Here my latest post I submitted in UC Berkeley's China Focus:
BIOGAS
Jim Rothstein
While
Chinese manufacturers frequently express desire for greater access to
Western technology, Western companies say they worry about the IP
implications. One common suggestion is for China and the US to
jointly develop new IP, especially in alternative energy or emerging
technologies. The logic goes something like this: US excels in
R&D, while China can implement projects quickly and for lower cost.
The result then is faster RD&D (research, development and
demonstration and ultimately commercialization) then either could do
alone - and we all benefit.
One candidate for this approach is joint project between a large commercial dairy in rural Jinshan,
near Shanghai, and a consortium of start-up Utah companies with strong
ties to academic research. Although the agreement, called the Jinshan
Clean Energy Project, is wrapped in much political language promising
jobs and ecological benefits - which will need to be evaluated - the 3
phase project calls for joint investment to recover biogas from animal
manure and to develop the commercial processes to convert it into a
syngas and ultimately diesel fuel.
Normally,
anaerobic digestion, a natural process using bacteria without oxygen,
is used to convert relatively small amounts of household/small farm
animal/plant waste into a slurry and biogas (a mixture of methane, CO2, H2S,
water) for cooking or electricity generation. However, as China (and
much of the developing world) joins the developed world's fondness for
high per capita consumption of animal protein, especially in the form of
beef or dairy, animal processing becomes centralized with the
associated environmental and waste concerns.
The Jinshan project is one of several technical efforts, in China (GE and Shenyang, GE and Henan) and elsewhere,
to scale and industrialize anaerobic digestion to work at a commercial,
rather than household, level. So this project seeks to create large
quantities of biogas (in a 3-4 story tower) from the dairy, purify it
and then, with novel catalysts/technologies developed by universities
and licensed to 4 Utah companies known as Utah Clean Energy Alliance,
covert it to a syngas and finally liquid diesel fuel, tweaking a well-known Fisher-Tropsch process.
Jinshan
District will provide $1 million dollars in funding, to be matched by
NSF. If successful, commercial manufacturing will be done in China.
The four Utah companies are: Cosmas (catalysts), Andigen (the AD chamber), Anaerobic Technologies (purification), Ceramatec (syngas equipment)
