Bob Walker's Plan to Transform the Global Energy Industry

Pyrolysis blows the alternative-energy possibilities wide open, Walker says, because it doesn’t just convert agricultural waste into energy but also converts municipal solid waste and sewage. “We can literally take all the waste in this country and convert it into some form of energy,” he says.

And pyrolysis—which could be done on site on farms or wherever biomass materials are generated—promises to solve the thorny issue of transportation that has stood in the way of a biomass energy system operating on a national or global level, according to Walker. “The key to an alternative-energy future is not just technology but getting the product to the consumer,” he says. “The fossil-fuel industry is successful because of a distribution system that gets the product from Saudi Arabia to local gas stations.” More about pyrolysis as a decentralizing solution to distribution problems in a moment.

But first, back to Bixby’s highly efficient biomass heating stove. It could as easily be a furnace, connected to a building’s existing forced-air ducts, and it could run either on pellets or liquid biofuel. Both could be delivered by truck, in bulk, to the customer’s house or facility, just as propane and heating oil are today. Bixby Energy Systems already owns its first fleet of trucks. In 2004, it acquired Step Saver, Inc., of Redwood Falls, which delivers salt tablets for water softeners. Step Saver is a profitable business on its own, and the salt trucks can be easily converted to deliver biopellets in bulk as well. That eliminates the customer’s need to go to a store to buy bags of fuel. Liquid biofuel would require different trucks, but the principle is the same.

Now, suppose that furnace were equipped with a Stirling engine that uses waste heat to generate electricity. The Stirling engine is a proven technology, invented in 1816, and Bixby is working to acquire rights to “the most efficient one I’ve ever seen,” Walker says. The cylindrical engine, about two feet high and five inches in diameter, will generate up to 1.6 kilowatts of electricity per hour, he says. The typical American home consumes 24 kilowatts per day. So what Bixby Energy Systems intends to be selling a couple years from now is a biomass furnace that heats and air-conditions your house, runs your water heater, and provides all the electricity you need for at least 20 hours of every 24-hour day.

During those 20 hours, Walker explains, the system will send your excess electricity out onto the power grid. “For four hours a day, you probably consume more electricity than you produce, so you’ll be taking back from the grid. The grid itself becomes the power plant. Xcel Energy buys your excess at maybe six cents a kilowatt. The guy who lives across the street from you is running a power saw [using more electricity than he’s producing], and Xcel sells it back to him at 10 cents. So Xcel made four cents a kilowatt, it did not build one power plant, and it did not have to subscribe to one national transmission line. That’s the future.”

Actually, it’s the present. Homeowners with solar panels and other energy-generating systems have had these give-and-take arrangements with the power grid for years. But the efficiency and the payback period have been such that they generally do it for earth-saving reasons, not money-saving ones.

From an earth-saving perspective, however, the vision Walker outlines is hugely significant, says Dick Hemmingsen, director of the Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment, a research group at the University of Minnesota. About one-third of the nation’s energy consumption is devoted to transportation, one-third to residences and commercial buildings, and one-third to industrial uses, Hemmingsen says. Biomass in the form of corn-based ethanol “has gotten a lot of attention as a vehicle fuel,” and that’s good, he says. But for biomass to fulfill its real potential as an energy source, a system is needed to convert all kinds of organic material into energy—not just corn or wood or switchgrass—and the fuel created must come in different forms (liquid, solid, gas) to be useful for many applications: producing heat, electricity, and motive power.