Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Alchemy Fuels July 2024

My name is Phillip Manske and I operate a recycling and biomass fuel company named Alchemy Fuels.  My attention  today is offering Green Hydrogen  from recycling for hydrogen membrane electrical generation  that meets and exceeds The Inflation Reduction ACT (IRA) Section 45V requirements for tax credits.  All my systems produce 1 MWh per hour for the ten year life of the contract.   This amounts to $2.1 million per year income with a very small cost footprint.   

Wholesale electricity usually pays $.05 per KWh from the utilities and $.04 from a general IRS credit. 45V pays an additional $.15 per KWh. This amounts to $2.1 million in income per year from a 1 MWh contract. All of this income is from IRS activity exclusively. The business model isn't a business model. All of my product and energy I use comes from wood cellulose waste. Lead Acid Batteries recycle very well with solar evacuated solar tubes for heat.


Central to all of this is the use of the biomass syngas gasifier to make charcoal, heat, fuel and products from woodchips. Pyrolysis makes and uses 30 percent green hydogen for all processing energy. All products are 100 percent hydrogen. Alchemy Fuels offers four avenues to 45V. The avenues are listed in ease of implementation via off the shelf equipment and at #4 has the most promise but needs the most work. My processes are basic and modular and scaled to be operated by one employee per shift and the employee can make fuel for the other shifts. The processes make hydrogen or electricity. The four processes are very similar in regard to activity and resources and environment. The most investment heavy part of my process is the large step up 1MW electrical transformer needed to attach to the grid. These are available off the shelf and usually used with large wind turbines. 1 - Alkaline Hydrolysis from protien. This process has the most expensive feedstock but it assembles and produces easily. This process is used in funerals as wet cremation. Feedstocks include dead farm animals and high protien Corn Gluten Meal. Ammonia Crackers are used then Hydrogen Fuel Cells directly. This product makes hydrogen and biodiesel fats as a side product 2 - Active Lead Acid Battey Recharge. This process recharges discharged lead acid alectrolyte without using electricity. The electrolyte is renewed by mixing the entire amount, boiling off 10 percent of the water in the elecyrolyte and charging the plates to ten percent. Each kilowatt uses two gallons of electrolyte. This process makes electricity. Sulphuric Acid Distillation and Solar Tube Water Heating is an excellent pair. 3 - General Wood Recycling - This process makes charcoal and wood distillate fuel and industry chemicals. The charcoal is made as a quality assurance step and is then used as fuel or for chemical extraction. This step is significant because bio charcoal and coal mine coal are the same and can be switched if necessary. This process makes electricity. 4 - Hydrogen Splitting From Syngas. Syngas is thirty percent green hydrogen and the feedstock is enormous. There are five gases to separate and some significant work has already been done. Attaining the goal of a reliable and significant hydrogen stream is three routine cryogenic steps away Hydrogen Balloon Structures. There is opportunity to make hydrogen balloon supported structures for solar panel placement, agriculture or wind generated eletricity. This action is novel beyond simple investment but still requires small investment amounts for significant effects and returns. Wind turbines can be replaced with wind catching parachutes and floating hydroponic farms can be developed. I have a college degree in a clinical healthcare field. Im a US Navy Veteran and former Federal worker. I was a ship engineer, power plant operator and a private sector boiler plant operator. I have regular harvest labor and processing job experience including seafood, sugarbeet and commercial corn and soy silo operations as well as munincipal waste and recycling experience.





Saturday, January 7, 2023

Giant Pumpkins - The Premier Biofuel

 



You can earn $3 Million USD a year from one acre Florida Ag land if you grow giant pumpkins. Pumpkins make one gal (GGE) of methane for each 50 pounds of wet pumpkin. The biggest ingredient is water. You have to use hydroponics to deliver the water and increase fruit size. An acre will hold approximately 3200 pallets but 2700 is more reasonable to make room for navigation. Dills Atlantic Pumpkins routinely grow to 500 lbs but aim for 1000 lbs. There will be three or four harvests every year. You have to use plant grafting to make new plants. You'll grow 10,000 pumpkins every year. You'll harvest approx 30 fruit a day. You can reclaim the water, potassium and phosphate. This will produce 60,000 cubic feet of methane daily. QA work should produce more gas to optimize the reactions. This methane is first cleaned, stored in a large CNG tank and then fed into a Gas to Liquid (GtL) catalytic reactor ($2 million USD) which in turn will produce 30 - 50 barrels of synthetic gasoline or diesel fuels. This sells easily and you get tax deductions and RINS for each gallon. The remaining mash is fed to bugs to produce biodiesel fats and bio ammonia.

Biofuels need M&M's; Mass and Metabolism and pumpkins deliver. We can find a use for this car sized fruit if we look hard enough.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Biodiesel Feedstock From Cockroaches - A New Frontier

Biodiesel Feedstock From Cockroaches - A New Frontier


The common house cockroach is poised to provide legions of tons of biodiesel feedstock if grown on industrial scale.  .  The insect is rich with oils directly purchased by the refining industry and the insect's life force is well known.  Its time to abandon the "ick" factor and move forward with real work.

Historically maligned, the common roach, the German and American species, offers great opportunity for insect feed and biodiesel feedstock.  We'll talk about the oils provided by the insect today.

We'll start with pictures...

House Roaches are literally bursting with fat.  You'll often see bubbles in roach dissection pictures.  Doing dissections underwater emulates the the insect's abdominal cavity in that the cavity is filled with lymph fluid in the interstitial space between organs.  That lymph fluid is clear but its not water, in this case and among other purposes, chemical messages are transmitted through the lymph to the fat bodies to instruct the fat body to release nutrient compounds needed by the insect. Those nutrients are stored as fat.  The lymph also offers physical support to hold the organs in place.  Ninety percent of the good stuff roaches have to offer comes from the abdominal cavity alone.  This fat accumulation is one of the reasons roaches live so well.

 These fat bodies are not connected to insect, they float in the lymph.  The fat bodies wash out of dissections with squirt gun water like pressure.



Alimentary canal and nerve ganglia exposed.


Again, the roach body is fat with fat bodies.

Cockroaches: Ecology, Behavior, and Natural History Front Cover William J. Bell, Louis M. Roth, Christine A. Nalepa

This book looks good but I haven't read it.

Analysis of oils from insects

The types of oils found in insects don't vary much but amounts do.  Generally, insects have 50% linoleic and 50% oleic acid.  These fat acids are common in nature and found in high amounts in olives.

Brief non scholarly description of nutrition provided by American Cockroach

Nutritional composition [%] and energy content [kcal/100g], based on dry matter:
Protein - 65.60
Fat - 28.20
Fiber - 3.00
NFE(Carbohydrates) - 0.78

Wikipedia explains soy oil
 Per 100 g, soybean oil has 16 g of saturated fat, 23 g of monounsaturated fat, and 58 g of polyunsaturated fat.[2][3] The major unsaturated fatty acids in soybean oil triglycerides are the polyunsaturates alpha-linolenic acid (C-18:3), 7-10%, and linoleic acid (C-18:2), 51%; and the monounsaturate oleic acid (C-18:1), 23%.[4] It also contains the saturated fatty acids stearic acid (C-18:0), 4%, and palmitic acid (C-16:0), 10

Soy oil is very similar to roach oil in composition.  Soy is 1/3 fat, 1/3 protein and 1/3 carbohydrates.  House roaches are 2/3 protein and 1/3 fat with small amounts exoskeleton chitin.

The insect of the day - Black Soldier Fly

 Biodiesel and Protein from Soldier Flies Exceeds Value of Biogas from Manure

If you were unaware that insects can make biodiesel feedstock, be learned on the matter now.  Feedstock has been harvested for years and it has been sold for all that time.

My argument - Roaches live better than BSF and BSF larva and thus will make protein and oil more efficiently.

BSF farming is the growing entomology area.  I'm glad this area is being developed.  In my opinion BSF earns its pay in pollination services.  BSF can live completely in a greenhouse, bees need to travel  inside and outside of the greenhouse.  BSF is slightly less productive in pollination than bees but I understand with an increase of BSF presence, that is more flies, this deficiency can be addressed.

Regardless, BSF larva growth and harvesting is delicate and labor intensive.  BSF farming is about the larva and that larva has demands that exceed the life needs of house roaches.  BSF larva live in a bed that is part feed, part filler and part toilet.  That bed cannot be too moist, it must have the right pH, it has to be aerobic and not anaerobic  and it can't be filled with too much ammonia waste.    Roaches live in the air, there is no pH demand and roaches are fecal phagic, that is they eat their won waste.  Almost all animals live in the opposite direction of their waste.  Roaches don't have this aversion and readily eat their own waste.

General arguments in support of mass roach farming   

More to come...








Friday, February 27, 2015

Bio Ammonia - State of the State

Ammonia has value and it is the apex waste product of the animal kingdom.  Highly toxic when collected and compressed, it is usually welcomed by nature and is collected and used quickly and quietly.  Currently sells at $600 USD per one ton.

Ammonia is an attractive source for hydrogen when produced naturally when using an off the shelf cracking process.  It can also be stored in pellets.  Ammonia can be used in internal combustion engines with modifications similar to CNG refitting.  

Bio Ammonia is hard to come by.  At spring, 2015 there are only two methods other than waste collection that can make ammonia.  One is from a Scandinavian company and the other is Synquest, an American company.  Both methods are proprietary, this means you can't use them.  Other than that, all ammonia on the market comes from the natural gas based Haber Bosch process.


Urine - contains 1% ammonia and animal manure is somewhat higher.  The literature talks about excretions



Details - Proteins - a substance broken down into amino acids andthen into ammonia by an enzyme called protease.

Urea and Uric Acid - Urea is what is passed out from higher order animals, it breaks down into ammonia soon after.  Uric acid comes from birds and reptiles.  Uric acid has four NH3 units
 

More later... this page is half done.

Sabatier Methane From Wood Chips

Methane from biomass is thought to typically come from biodigesters but there is another way and it has been on the books for some time.  Sabatier Methanation was discovered 100 years ago and has become a staple of the coal to gasoline process known as Fischer - Topsch (FT).

FT is fairly complicated but the first few steps are much easier if all you want is methane.  Most of the items listed below are not for sale on the market, you have to make them from materials that are available.

Parts
  1. Biomass
  2. Biomass Drier
  3. Biomass Saw Dust Machine
  4. Biomass Briquette Maker
  5. Biomass Gasifier
  6. Infared Gas Monitor
  7. Cryogenic/Membrane Gas Splitter *
  8. Water Gas Shift Reactor *
  9. Sabatier Methane Reactor *
  10. CNG Handling Equipment
* Items not for sale on market, must be constructed 

The items above are needed to make methane from woodchips.  This is not new or experimental.  It is older but still highly efficient and recognized by the chemical industry.  $100,000 will get you eight gallons/GGE per hour.