by Jim Lane

Too often, the first time most people heard something EnegraTech, they mistook it for ViagraTech — and were inclined to form the wrong impression of its claims to vastly improve performance, and overlooked it.

So it’s good news that the company has been renamed NextFuels — and its purpose is much clearer , and so too its merits and improvements. Addressing in this case, the appalling problem of smoke formed by burning waste palm biomass — generated by the world’s rising demand for palm oil.

One reason we might pay close attention to it — or at least we do in Digestville — is that we live in a world are bedevilled by the appalling distribution of water . When you need it, it is unavailable — when you could use none of it, you get inundation.

So if is that the United States with its vast acreage is currently unable to produce enough bioenergy to meet its transport fuel needs without resort to the barrel of oil — it is primarily because of a shortage of water in the grand West.

If technologies like algae struggle to fill the gap at economic costs, it is because you have to get the algae out of the water, or get the water out of the algae, and it is prohibitively expensive to move water.

So, if we turn to foreign shores for bioenergy and opportunity — and we find ourselves looking to the vast estates of palm waste in Indonesia and Malaysia — once again there is just too much darn water in palm waste — as much as 60 percent, by weight — for technologies like pyrolysis to deal with.

And so we have waited for innovation, and waited. And then, along comes NextFuels, based on hydrothermal liquefaction – a/k/a/ hydrothermal upgrading.

Like so many innovations, it turns out that NextFuels is based on a very old idea that was cast aside and now is seen in a new and more positive light. Just as it took a lab technician to store radium in a desk drawer along with film materials for us to recognize the potential and properties of radioactivity.

The underlying technology was originally explored at Shell as far back as the 1980s, when oil prices rose to scandalous heights — and like algae, research came to a crashing halt when oil prices fell into the sub-$20 range in the 1990s. But a team of researchers , with support from the Shell Foundation, later took its development through a 1000-hour pilot test.

This hydrothermal liquefaction technology has much in common with pyrolysis in its outcomes — some residual biomass residue and a crude oil which can be burned in boilers to generate power, or upgraded into fuel. It replicates the Earth’s process of using temperature, pressure and water to convert biomass into a crude oil like product.

In today’s Digest, more about the technology, its origins, the palm biomass market, the team, the business plan, and the Bottom Line, by following the page links below.