Mad Like Tesla been selling for three weeks in the U.S. and for a week now in Canada, but there’s nothing like a party to make it official. I’ll be holding my launch party this evening at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District, the centre of cleantech innovation in Ontario. MaRS has kindly donated the space for this event, and Air Miles for Social Change has stepped up to cover the cost of munchies. Thanks to you.

I look forward to mingling with current and former colleagues, representatives from Ontario’s cleantech community, and my friends in the energy and environmental community who have been very supportive of my efforts and continue to inspire me and my work.

The book is doing well, has received several positive reviews, and I’m pleased to say I’m just getting started. If you’d like to learn more, check out my book website at www.madliketesla.com. I will be signing copies at the launch, where my publisher ECW Press will be selling books.

And to all my Clean Break readers, thank you for your continuing support and interest in what I write here.

My Clean Break column today in the Toronto Star is a look at Toronto-based company NIMTech, which uses an ultrasonic sensor technology to figure out with remarkable accuracy what’s flowing inside pipelines and containers. The technology offers a more efficient way for industrial and energy firms to guard against product contamination and make sure their commercial recipe — be it for ethanol, beer, wine, oil, pharmaceuticals, and even water and orange juice — isn’t off-spec. Oh, and when it comes to Coke and Pepsi tests, it never fails.

Read below…

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Tyler Hamilton

More water mains are bursting. Oil and gas pipelines are increasingly springing leaks. We obsess so much about fiscal deficits these days that we recklessly overlook the enormous infrastructure deficit that’s growing beneath our feet or in our plants and factories.

We’ll have to deal with it at some point, which is why there are several companies out there with technologies — packed with a variety of high-tech sensors — that make it easier to inspect infrastructure, detect leaks and flag weak spots in need of immediate attention.

But knowing what’s flowing through the pipe is just as important. Are there contaminants in the water system? Are harmful bacteria growing in the pipes of a factory that processes orange juice? Has an unidentified substance mixed with a drug being made by a pharmaceutical company, which could be held liable if the mix-up makes people sick?

Companies routinely do checks to make sure substances flowing through their manufacturing or distribution systems are not contaminated or “off-spec,” but this is usually disruptive to operations and comes at a cost. Machinery must be stopped. Samples are taken and sent to the lab. Operational efficiency takes a hit.

This is a problem Toronto-based NIMTech is trying to overcome. It has developed an ultrasonic monitoring and measurement technology that can take a chemical fingerprint of liquids, gases and solids as they move through pipes or in and out of containers. It can do this in real time, as the substances are moving, and without any impact on operation.

Indeed, the company’s patent is based on intercranial brain scan technologies that have been adapted for industrial processes.

“We can do the Coke and Pepsi taste test outside the can using this ultrasonic technology,” half-jokes Jason Kotler, NIMTech’s chief executive. “We can literally see stuff going through pipes to help companies make their factories or processes smarter. We shine a light on places where other technologies can’t look.”

Another potential application: detecting counterfeit scotch.

The installation looks remarkably simple. The company clamps its ultrasonic device on the outside of a pipe, for instance, and sends out a variety of ultrasonic frequencies, i.e. sound waves that are beyond what humans can hear. The behaviour of each frequency as it travels through the pipe is reflective of the chemical composition of the substance flowing inside.

The system does have to be trained, however. An ultrasonic measurement is done at the outset to establish what the chemical fingerprint of the substance should be, allowing NIMTech to instantly detect if the substance strays from that original baseline reading.

“Depending on what the process is and the type of material, there’s a magic frequency or zone where we get the best mathematical model,” explains Kotler, adding that the system can potentially take 100 different measurements per second. In a water system, for example, “we can get down to parts per million measurements, if not parts per billion, to show any anomalies in the water as it flows through a pipeline.”

Beyond establishing that benchmark fingerprint, the system can also learn over time, similar to how early voice recognition software became more reliable and effective as it learned words and the pronunciation of those words by the person using it. The longer NIMTech’s technology, called SonicGauge, is attached to a process the better it presumably becomes at measuring and monitoring the materials flowing through it.

One of NIMTech’s first major demonstration projects is with Toronto-based Greenfield Ethanol, the largest independent producer of ethanol in the country. Greenfield will use the technology to improve the efficiency of its corn ethanol fermentation process, an application that could be replicated throughout the biofuel and larger energy sector.

NIMTech will measure ethanol, glucose, lactic acid and water content during Greenfield’s fermentation process with an eye to maintaining the best mix and highest ethanol yield as possible.

“Take the average U.S. ethanol plant,” says Kotler. “If you were to increase their production by 1 per cent it’s roughly a $1.5 million increase in revenues.”

The approach can work for breweries and wineries as well, and Kotler is actively seeking strategic and financial partners to take on new demonstration projects.

“There’s so much we can do,” he says.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies. Contact him at tyler@cleanbreak.ca

My Clean Break column this week reports on a new study out of the Richard Ivey School of Business, which takes a look at the state of the bioproducts industry in Canada. The researchers behind the report analyzed Statistics Canada data between 2003 and 2009 and what they found was a disturbing negative trend — the industry is shrinking, not growing, at a time when bioproducts are desperately needed as part of a strategy to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels; also at a time when the United States and other regions are showing a strong commitment to bioproducts and are enjoying the associated growth.

What’s going on? Well, for one the bulk of bioproducts made in Canada are first-generation biofuels, such as corn ethanol, or other forms of bioenergy. We don’t give enough support to biochemistry research and product development, or higher value non-fuel markets such as alternative plastics, which in my view are much more exportable down the road. We are throwing money at corn ethanol and not doing enough to support and help commercialize next-generation biofuels produced from algae or cellulosic conversion technologies.

I’m pasting my column below, though before you read there are some caveats here. The data analyzed doesn’t cover the past two years, so there may be some positive signs not accounted for in this report. Also, Ontario appears to be doing much better than the rest of Canada, though this is not to suggest there’s enough being done in Ontario. Anyway, I think this report is an important wake-up call for Canada. Sure, we’re blessed with forestry and agricultural resources, but are we satisfied just growing and selling commodities? Are we going to continue down the path of selling our raw natural resources to other countries, only to purchase it all back in the form of higher-value products? Once again, Canada lacks a vision and has no real plan to lead the world on bioproduct development, even though it has the capacity to do so. Click below to read the full column: (more…)

HSBC Global Research just put out a report titled “Energy in 2050” and concludes that the world can grow without excessive environmental damage, “but it will need a change in human behaviour and massive collective government foresight” — both of which, unfortunately, we lack at the moment.

Some other interesting comments:

“As things stand, the world simply doesn’t have the luxury of turning its back on nuclear power, despite the recent disaster in Japan”

Oil demand and overall energy demand is expected to double between now and 2050 as developing countries grow and add more cars to the roads.

If we do nothing, “a doubling in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, more than three and a half times the amount recommended to keep temperatures at a safe level.”

“We have become terribly complacent in the way in which we use energy… The lowest hanging fruit is in the transport sector. Smaller, more efficient cars will get you from A to B, just not as quickly. Similarly, buildings can be powered much more efficiently, with the cost of alterations coming down quickly as technology evolves.”

“The lead times we highlight on the measures in ‘the solution’ are often long. Therefore the squeeze on fossil fuels in the interim could be both persistent and painful as oil prices are so sensitive to minor imbalances between energy demand and supply.”

It’s an interesting read, and while those who follow these issues closely won’t find anything new, it’s good to have another major institution issuing a warning and call for much-needed change in the way the world operates.

Canadian sites are taking pre-orders for a few more days still, but for my U.S. readers Amazon.com has started shipping my new book Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and Their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy. The book tells the stories of some clean energy entrepreneurs/inventors taking huge risks and thinking outside the box to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. Each one is at a different level of development but all face similar barriers along their journey. The stories set the stage for discussion about a specific type of clean energy, technology or field of discovery (e.g. fusion, solar, waste-heat recovery, biofuels, energy storage, biomimicry, etc.) supported by some historical context and current-day examples.

Why Mad Like Tesla? That’s explained in the introduction, but in a nutshell Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla invented many important technologies in his lifetime. yet he faced constant struggle against naysayers and skeptics who couldn’t, at first, grasp the significance of what he was sharing with the world. Many dismissed Tesla as a mad scientist, and yet his inventions shaped the world largely for the better. So, in my view, if someone today is mad like Tesla, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s quite a good thing, actually — we need more of these people, for the changes necessary in our world will not come from the kind of cautious, incremental steps being taken today.

I have a website for the book in the works, but it won’t be ready until end of August.

Thanks for your support!