By Linda F. Jarrett
With the green movement off and running, the
idea of finding and developing alternative energy sources has emerging companies rushing to get their discoveries in the public eye.
For four local companies, these discoveries
promise to be the next big thing.
INNOVENTOR INC.
Founded in 1996 by Kent Schien, a former McDonnell Douglas engineer, Innoventor is working on “Manure to Energy,” a process to turn swine waste into petroleum-based products, one of which is asphalt binder.
“Asphalt binder as we’ve known in the past is becoming scarce in the United States because many refineries have adopted new technologies to extract as much high grade fuel from the crude oil as possible, reducing the amount of asphalt binder,” Schien says. “This reduction in supply has had an impact on asphalt binder pricing, which at times surpassed the price of concrete.”
The comprehensive environmental solution, which will be used in hog farming, has three parts.
· The core technology that converts the manure into a petroleum product.
· The air scrubber that cleans the air
exiting the buildings
· The purification of the black water
(material that is coming into contact
with the solid mass) to clean pond
quality water that farmers can reuse
on the farm
Innoventor has a project under way with the Missouri Department of Transportation to lay a tenth of a mile of asphalt with their binder.
“We will watch the material for four cycles of weather to see that it does not crack, bubble up, or deteriorate any faster than standard asphalt,” Schien says. “We hope to ultimately certify our material as acceptable to use with asphalt.”
He says that Innoventor would own the system installed on the hog farm. The company would install the air scrubbers on the buildings, and install the system that produces the asphalt binder.
“We would give a portion of the proceeds coming from the binder to the farmer, who will not have a capital expense,” Schien says.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult for hog producers to make a living,” he says. “We want to make sure the system is maintained, and not have a big capital expense. By us owning and managing it on their farm, they don’t really have to get involved.”
Another big plus to this concept, especially to those who live close to hog farms—no odor. “This process removes 96 percent of the carbon that would normally go into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and methane,” Schien says.
Schien says they now have a 1000-hog farm producing the petroleum-based products.
CONTROL TECHNOLOGY &
SOLUTIONS
Based in Earth City, Mo., Control Technology & Solutions (CT&S) works with public entities to make them more sustainable.
“We saw a lot of older buildings out there needing infrastructure updates,” says Managing Partner Scott Ririe. “Our primary focus is kindergarten through grade 12 schools. Some are very inefficient with leaky windows, overheating of the classroom, or lack of ventilation, not a good learning environment for the kids.”
In Missouri, CT&S has upgraded schools including Riverview Gardens School District, Union R-XI School District, Waynesville R-VI School District, and Warren County R-III School District.
They are now developing a master plan for Lake Land College at Mattoon, Ill. to make it Illinois’ first self-sustainable college campus. They will do this by harvesting geothermal, solar and wind energy. When the work is completed in 2012, their efforts will save about 859,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and 70,000 therms of natural gas each year, reducing its carbon output by 556 metric tons.
Ririe says that the challenges in renovating the schools are the time constraints. “You only have so many weeks that you can get projects done, so it takes a very calculated effort on our part to be prepared to start working on a project, have everything line up and ordered, and not be sitting there waiting for windows to show up in October.”
CT&S also works with city halls and county buildings. Last year, they also completed
$4.7 million in energy-saving upgrades to seven veterans’ homes in Missouri.
CONFLUENCE SOLAR INC.
Confluence Solar Inc., located in Hazelwood, Mo., was founded with $12.7 million in venture capital funding for the purpose of bringing premium quality, low-cost single crystal silicon as a platform for high efficiency cell design to solar cell manufacturers.
CEO Tom Cadwell explains that solar energy can be divided into two areas. “One is what is called solar thermal, and the other is photovoltaic. When people say solar, they typically mean photovoltaic, or the generation of electric energy from the sun’s power or energy.”
Cadwell says that while the photovoltaic industry has been around for a long time, “it’s only been in the past few years that the cost of generating electricity from the sun’s energy has begun to decline enough to be competitive with grid-based nuclear or coal or hydroelectric power.”
Confluence Solar, he says, makes crystalline silicon which is built into a panel that “looks like a sheet of plywood, mounted on a frame and tilted at a right angle toward the sun, and it’s covered with these, like a tile floor.”
Not only are these used on roofs, they are used on outdoor lights along sidewalks and on call boxes along the interstates.
“The solar market grew about 100 percent last year from the previous year,” Cadwell says. “The panel level was $15 billion, and our part is about 25 percent, so we did about $4 billion. We’ve been sampling and developing customers because we’re bringing to the market a much improved product over what’s available today.”
WIND CAPITAL GROUP
Northwest Missouri offers much more than beautiful rolling hills. It has a lot of wind, and when Tom Carnahan realized that, he bought wind farms, which in turn, bring not only a cheap source of energy, but also revitalization to many little disenfranchised towns in that area.
“I’d always been interested in renewable energy, and upon doing some research,
I found that while there were some utility scale wind farms in most every state that bordered Missouri, there were none inside, and I found that strange.”
When he found out it was because no one had tried it, he set out to put in, as he called it, a profitable wind farm in Missouri that made a commitment and good partnership with the local community.”
That was in King City, Mo. in 2006. Now, Wind Capital Group has three more farms in Missouri—Loess Hills and Cow Branch in Atchison County, and Conception in Nodaway County, plus Buffalo Creek in Franklin County, Iowa, and Bent Tree in Freeborn County, Minn., in addition to 16 projects in other states.
They have also started another Missouri wind farm, Lost Creek, which will be nearly 20 acres in DeKalb County.
“Wind speeds are more predictable than people think,” Carnahan says. “While Missouri is not thought of as a windy state, it stacks up favorably with the more windy states like Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.”
Carnahan predicts that Wind Capital will bring over a billion dollars worth of development over the next five years to northwest Missouri. “And I can’t think of many other industries that will come close to that.”
Wind Capital has its office on Washington Street in downtown St. Louis.
