While SarTec did the research and development work, McNeff and his partners have formed another business, McNeff Research Consultants, that owns the intellectual property and handles licensing. Besides licensing the technology to Ever Cat, it has licensed the Mcgyan process to another start-up that includes McNeff on its board, BioCat Fuels, which is building a plant near Freeport, Illinois, and plans to put up more around the country.
For the Ever Cat plant in Isanti, McNeff has been circulating a private placement memo to potential investors this winter, and says that as of mid-February, it’s about “one-third filled.” Ever Cat will start out producing 3 million gallons, he says, but he’ll keep seeking investors because “it’s our intention to grow to 10 million and then to 30 million gallons within the next five years. We’re trying to gain enough equity at this point to be able to do that expansion as quickly as the opportunity presents itself.”
The McGyan Process for Biodiesel Production |
Works with a wide range of feedstock oils. |
Produces virtually no waste. |
Converts feedstock to biodiesel in seconds rather than hours. |
Doesn’t require strong acids or bases for conversion; uses zirconia as a catalyst. |
Doesn’t consume catalyst. |
Doesn’t require water to “wash” the fuel; produces some water as a byproduct. |
Is a continuous process rather than a batch process; no large reaction tanks required, so the plant has a smaller physical footprint. |
Read more at evercatfuels.com. |
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To begin with, the Ever Cat biodiesel plant will use inedible waste corn oil from ethanol plants as its feedstock. But cofounder Clayton McNeff says any plant or animal oil can be processed efficiently, and in particular, he’s excited about applying his company’s Mcgyan process to algae. Some varieties of algae have very high oil content, but the oil is high in free fatty acids that turn into soap in a traditional biodiesel conversion process.
Algae became the buzz in biofuels last year (see Portfolio’s January online reporting on investments by Bill Gates and the Rockefellers in algae-based fuel technologies at portfolio.com). But McNeff acknowledges that methods and infrastructure for growing, harvesting, and extracting oil from algae on a large scale are far from being in place yet.
He’s working on those problems, however. In a research collaboration with Elk River–based Great River Energy, McNeff’s company SarTec is bubbling flue gas from Great River’s Coal Creek Station coal-burning power plant though algae ponds to feed the carbon dioxide to the algae plants.
In another collaboration, with Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, SarTec is studying the attributes of different strains of algae. Some are better for carbon sequestration, while others are better for oil production, with oil accounting for as much as 50 percent of their mass. Which strains are best to grow depends on your goal, McNeff says.
—D. L.
