As 2007 began, Bixby Energy Systems of Brooklyn Park was essentially a corn-stove manufacturer with ambitions to become a biomass-energy giant. CEO Bob Walker spoke of plans to convert everything from wheat straw to municipal waste into solid or liquid fuels (see the March 2007 TCB cover story).
By midyear, he had revealed a new way to fund his biomass plans. And the fuel that “will both pave the way and pay the way” is not a solid or a liquid but a gas, and not extracted from biomass but from coal—a mainstay of the “old” energy industry that’s vilified for the pollutants it gives off when burned.
Gasification is a so-called “clean coal” technology, an alternative way to extract the energy. It’s about 50 percent cleaner than burning, but still quite dirty, Walker says. Gasification has “always been 20 years away from making coal as clean as natural gas.”
Until now. Walker says that Bixby has developed a coal-gasification technology that genuinely is as clean as burning natural gas. Unlike others, “our process doesn’t burn the coal to begin with, so we don’t get mercury, sulfur, and other nasties to clean up on the back end. And we use no water, so no polluted water comes out,” he says. The coal becomes synthesis gas, and the only byproduct, according to Walker, is activated carbon, which Bixby will sell as water- and air-filtration material.
He describes the system as a lightly pressurized chemical reactor. Each unit measures just 6-by-6-by-25 feet and weighs 12,000 pounds. When connected to a gas turbine, each can produce 1.5 megawatts of electricity. But the units can be linked together, just as personal computers can be networked to achieve the capacity of mainframes. Bixby’s system mostly fuels itself; about 13 percent of the syngas it produces goes back in as operating energy. Walker allows that “we also use some electricity, but not much.”
The first customer will be either a Tyson Foods or Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant in North Carolina. Bixby Energy Systems will build a mini power plant in coming months operating several of the gasification units adjacent to one of those companies’ operations. It will produce syngas that Bixby will sell to its customer for less than the price of natural gas. Coal is considerably cheaper than natural gas, Walker notes, and this country is “the Saudi Arabia of coal, with a 250-year supply.”
Walker says he has letters of intent from four customers to purchase 160 gasification units, representing about $650 million in revenues. Fertilizer plants and ethanol facilities—big consumers of natural gas—have shown particular interest.
With adjustments, the same system can gasify virtually any kind of biomass, Walker adds. “We’re starting with coal because the biggest contributor to global warming right now is coal-fired energy plants. There is a huge need to get clean energy from coal, and an immediate market for it.”
