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!

I have a feature in the latest issue of Corporate Knights magazine called “Cows, carbon and you” that takes a look at whether carbon labelling of products would have an impact on purchasing behaviour in Canada and the United States. It’s being done to a limited extent in Europe, but would such an approach fly in North America?

It’s an interesting question: Would you, as a consumer, be more likely to purchase a product in a retail store if you knew the energy used to produce it could be guaranteed as zero- or low-carbon?

I know I buy unbleached coffee filters, low-salt cans of tuna and organic veggies because it matters to me, so it follows that some people would be swayed by carbon content. They might not pay more for it, but price being equal, it could give one product a competitive edge over another. On the other hand, is there really any room on product labels to fit this information? How would it be presented in a simple way that doesn’t confuse people? What standards are used to measure the carbon content of energy inputs? Can such a label be exact enough to matter?

BTW: Why the “cows” reference in the headline? That’s because I open the piece with a look inside the operations of Delft Blue, a veal farming company in Ontario that turns cow manure into electricity and heat. So, in a sense, Delft is supplying the market with low-carbon veal. It’s doing so because the capital investment lowers the cost of its farming operation and achieves payback in five or so years. However, its customers — Walmart, Loblaws, etc. — could choose to market the veal as low-carbon if they chose. At the moment, they don’t.

Enerkem, the Montreal-based waste-to-ethanol company, continues to raise money and extend its reach through new partnerships. The company announced today it has secured another $60 million in financing and that Valero Energy has joined existing investors Waste Management, Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and Cycle Capital in the round. Valero and Enerkem have also agreed to jointly explore future commercial opportunities.

Enerkem is proving to be a Canadian waste-to-energy success story. It has several projects under construction and in the pipeline and it has managed to attract top-tier strategic investors and VCs. Valero is a good catch. It has 10 ethanol refineries across the United States, making it the largest supplier of ethanol in the country. It also has made several investments in next-gen ethanol technology companies, including Mascoma, Zeachem, Terrabon, Solix Biofuels — and now Enerkem. “With Valero joining Waste Management as a strategic investor, Enerkem becomes one of the very few renewable products companies that is aligned with industry leaders from both upstream and downstream parts of the business,” said Vincent Chornet, president and chief executive officer of Enerkem, in a press release.

There’s so much wind and solar development happening in Ontario as a result of the feed-in-tariff program that it’s easy to forget that FIT prices also exist for generating electricity from biogas and biomass. Indeed, the biogas option has been largely overshadowed even though as a source of electricity it’s arguably the best approach of them all — it’s dispatchable, it reduces methane emissions from manure, it’s a waste management solution, and it’s a way to ensure dangerous pathogens from in-field manure don’t leech into groundwater systems. There have been a dozen or so farm-based anaerobic digester systems deployed throughout Ontario, but there is potential for a whole lot more, not just from dairy farms, but for processing of municipal waste water, chicken/pig/turkey poop, organic matter from industrial food production, etc…

A good sign that more will happen was the announcement yesterday that Anaergia, which operates in Europe under the name UTS Biogas, has chosen Ontario as the location for its $70-million global headquarters, which will include R&D and manufacturing. The company expects to hire 200 people, and it plans to support and drive growth in biogas systems across Ontario and presumably the rest of Canada and northeastern parts of the United States. “The industry, in my view, is still in its infancy,” Andrew Benedek, company CEO, told the Toronto Star. “It has not evolved technologically. I really see an opportunity to become far away the leader of the world.” Benedek, a Canadian citizen, has a track record for running successful cleantech businesses. He was previously founder of Zenon Environmental, the Ontario-based water treatment company that went on to be purchased by General Electric in 2006 for about $700 million.

This is another healthy sign that the Green Energy Act and FIT program, despite their fixable problems and Hudak-spun controversy, are luring future-looking investments and jobs to the province.

A Los Angeles-based company called Rentech Inc. announced today that it is building a biofuels plant four hours north of Sault St. Marie, Ontario, that will be dedicated to turning forest waste and “unmerchantable” tree species into renewable jet fuel and naphtha, which is a chemical feedstock for making all sorts of products. This is big news for an Ontario steel and forestry area that was hit hard by the economic downturn. The plant, called the Olympiad Project, is expected to be operational in 2015 and will employ up to 1,000 people during peak construction. There will be about 83 direct full-time jobs once the plant is operational and over 300 indirect and “induced” positions — whatever that means.

Rentech’s approach is to gasify the biomass, condition the resulting synthesis gas (syngas), then convert it into jet fuel and naphtha using a Fischer-Tropsch process. The plant, called the Olympiad Project, is being designed to produce approximately 85 million litres (23
million gallons) annually of renewable and certified low-carbon jet fuel. Rentech will get its biomass from Ontario crown land through a deal with the province. In total, Rentech will have access to up to 1.1 million cubic metres (1.3 million U.S. tons) of Crown timber per year. The company has applied to receive up to $200 million in funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada’s NextGen Biofuels Fund. That amount is expected to be paid back over time from project cash flow.

The ultimate impact of this fuel on the environment, according to Rentech, will be a reduction of 600,000 metric tonnes per year of CO2-equivalent emissions. “This equates to removing more than 100,000 passenger cars from the road,” the company says. The green jet fuel is “virtually” free of sulfur and aromatics. It has lower particulate matter, NOX and  SOX compared to conventional jet fuel (kerosene). The fuel is certified and was tested in 2010, though as a mix that contained 40 per cent conventional Jet-A fuel.

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I’m a big supporter of developing biofuels specifically for aviation purposes and adopting an electrification strategy for light-duty vehicles. We can’t electrify commercial airliners or military jets, so greening up those fleets will require some sort of biofuel solution. The bonus is that distributing this green jet fuel to airports is much easier than delivering to the thousands and thousands of gas stations across North America. Rentech, for instance, could do a deal with CN rail, which delivers jet fuel directly to Pearson International Airport in Toronto.

I plan to chat with Rentech’s CEO this afternoon to get more detail about where the company plans to sell its green jet fuel and related products. Also, next Tuesday, there will be a panel on bio-jet fuel innovation at BIO World Congress in Toronto. I plan to attend and will report back.