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Old Posted Oct 30, 2007, 3:38 PM
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MarkDaMan MarkDaMan is offline
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Little green energy source. And big bucks for Oregon

Little green energy source. And big bucks for Oregon.
A Portland inventor and visionary wants to use algae to clean up the planet – and make Oregon rich in the process
POSTED: 05:00 AM PST Tuesday, October 30, 2007
BY LIBBY TUCKER

SALEM – Heel, toe, toe, heel. Toby Kincaid’s left loafer taps and slides along the floor. He’s delivering an impassioned pitch to renewable energy advocates and state officials at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. His right foot is still.

Minutes earlier, a Department of Energy staffer had made a list with permanent marker on white paper taped to the walls. The state’s renewable energy working group is drafting its strategy for the coming year. It’s just achieved its goal of the past two years – convincing Gov. Ted Kulongoski to set standards for renewable energy use in the state.

Kincaid, a technologist and energy consultant for clients across the globe, is here to tell them their intentions are good, but they’re applying them wrong.

“The most important thing that’s not on the list is research and development,” Kincaid says. Heads around the table begin to nod.

The state has set what Kincaid thinks is a modest goal – a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels, but “our world is a freight train of toxicity heading for a cliff.”

He tells them the state’s fortunes, and its energy future, lie in little green algae.

Kincaid is a Portland native, an inventor, a connector, and a visionary who wants to solve the world’s energy problem. He wants to do it in Oregon. And he wants to make money doing it.

“I want to be the Bill Gates of alternative energy,” Kincaid says. “And the way I’ll do it is through pure profit.”

Policymakers, researchers and environmentalists, he says, think the problem is how much and how fast carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere as a by-product of burning oil, coal and natural gas. They’re wrong, he says. It’s the source of the carbon that needs fixing.

Kincaid, who’s made a fortune peddling renewable energy hardware in 17 countries, has a patent pending for a new way to make carbon-based fuel from algae, single-celled plants that eat carbon dioxide gas and use sunlight to stow it away in carbohydrate chains. With as much as 40 percent of their biomass in oil, algae have the potential to be an abundant supply of renewable energy, scientists say.

Algae can be squeezed to extract oil for biofuels. Or the plants can be dried and compressed into “green coal” cakes and burned for energy. And because they eat their own pollution and that of other carbon sources, they’re completely carbon neutral.

Kincaid hopes to develop his algae technology, a photobioreactor, in his home state, assembling Oregon university students and researchers to test his invention and lend credibility to the project. And then he wants to make money.

His appeal to the renewable energy group was just one stop on the war path, gathering support from anyone he can convince to help petition the federal Department of Energy for money.

Over the past month, Kincaid’s solicited board members of the newly formed Bio-Economy and Sustainable Technologies (BEST) signature research center. Researchers at Oregon’s three major universities have signed a letter in support of his plans.

“We need to get a critical mass to attract attention that Oregon is a place worth investing in,” Jennifer Allen, a Portland State University professor and a BEST board member, says.

Letter in hand, Kincaid on Thursday will go to Washington, D.C., to meet with the federal Department of Energy.

Kincaid likens his latest invention to the cotton gin, which went through several versions, each an improvement over the first, before Eli Whitney put it all together in a single, efficient machine.

The photobioreactor isn’t new, but the latest iteration is leaps more efficient than the first prototypes. The technology has evolved through academic research. No automated commercial process exists.

“It hasn’t been done in a machine for the purposes of making money,” Kincaid says. “This is an oil machine.”

Even nature didn’t invent the most efficient way to feed algae. The plants thrive on red and blue light, absorbing only these two limited patches of the spectrum (green light is reflected, giving algae its color). Sunlight, which beams the full electromagnetic spectrum, is mostly wasted on the cells.

The earliest bioreactors grew algae in flooded tanks spread over fields like rice. Because algae draw on direct sunlight for energy, they were kept in shallow water. Light, blocked by the green cells, couldn’t penetrate the water past more than a few centimeters.

Then researchers at MIT developed a way to farm the cells by cycling the water through clear tubes on the lab’s roof. Carbon dioxide gas bubbles through, feeding the algae, which are still exposed to direct sunlight.

Japanese researchers began experimenting with concentrated red and blue light sources to grow algae using the least possible amount of energy. Now labs in Arizona, Utah and Oregon have expanded on that by sticking energy-efficient light-emitting diodes inside the water. The cells are bathed in light and can be grown in deeper vats, stacked like computer servers.

Kincaid’s technology goes one step farther, using solar panels to power the blue and red LEDs.

“The beauty of the concept is because you require less power and you’re delivering it very efficiently into the photobioreactor, it makes you expend minimum energy to get the maximum benefit,” Ganti Murthy, an Oregon State University biology professor, says.

It will take more than a little luck to get Kincaid’s idea off the ground. It’ll take millions.

Oregon’s investment in renewables research has so far been limited, and only a handful of scientists in the Northwest have studied algae as a potential energy source, alhough Gov. Ted Kulongoski wants to step up research and development of cellulosic ethanol and other early-stage renewable technologies.

“We see a special role for algae,” David Van’t Hof, Gov. Kulongoski’s renewable energy adviser, says.

The 2007 Legislature set aside $2.5 million to start BEST. The state’s nanoscience research center, by comparison, got $9 million this year.

And the technological hurdles are vast – find and cultivate the best species of algae, refine the process to grow and harvest them, then figure out how to best extract the oil for fuel.

OSU’s Murthy estimates photobioreactor technology is two to three years from commercialization.

But Kincaid’s invention hasn’t been tested. It hasn’t been built. He doesn’t even know if his invention will work, although Murthy and others say the idea is sound. He’s only pored over research papers and studied previous models of the technology, looking for an innovative approach.

His track record? Serving on the board of a Japanese satellite company, some physics classes at Portland State and courses in optics he crashed at Harvard in the mid-1980s, and four patents for inventions, including an individualized solar power pack now sold worldwide and a vertical wind turbine that Portland State installed on the roofs of four buildings in February.

It’s fair to say that chance played a big role in helping Kincaid score a meeting in Washington.

Or perhaps it was fate.

Charisse Santha, a Texas producer who made a short video commercial on Kincaid’s solar backpack five years ago, was flying home to Dallas from Honolulu and just happened to sit next to the Department of Energy’s Paul Dickerson.

Dickerson, who reports to President Bush, told her he was interested in using algae for sequestering carbon from coal stacks. Santha recommended he speak to Kincaid. A few days later, Dickerson e-mailed Kincaid and arranged Thursday’s meeting at DOE headquarters in Washington.

“My whole world changed,” Kincaid says, “because I (could) have something that’s respected in Oregon: outside money.”

The DOE has set aside $38.3 million in 2008 for biomass R&D. And the agency in June allocated $30 million to three labs for research in the area.

If it gives Kincaid the millions he’s seeking, this won’t be the first time the DOE sinks money into pond scum. Federal research into algae for biofuel production began in 1978. But the feds cut funding to the aquatic species program in 2006.

“Unfortunately at the federal level, there isn’t much going to algae at this point,” Murthy of OSU says.

Kincaid hopes to convince the No.1 guy at the Department of Energy’s efficiency program to give Oregon that money.

His request isn’t modest. Kincaid wants the DOE to grant Oregon researchers almost $10 million – which matches what the DOE gave the other labs – for the first phase of his three-phase project.

Less than a week before Kincaid leaves for Washington, the final pieces of his plan are falling into place. He’s been carefully crafting and rehearsing his pitch to the DOE’s Dickerson.

To Kincaid, it’s all about the economics.

“I’m not asking for favoritism for Oregon, I’m just asking for our fair share,” he says.

“Pollution is a valuable resource. Let’s stop taking carbon out of the ground and take it from the atmosphere.”

Coal provides 44 percent of Oregon’s energy, and 9 million metric tons of carbon pollution, he says. And the federal carbon reduction tax credit is 1.9 cents per kilowatt-hour. Do the math, Kincaid says. Getting rid of Oregon’s pollution from carbon is worth $170 million per year.

“That’s amazing, everyone’s wasting that,” he says. “I want that. I want to hook up my machine and eat that pollution. ... All you have to do is make the solution profitable, and the rest will be done.”
http://www.djcoregon.com/articleDeta...wants-to-use-a
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