BioCee is mentioned in Kevin Bohn’s and Jessica Yellin’s article on the CNN website which gives a good overview on the ARPA-E program’s potential in the energy and job markets. They quoted us:
Tom Schulz, co-founder of BioCee, which does research in solar fuels, said the program will produce the next “Energy Google.”
“We don’t know which company of the funded projects it will be, and we don’t know when it will ‘tip.’ However, most of the projects will create only a few (but very qualified) jobs over the next two years,” Schulz said. “The real question is how many jobs will be created and saved in 5 to 10 years.”
How is it possible that the media is not reporting on one of the most important “stories”? Andrew Revkin’s blog in the New York Times, “The Greatest Story Rarely Told”, shows just how bad the media misinforms, and gives excellent links to background reading.
Greentech Media published their list of the cleantech “Top Ten High Concepts 2009″, and BioCee is mentioned as #6 on the list. Thank you very much. Now: let’s make sure there’s no misunderstanding. BioCee’s technology — the bioreactor — is actually a proven technology for several applications. It’s only the new application, using two types of microorganisms for the production of fuel out of sunlight and CO2, that makes this a “high concept”.
“BioCee and the University of Minnesota wants to take sunlight, carbon dioxide and two organisms (cyanobacteria for sunlight capture and shewanella for metabolic transformation) to produce a liquid hydrocarbon. Coal and oil are indirect: sunlight and carbon dioxide create plant matter, but then geological forces are required to turn dead trees and microbes into a fuel. Think of it as microwave petroleum: no more slaving over the Permian basin for millions of years waiting for those hydrocarbons to be done.
An added plus: It creates a market for carbon dioxide and reduces the total amount that will exist in the atmosphere.”
BioCee is the company that I co-founded with my friend, biologist, chemical and environmental engineer Marc von Keitz; other co-founders are Michael Flickinger, who developed the technology at the University of Minnesota, and Luca Zullo, who joined us from Cargill.
BioCee is a material science company, right at the overlap of biotech and chemical engineering. They produce bioreactors that make microorganisms happier and more efficient than the usual steel tanks in which they have to do their work.
The first applications BioCee focuses on are desulfurization of petroleum products (NSF gives us a grant for that), and “Direct Solar Fuel”; “Direct Solar Fuel” is the production of hydrocarbons directly from sunlight and CO2 (some kind of artificial photosynthesis). For that, BioCee was among the first three ARPA-E recipients in October 2009.
Please see my 99 second interview on BioCee which was taped at the Munich Cleantech Conference a week ago (it’s in German).
The official press release is here, and lots of excellent press article are here.
Robert Rubinstein showed this clip at his recent TBLI Salon in Munich…and our jaws dropped. It is from a TV educational documentary produced in 1958 by Frank Capra. Greenhouse gases, temperatures rising, glaciers melting, … all is there, 50 years ago.
In a world of accelerating developments (“Singularity”), of rapid communication, this is a wake-up call. It’s not important to just know of issues, but it’s important how quickly we act.
A Thank You to the man who started us on this path
Discussing the Copenhagen conference, we started asking each other “what or who got you seriously started in Cleantech, and when?” Although many might have been interested for a long time, or — especially in Germany — might have voted Green, there is this moment when you know that you have to engage 100% to make a difference. For me, it was in 2003, when my wife and I had the opportunity to see Al Gore presenting his “Inconvenient Truth” slideshow in Puerto Rico, at Deepak Chopra’s annual peace conference.
With Al Gore in Puerto Rico 2003
Unbelievable, that it is already 6 years later, and unbelievable, how much time was lost in between. It was with Al Gore’s winning the nobel prize and (maybe even more importantly?) the Oscar in 2007 that the U.S. started to wake up.
BioCee’s story on Public Radio’s “Living on Earth Program”. I learnt that we are now the “Magic Bug Guys”. Sounds like fun. For those of you who haven’t followed the news on BioCee: After receiving an NSF grant for desulfurization of petroleum products, we were amongst the Top 3 recipients of the brand new ARPA-E grants. This time for our participation in a consortium with the University of Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, making “direct solar fuel”. BioCee’s bioreactor will be the home for two types of microorganisms that produce biofuel directly from sunlight and CO2. See BioCee’s website for the press release and the news articles.
My friends at the Climate Prosperity Alliance have published their new tool to account for investments in the Green economy. They call it the “Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard”, and they have found that already over $1 Trillion have been put to use in the Green economy since 2007.
Climate Prosperity Alliance
“The Climate Prosperity Alliance uses the Climate Solutions 2 computer model of Australia’s Climate Risk Pty., showing how $1 trillion invested every year for the next 10 years can assure the global transition to sustainable prosperity and job growth. This $10 trillion is less than the bailouts of failed banks in the USA and Europe and less than 10% of the world’s pension and institutional funds of $120 trillion. Institutional fund managers can shift 10% of their assets away from hedge funds, risky derivatives and commodity speculation to real investments in a greener global economy, thereby assuring their beneficiaries a healthier future.”
The leaders behind the Climate Prosperity Alliance are Dr. Marc A. Weiss, Chairman and CEO of Global Urban Development and Chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance, and Dr. Hazel Henderson, futurist, author of “Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy” (Chelsea Green, 2006) and president of Ethical Markets Media.
After publishing the worldwide CO2 emission chart in a variwide format some friends wrote that I should follow up with a chart just for the U.S.
So here it is. Feel free to download the PDF file and use it according to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.
Interesting to see that oil-producing states have a much higher per capita CO2 emission than the non-oil-producers. Also interesting: California and Texas are both the largest states but are very different in CO2 emissions per capita.
Data sources are the U.S. EPA (2007 CO2 emissions from fuel combustion), and U.S. Census (2007 estimated)
It’s time for a chart that makes it easy to see both the absolute size of CO2 emissions per country and the per capita emissions — at one glance. The trick is to draw an area chart, similar to what McKinsey did in the now famous chart that demonstrates the cost of measures for greenhouse gas reduction: “U.S. MID-RANGE ABATEMENT CURVE – 2030“.
In the new chart, we used 2007 data from the International Energy Agency from their 2009 edition of CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion: Highlights. Each country or region is represented by a rectangle. The height of the rectangle corresponds to the per capita emissions, and the width corresponds to the population size. Therefore, the total area of all rectangles adds up to the total worldwide CO2 emissions.
It becomes immediately clear how difficult any limitation or decrease of CO2 will be. Countries like the U.S. have a multiple of CO2 emissions per capita compared to India, China, or Africa; it is in the U.S. then where the most potential for savings from the current levels lies. However, most of the growth is expected in China and India, and we can see that there is just no way these countries could ever grow into the levels of European or U.S. CO2 emissions per capita. The Earth would not sustain it.
