors to use as we please, but rather that it was passed on to us to be taken care of for our children. As the major contributor to these problems, America needs to take a leadership role in changing our thinking and solving these problems we have created.

The world today now consumes a thousand barrels of oil a second. Every time we flick on a light switch, turn up the heat, or start our car, a vast and complex energy supply chain kicks in to fuel this demand. That means we now consume 85 million barrels of oil, 240 billion cubic feet of natural gas, 14 million tons of coal, and 500,000 pounds of uranium. That’s every day! And for every two barrels of oil we consume, we are replacing it with just one new barrel of oil.

As I mentioned earlier, America consume 25% of the world’s energy in today. However, others are coming up fast behind us. It is predicted that China and India, who make up 35% of the world population, with booming economies and a growth rate currently 2 to 3 times higher than the United States, will likely pass us in consumption within this decade.

Where will all this new energy come from? Certainly not from oil. A recent article in Time Magazine stated that “while the world expects to consume 120 million barrels a day in 20 years, actual supply may be half of that”. A general in the Chinese army predicted that “the next world war will not be over ideology but oil”.

So, if we are to sum up the situation, the world needs to find or develop new sources of fuel to supply the worlds increasing demand for energy. Further, the world needs to find ways to make the fuel sources we use today non-polluting as well. And if we are to avoid conflicts over energy supplies, we as countries need to develop our own energy independence.

To accomplish all that at first blush, sounds like a tall order, a very daunting task, an almost impossibility. It may surprise you, then, when I tell you that the world already has these new energy sources and the technology to accomplish these goals. Now, I am not saying that this isn’t going to be a big and ambitious project, because it will be, but about 150 years ago, when we discovered oil here in the United States, it took some time and effort to set up the structure that we know today as the oil industry. And, when coupled with the coal and gas industries, the fossil fuel based energy industry we depend on today is one of the biggest businesses, if not the biggest, in the world. Therefore, we aren’t going to solve our energy problem by thinking small. The good news is that, this time, if we do it right, we can solve our energy problems and possibly even our environmental problems forever. The new energy economy, one that needs new clean ways to produce and provide energy to the world I believe will likely be the biggest business opportunity of our lifetime. Former President of the United States, Bill Clinton describes it as a “trillion dollar business opportunity”.

I founded Bixby Energy in June of 2001 after spending more than a year and a half researching the potential of finding new sources of energy. I soon realized that the economics of transporting these new energy sources was going to be the most significant factor in how they would be used in the new energy economy. Where in the past we recovered millions of barrels of oil from a single well we would now instead have to obtain that same amount of energy from thousands of farms, forests, and municipal waste dumps. However, while oil wells eventually run dry, there will always be farm waste, garbage, and forest residue. These materials are less dense than fossil fuels; so managing their transportation is going to be a critical factor if these materials are going to become viable energy sources.

Biomass will be a major source of energy. We all familiar with the energy from one form of Biomass, dry shelled corn. However, there are 36,000 other biomass materials that grow every year on this planet. There is a tremendous amount of energy to be derived from this energy source alone.

And think about all the energy that is contained in municipal solid waste. Incredible! We have been burying, or maybe I should say banking, one of our future energy sources in garbage dumps all over World for hundreds of years. And we continue to produce more of it every day. Add to that all the human and animal sewage we produce, and rubber tires. In the U.S. alone we throw away more than 300 million tires a year. There is at least a gallon of diesel fuel in every tire. When you combine all this energy from these waste resources, it begin to realize that we will have an almost inexhaustible source of energy in our own back yards.

Solar & Wind Energy are two other great sources for providing our future energy requirements but they derive their power from the sun and the wind and you can’t always depend on them to be there when you need them. They also suffer from the transportation factor because where sun and wind is available is not usually close to their demand base. For example, the two windiest states in the U.S. are North Dakota and Montana — far from population centers. And we only have sunlight half a day. Waste materials, however, are always there all the time and that is why, at Bixby Energy, we choose to focus on their potential.

But how do we access and use these incredibly vast but widely disbursed resources? Setting up a system for obtaining these materials, refining them into engineered fuels, and delivering them to the consumer who will use them will be the key. In the United States for example, we will need to set up a national transportation system to accomplish this. When using waste as a resource for energy, it is not only a case of how we get our energy products to our customers but how we get the raw materials to our processing facilities in the first place.

Dick Hemmingsen, Director of the Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment, a research group at the University of Minnesota says that for waste materials to fulfill its real potential as an energy source, the fuel created from it must come in different forms: Solid, Liquid, and Gas.

Let’s take a look at solid fuels first. Certain biomass materials might be better used if processed into what we call engineered fuel pellets. Made from wood waste, biomass, or even municipal solid waste these pellets are today being shipped to European power plants under long term contracts. They are burning them 50/50 with coal to reduce the carbon emissions and the penalties they would have to pay. The carbon emission penalties being assessed make using these fuel pellets instead more economically practical.

Bixby Energy currently produces and markets the MaxFire stove, a biomass system that burns dry shelled corn, wood and engineered biomass pellets. Available nationwide, it has an incredible fuel combustion ratio of 99.7%. This technology is the early precursor to our Omni Furnace technology which we intend to introduce in the future as our national fuel distribution system develops sufficiently to support fuel distribution to Omni Furnace users. This state-of-the-art furnace is designed to heat your home, your water, air condition your house, and generate your electricity. And as your furnace becomes your primary source of electricity, blackouts will no longer be a problem. The excess electricity you produce can be sold back to the grid, making the local grid your auxiliary power plant. Large power plants as we know them today may no longer be required.

As earlier stated, although this technology is important, the transportation issue will be the determining factor as to what will be the best technology to use in each situation. You could say that “the economics of transportation balanced with the most practical energy technology will determine the viability of these new energy sources”. Using these technologies we believe can provide energy to the United States at prices 40 to 50% less than we are now paying and, we believe, without the need for government subsidies.

As you know, corn is today’s base material for making ethanol in the United States. Because it is a dense, solid material it works fine to deliver from the corn fields to an ethanol plant nearby. That model has worked so far, but even if we used all the corn we grow today for ethanol, it would provide less than 8% of the U.S. demand for gasoline. Using corn as a fuel is further complicated by the fact that it is one of our primary sources of food for both humans and animals. We need to look to other sources such as the 36,000 other biomass material to fill this need.

Cellulosic materials are the current candidate to replace corn as the base for ethanol. However, cellulose, which can be corn stalks, wheat straw, wood chips is significantly less in density than corn. At a recent energy conference I attended the President of an ethanol company spoke of the challenges before him. He said that his current ethanol-from-corn plant that cost him $50 million to build years ago processes about 3 train cars of corn a day. He said that if he had to use cellulose instead, wheat straw for example, he would have to build a new plant that would cost him from $185 to $300 million. Then to produce that same amount of ethanol to equal what he obtains from the corn would require having to ship in and process roughly 14,000 bales of wheat straw per day. He said, if the freight costs don’t kill me, the logistics of handling all that material will. Yet, he and all the other ethanol producers, and our government in Washington who are throwing their support and our tax dollars behind this idea, feel that somehow this is going to have to be the answer to increasing our production of ethanol. If corn-to-ethanol processing already has a large subsidy, imagine what the size of the subsidy this system will have to be to make this work. That is a clear example of where the economics of transportation have not been factored into the equation.
.Let me use the dairy industry as an example that might make it clearer for you. In that industry, the end product is milk. If we were to duplicate what they intend to do with cellulose, the cows would be moved to the dairy and the hay they to create the milk would be hauled in every day from the farm.

In order for cellulosic materials to become a viable energy source, we need to create technologies that place the processing closer to the source of the material. In other words, we need to develop, literally, mechanical cows that can process our energy resources on site into economically transportable material. Bixby Energy, for example, has been working with Dr. Ruan at the University of Minnesota. He has developed a pyrolisis process which could be placed in a farmer’s barn. If you process through it what would be equal to a 40’ trailer of wheat straw it can in 2 hours convert that cellulose into 3½ barrels of bio-crude. It also uses energy produced from the process to power itself. The resulting bio-crude is now in a size and state that makes it very practical to transport for final refinement. There are already systems out there as well that can process corn and cellulose into ethanol at the farm.

Transportation economics will always be the determining factor. While this process might work well on the farm or municipal solid waste dumps, places where the materials are within a couple hundred miles from their ultimate refining facility, it probably would not work in more distant applications. For example, the Canadian province of Saskatchewan has talked to us about the huge supply of wood chips and saw dust they have from their wood industry. It is impractical to ship these materials anywhere unprocessed and pyrolizing them into a bio-crude would certainly reduce its volume but rail rates would make shipping any great distance impractical. In this instance, gasification would be a more practical solution. Bixby Energy has developed a gasification system that allows us to gasify these wood chips and saw dust on site into a natural gas that could then be sent through nearby pipelines all over the U.S. and Canada.

We refer to this process as the Bixby Closed Loop Fluidized Bed Gasification System. It represents a revolutionary breakthrough in gasification. It is so highly versatile that it can gasify biomass, wood waste, municipal solid waste, sewage, hazardous waste, plastics, rubber tires, and even coal into natural gas quality syngas. What is so incredible about this process is that when used with coal, it produces no carbon emissions. Just think about that. This means for the first time, we can actually produce clean energy from coal. With this system, electric companies will now be able to produce electricity from coal without polluting the air. Since the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal and has enough to supply our energy needs for the next 250 years, it means that this technology could make our coal resources the source of our move to energy independence as we mature other environmentally friendly energy technologies.

This technology is not a concept but an already proven working technology. The syngas it produces is a natural gas quality grade that generates 1017 Btu’s per cubic foot. The design is extremely flexible and can be built in small systems to supply small requirements like ethanol plants or large industry like 500 MW power plants. This system does not use water as part of its process so there is no harm to the aquifer.

Simply explained, Coal goes in and a high quality gas and a valuable activated carbon come out. This unique system does not burn the coal but actually gasifies it by heating the coal in an oxygen free environment. As a result, we do not create the carbon emissions normally associated with other systems that gasify coal by burning. Because we do not burn the coal, the nasties like mercury and sulfur stay bonded to the activated carbon and are not released. Because of that, they are not released into the environment.

We are excited about this technology because coal burning power plants are the biggest man made contributor to Global Warming. New power plants that adopt this technology will no longer be carbon polluters.

With this system, we actually generate more revenue from the carbon residue than the gas. The activated carbon we produce is one of best materials available for water and air filtration, the mercury and sulfur remain bonded to the carbon and will not leach out with this use.

To insure an unlimited demand for our product we have also developed a carbon to liquid fuels technology which allows us to take the activated carbon we produce and convert it into diesel fuel or jet fuel.

Our first commercial unit is scheduled to be completed and go into operation in the next 3 months. We expect this revolutionary gasification technology will garner a lot of attention in the coming months as we bring it to market.

Although it can convert any carbon based material into a gas the significance of the Bixby gasification technology is that it moves one of the worst fossil fuel polluters, coal, to the clean energy side of the ledger. This is actually our first announcement to an international audience that a process with this capability is not only possible but soon available.

Today, as I describe our plans at Bixby Energy to people, many make the comment “Isn’t this all a little ambitious?” I can only think how one of America’s earliest energy pioneers John D. Rockefeller might have dealt with that question some 150 years ago when people I am sure said to him, you are going to do what? Drill thousands of oil wells, build oil pipelines all over the country, and put thousands of gas stations on street corners all over the United States? Isn’t that a little ambitious? Well, I am sure he said what I will say to you today and that is, I don’t think it’s ambitious. I think it is instead one of the greatest business opportunities to come along in 150 years. Those who accept the challenge have the opportunity to be the pioneers who build the new, clean energy industry of the future!

How effectively we as countries develop these new clean energy sources as well as our energy independence from our current sources of energy will significantly effect how we all will live in the world of tomorrow. It is a world problem requiring big solutions, but we have the technology today to solve our energy problems forever, give us energy independence, protect our health, and reduce global warming.

Someone said that there is no Silver Bullet solution to our energy problems but I think there are a lot of Silver Bee Bee’s out there and at Bixby Energy, we think that just maybe we have a few of them. This new energy business has a bright future and we as one of its participants intend to be on the leading edge of this exciting industry.

I want to thank you for your kind attention. I hope you found my remarks not only informative but interesting. “