GigaOM » Waste-to-Energy

Startup Turns Plastic-to-Crude Oil, Gets VC Cash

Jeff St. John — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 21:00:21 +0000

Here’s the latest of Waste Management’s investments into turning its trash into treasure. The trash king said Thursday it had joined in a $22 million investment in startup Agilyx, which has developed technology that can turn plastic otherwise headed for the landfill, into a synthetic crude oil.

The Series B investment was led by Kleiner Perkins and joined by new investor, French oil giant Total, as well as previous investors Chrysalix Energy, Saffron Hill Ventures and Reference Capita. Agylix says it’s ready to scale up its patented technology, which has already churned out about 120,000 gallons of a crude oil-like substance from about 1 million pounds of shredded plastic at a Portland, Ore. pilot plant.

A 1,000-pound bag can yield about a gallon of the crude oil substitute, and Agylix says its system can process about 10 tons of plastic into about 2,400 gallons, or 60 barrels, per day. It uses an “anaerobic thermal reclamation process” — that is, heat in the absence of oxygen — to turn the plastic into a gas, which is then condensed into the crude oil product

That product, in turn, can be fed into existing refineries for conversion into a variety of fuels and products, the company says. That’s different from most biofuel startups, which seek to make liquids as close to fuel-ready as possible, though Texas startup KiOR is also working on creating bio-crude from plant waste like wood chips and straw.

Waste Management has been making a ton of green investments, with interests ranging from organic soil and compost makers to solar-powered trash compactors. But trash-to-energy and trash-to-chemicals technologies have been its primary focus, with investments in waste-to-ethanol startup Enerkem, and fermentation-based biofuel startup Terrabon,

In February, Waste Management announced a partnership with Genomatica, a San Diego, Calif.-based startup with a platform to create genetically modified organisms to turn biogas into a variety of industrial chemicals. That’s a smaller market than the holy grail of fuel production, but it can be easier to tackle for startups, if they can produce replacements for the often fossil fuel-derived chemicals at a high enough quality and low enough price.

Notably, Agilyx says it turns shredded plastic into a gas before condensing it into crude oil. It’s not clear, however, whether the startup’s gas is the same as the syngas that Genomatica CTO Mark Burk works with. I wonder if Genomatica can help Agylix build new bugs to make different chemicals out of its product, via the help of their common big corporate brothers?

Image courtesy of World Resource Institute via Creative Commons license.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The Guild Gets Melancholy in Comic Book Form

Liz Shannon Miller — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:45:14 +0000

Looks like in the case of The Guild, the gestation of a comic book project is about the same as a human pregnancy. Nine months after announcing that she’d be writing a Guild comic book for Dark Horse Comics, Felicia Day’s first foray into the world of panels and talk bubbles has hit comic store shelves.

While there’s no denying that the crossover between web video watchers and comic book readers exists — if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be much point at all to the comics review/interview series A Comicbook Orange — there’s also no denying that this is a new medium and thus a new audience to engage. Fortunately for newcomers to the world of The Guild, the series isn’t a continuation of the web series’s third season; instead, it’s an origin story exploring just how all the members of the series’ eclectic gang came together.

Reading it this morning, the most surprising thing I found about the first issue is that for a comic inspired by an multi-award-winning comedy, it’s actually pretty sad. The reason is that right away, we’re thrust head-first into the head of Cyd, not quite yet known as Codex (who Day plays in the series), and it’s not a happy place. Cyd, as we meet her, is struggling with an insensitive boyfriend, an unfulfilling job and the intense need to escape — problems her therapist is useless at solving, leaving her to find her own solution.

Day’s use of classic comics writing techniques like thought bubbles, fantasy inserts and other classic comics tropes makes the issue an intimate exploration of Cyd as a character. It’s why things get a little uncomfortable halfway through the issue (when — SPOILER ALERT — Cyd starts playing the game), for, as much as you want to emphasize with her finding an outlet for her feelings, it’s uneasy watching the early signs of addiction take hold. It’s tough to speculate on how much of Day’s past experience as a hardcore World of Warcraft gamer informs the storytelling here, but there’s no denying the narrative’s personal feel, which makes at least this first installment very affecting.

Adapting a live-action franchise for comics is a tricky proposition, as the artist is challenged to accurately capture the look of an actor while still managing to make them work in a comics context. Fortunately, artist Jim Rugg manages that ably here, drawing in two different styles — a clean minimalist look at the real world (which will be familiar to anyone who’s seen his past work — Street Angel is an old favorite of mine), as well as a water colored fantasy-novel-inspired approach to the world of the game, which also gives audiences their first look at what the in-game personas of the Guild might look like beyond their avatars.

The Guild is not the first web series to get a comic book prequel with Dark Horse — the Zack Whedon-penned Dr. Horrible single-issue came out last fall — but Dr. Horrible only sold about 25 thousand copies, placing it at number 80 on the November 2009 sales charts. When I picked up my copy this morning (from a stack on display at the front counter), the friendly counter jockey at Meltdown Comics said that several regular customers had requested that The Guild be included in their weekly orders — but those were customers who also read comics set in the “Whedonverse,” including the new Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel series. However, this isn’t the first time that Day has delved into a new medium and found an audience — we’ll have to see how many converts she finds in the comic book world with the release of this and the next two issues.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): New Use For Web Stats: Finding Hot Markets, Offline

Harvest Power Cuts Deal with Waste Management, Snags More VC Cash

Justin Moresco — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:00:49 +0000

Harvest Power, which builds, owns and operates facilities to turn yard clippings and other organic waste into renewable energy and composted soil, announced today that it is partnering with Waste Management, a leading waste services company, to expand its organics recycling operations. As part of the agreement, Waste Management — along with returning venture backers Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Munich Venture Partners — has invested an undisclosed amount into the Waltham, Mass.-based startup.

The partnership with Waste Management represents a major milestone for Harvest Power, which was founded in 2008 and so far has just one facility up and running: its Fraser Richmond plant near Vancouver, Canada. The deal gives Harvest Power a well-established partner in the waste businesses, and it paves the way for the startup to access organic waste (feedstock for its recycling processes) from Waste Management’s operations across the United States and Canada. Waste Management serves more than 20 million customers through a network of 367 collection operations, 273 active landfill disposal sites and 134 recycling plants.

Harvest Power chief executive Paul Sellew told us that the two companies are still working out the details of their agreement, but it likely will involve the startup building and operating recycling plants at select Waste Management facilities. “They have a great infrastructure in place, and it only makes sense to utilize that,” Sellew said.

Harvest Power’s business is to convert renewable organic materials from municipal and other waste streams into fuels such as biogas and compressed natural gas, as well as composted soil. The startup plans to use onsite combined heat and power systems to convert much of the fuel into electricty, which would be sold to utilities. The compost would be marketed to communities near the processing plants. Yard trimmings and food residuals account for about a quarter of the total U.S. municipal solid waste stream, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Harvest, which has some proprietary technology around composting but uses processes developed by Germany’s Bekon Energy Technology and others for converting the waste into renewable forms of energy, aims to build as many as 50 facilities in North America over the next 4-6 years, Sellew told us. Each facility would be able to process at least 30,000 tons of organic waste – or about what a community of 100,000 produces – per year, depending on the availability of feedstock. The startup has so far raised $40 million in equity, debt and grants, including this latest round of funding.

Image courtesy of Harvest Power. It shows steaming at a composting vessel at the Fraser Richmond plant.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Seesmic for Windows: An AIR-less Twitter Client

Darrell Etherington — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:38 +0000

I’ve long been looking for a Windows-based Twitter client that can delight me as much as its native Mac counterparts. Too many clients for Windows depend on Adobe AIR, something which isn’t an ideal arrangement, in my opinion. TweetDeck and Seesmic are both powerful tools, but why can’t someone make a Windows-native app that works just as well?

Seesmic apparently saw the wisdom in that idea, because it recently revealed a new Windows-only Twitter client that doesn’t require AIR to run. I jumped at the chance to take the software, which is currently only available as a preview edition, for a test run.

Feature-rich

Seesmic for Windows has just about every bell and whistle I could ask for in a professional Twitter client, but without a lot of the unnecessary frills that I feel get thrown in with something like TweetDeck. It seems closer to Tweetie for Mac, which is still my favorite client, independent of platform concerns.

You can use multiple accounts, and customize your columns in the main window however you like. By default, your Home feed will display tweets from all the accounts you have registered with Seesmic, which is a great thing for people who use different Twitter accounts to organize the people they follow, like groups. For those who don’t, Seesmic includes support for Twitter lists, so that you can organize those you follow that way instead.

My personal favorite feature of Seesmic is how the compose window uses your first-entered account by default. That means regardless of what post I reply to, and in what stream I find it, the reply originates from my main account. This is ideal for me because it’s my primary publishing identity, while the others are mostly for monitoring.

Searches can be initiated at any time using a field intuitively placed at the top right-hand corner of the Seesmic window, but I couldn’t find any way to find trending topics. While I don’t generally have cause to check the trends, not having the ability to do so does rankle a bit.

Good-looking and Functional

This is the best-looking Twitter app I’ve seen on Windows, and possibly one of the best-looking Windows apps I’ve seen, period. Especially using a dark-tinted Windows 7 glass visual theme, it just looks designed to fit its surroundings, which is more than I can say for any AIR application.

The tabbed sidebar and light-colored stream backgrounds make it a very usable interface, in addition to helping with aesthetic effect. I would appreciate an option to turn on color-coding for @ mentions or conversations between two people you follow, but with columns designed for the purpose, I guess the Seesmic team figures that isn’t necessary.

Advanced controls for each tweet can be brought up by hovering over a user’s portrait, or by right-clicking on any individual post, so you have options in terms of replying or retweeting. You can also create user lists on the fly from anyone in your stream, or add people to existing lists, which makes it very easy to create functional groups quickly. You can even drag a user’s profile pic to the group of your choice to add them to it.

If there was a feature I’m missing most with Seesmic, it’s the ability to follow/unfollow people from within the client. It’s something I use regularly with my iPhone Twitter clients, and something I enjoy being able to do at a moment’s notice without visiting the web-based interface for Twitter.com.

Client of Choice for Windows

I won’t mince words: Seesmic’s dedicated Windows app has become my go-to software for using Twitter on a PC, even though bugs are present in the preview version. It’s just that good, and it’s not Adobe AIR. In fact, it might be reason enough for me to spend a little less time in OS X, and a little more time working in Windows 7. I’ll stress the might in that last statement, though. If you want a copy, for now you have to sign up for the Seesmic newsletter at Seesmic.com, but turnaround time for a download link seems to be less than a day for most.

Have you tried Seesmic for Windows? Let us know what you think of it below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

World’s Largest Landfill Gas to LNG Plant Opens in California

Justin Moresco — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:30:23 +0000

Waste Management, one of the country’s largest landfill operators, today is opening what it says it the world’s largest facility to convert landfill gas to liquefied natural gas (LNG). Once at full capacity, the $13.5 million facility, located at Waste Management’s landfill site near Livermore, Calif., will purify and liquefy up to 4 million gallons per year of the alternative fuel, which produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum when combusted.

The plant is a joint venture between Houston-based Waste Management and Linde North America, a Murray Hill, N.J.-based subsidiary of The Linde Group, a global gas and engineering company. Linde built and will operate the plant, which has produced 200,000 gallons of LNG since the commissioning process began in September. Landfill gas, which is generated from the natural decomposition of organic waste, is about 50 percent methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Refining that gas for use as a transportation fuel or to generate electricity reuses what otherwise would have been a wasted resource and reduces its greenhouse gas contribution.

Four California agencies, including the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board, Air Resources Board and Energy Commission, and the South Coast Air Quality Management District, contributed a $2.3 million grant for the project.

Waste Management, which owns 277 landfills in the U.S., previously announced a goal of developing 60 landfill gas-to-energy projects by 2012. The company (which last week reported an 11 drop in profit for the third quarter of this year) said it aims to produce 700 MW of electricity from about 170 projects in four years. The Environmental Protection Agency said that as of December last year there were about 480 operational landfill gas projects in the U.S. and 520 landfills are good candidates for projects (here’s a map by the agency).

But landfill owners might soon be able to tap a second revenue stream besides the sale of fuel or power produced at these sites. Landfill projects could become a major business opportunity if a nationwide cap-and-trade system is established. In 2007, landfills accounted for about 22 percent of all methane released in the U.S., according to the EPA. Landfill owners could sell GHG offsets into the cap-and-trade system by capturing the methane at their sites. But that depends both on Congress actually passing a nationwide cap-and-trade bill and on that bill including language that would allow this practice, neither of which is certain.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

YouTube Testing Video Comments Filter

Chris Albrecht — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:06:38 +0000

YouTube has spent the last six months cleaning up its act, implementing new community guidelines and welcoming more professional content. Now Ars Technica reports that the company, perhaps feeling the pressure from the Parents Television Council (PTC), is testing a new filtering system for video comments left on the site.

Word of the new comment filters came from a message Google sent to the FCC last week. From that filing:

“This new feature, which is currently being tested in the United States, gives users control to set their own comment preferences by enabling them to choose whether to see all video comments, no comments, or filtered comments.”

The PTC has complained that YouTube comments can contain material inappropriate for children and has called on the site to do more to filter such content.

YouTube’s filing comes at a time when the FCC is examining the need for additional content filtering across more devices. Companies like Google and Microsoft say they have the situation under control online and that the commission should be more focused on content blocking for television.

GigaOM staff writer and mom Stacey Higginbotham tells us she’s all for YouTube being more proactive about comment filtering. To her, the bottom line is that parts of the web (on sites like YouTube and Google) are a lot more like TV than people would like to admit when it comes to a need to protect kids from inadvertently seeing something they shouldn’t.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Where to Watch March Madness Online (and on Mobile and On-Demand)

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:39:34 +0000

UPDATE: To find out where to watch the 2010 NCAA tournament, go here.

Let’s be honest. This is the most wonderful time of the year. March Madness, baby! The NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament is back!

Once you’ve filled out your bracket and given $5 to the office pool, all that’s left to do is watch the games. We can’t do anything about them airing during office hours, but between online, on mobile, on demand and on TV, you have more options than ever to catch all the action. There’s a lot out there, so we’ve rounded them all up into one helpful guide.

ONLINE
Your main source of March Madness online will be through NCAA.com (CBSSports.com is also a good starting point). From there you’ll be able to watch all 63 games for free in the brand new high-quality video player. Bonus, the player will have Facebook functionality built in, so you can send out status updates live while you’re watching the game.

If you’re too lazy to type in NCAA.com into your browser, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to watch the games at one of the many sites you already enjoy. CBS Sports is distributing March Madness to 300 different sites including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and ESPN. Links on these pages will pop up the player so you can stay on the page you’re on.

ON MOBILE
Want to watch your games on the go? CBS Sports now has a new March Madness on Demand application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that will stream the entire tournament live. The app will also provide tournament bracket updates and allow you to click directly from the brackets to live video.

The only bummer? The tournament will be streamed over Wi-Fi, not 3G, so you won’t be able to watch too far from a friendly wireless network. The March Madness app is available now and costs $4.99.

If you don’t have an iPhone, other AT&T handsets will offer the games live to MediaFLO subscribers.

ON DEMAND
If you missed the game and want to watch highlights, there are a ton of on-demand choices out there. CBS has partnered with 20 different outlets, including Comcast, DirecTV, Verizon FiOS, and Charter, to deliver the NCAA VOD: The Best of March Madness, featuring HD highlights from throughout the tournament, free of charge.

Games from the Final Four will also be available for purchase the day after they are completed for $1.99 each at iTunes.

So get ready, get your brackets (The New York Times is giving away Amazon Kindle 2.0s for winners of its brackets) and get set to watch more March Madness than ever before.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Daily Sprout

Josie Garthwaite — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:45:04 +0000

Let’s Make a Deal: Spending on clean energy, energy efficiency and public transit in the latest stimulus bill is exactly halfway between the House and Senate versions — the House had approved $72 billion, the Senate $68 billion. — Gristmill

Bingaman for Ethanol Boost: With corn ethanol plants closing almost every week, and many technological hurdles remaining for commercial cellulosic ethanol, Senator Jeff Bingaman, Chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the government should consider allowing higher ethanol content in gasoline blends. — NYT’s Green Inc.

Impax Backs Waste-to-Energy Startup: UK-based Impax Asset Management has invested $6 million in the waste management company New Earth Solutions to support the launch of a waste-to-energy offshoot. — Clean Edge

Vestas Banks on U.S. Market: Turbine maker and sector bellwether Vestas is hedging its optimistic 2009 outlook based on what happens in the U.S. market. While company expects other markets to “do their part,” it fears the U.S. market may not recover from near-total “collapse” last quarter. — WSJ’s Environmental Capital

Gearing Up for the Smart Grid: Michigan’s Consumers Energy today announced it will be the first utility to buy SAP AMI Integration for Utilities software package, a move that’s indicative of the wave of change sweeping across the power industry. — Triple Pundit

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Garbage Eating Machines Go Small-Scale

David Ehrlich — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:00:16 +0000

Burning garbage is so yesterday — now you can gasify it. And Waltham, Mass.-based IST Energy wants to bring the waste-to-energy technology to the masses. The business masses, that is.

The Green Energy Machine, or GEM, which IST is launching today, is about the size of a large garbage dumpster — and apparently very noisy. Designed to be parked at the back of an office building, mall or college campus, a GEM can turn up to three tons of trash per day, including paper, wood, plastic, food and agricultural waste, into 120 kilowatts of electricity, as well as the equivalent of 240 kW of heat.

While there could be a significant reduction in emissions related to the transport and landfilling of all that garbage, as well as savings on garbage collection costs, it’s not an emission-free system.

The garbage is broken down with downdraft gasification, which uses high heat to decompose the trash in a controlled process that produces no emissions, according to the company. Small fuel pellets are then created from the decomposed trash, with gasification used again to convert the pellets into syngas. The syngas is then used in a traditional generator, and that generator, like most generators, produces emissions when the syngas is burned, although the company claims those emissions are offset by the other, emission-reducing parts of the system.

IST, part of research, development and engineering company Infoscitex, isn’t the only company working on a small scale waste-to-energy system. The U.S. Army is testing out a similar size unit that was developed by McLean, Va.-based defense contractor Defense Life Sciences, Purdue University and the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland. But the TGER, or Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery, has to tackle a bit more than just garbage. It also has to stand up to the extremely hot and sandy conditions in Iraq.

But unlike countries like Iraq, in the U.S., IST’s system will have to go up against an already available recycling and composting infrastructure in many states. And composting doesn’t make any noise at all.

IST, which has received funding through the federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research program and an angel investor, said the GEM system is currently being demonstrated at its headquarters. It’s scheduling customer demonstrations of the technology and expects deliveries to start this summer.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Hurricane Debris to Power Biomass Plant

Craig Rubens — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:13:05 +0000

The debris from Hurricane Ike, a depleted oil field and some biomass power expertise could soon start delivering clean power to the city of Houston, which is still recovering from the third-most destructive hurricane to hit the U.S. Biofuels Power Corp. signed an agreement today to create a biomass plant that will use wood chips and debris from the ongoing Hurricane Ike cleanup to produce 4 megawatts of clean energy and then sequester the carbon emissions in a depleted oil field.

Under the terms of the agreement, six acres of land will be leased from DSMC of Humble, Texas, a waste wood storage facility operator which has been the primary collector of debris for the City of Houston’s Hurricane Ike cleanup effort, and which will also supply the fodder for the plant. The land includes a number of abandoned oil wells that will be retrofitted for exhaust gas sequestration by Texoga Technologies Corp.. The end result will be a pilot-scale power plant that burns the city’s waste debris to produce power while safely storing the emissions underground. “We don’t expect our carbon sequestration activities to result in significant oil production, but surprising things can happen in old oil fields,” Fred O’Connor, president and CEO of Biofuels Power, said in a statement.

Biofuels Power will manage the project and contribute a 2.5-megawatt steam turbine, a 1.5-megawatt diesel electric generator and transformer and grid interconnect equipment. Based in The Woodlands, Texas, Biofuels Power currently operates two grid-connected biodiesel-powered plants and a biodiesel refinery.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.