Join 5+ climate accelerators for a morning of startup showcases, 1:1 match making, and a look at some of the region’s most promising hardtech solutions from seed to commercial growth.
The event will feature a special conversation with leaders from LanzaJet
Resilient Futures & Tech Horizons is the flagship event for Chicago Climate Tech Week 2024! Listen to panels around Biotech, Energy, Policy & Economics, Quantum and Workforce Development.
On Tuesday, September 17th, Evergreen Climate Innovations will be hosting their annual flagship event, Co_Invest Climate!
As part of the Evergreen Expert Network, I look forward to this annual event.
Join us to discover new impactful climate technologies, network with innovators, entrepreneurs, & industry leaders, and hear the latest on the region’s thriving innovation ecosystem.
Evergreen’s startups will be joined by key ecosystem partners to present some of the region’s most impactful climate technology innovations. Hear from the inspiring innovators and startups fueling the region’s climate innovation engine.
The annual conference for Circular Indiana, focused on education and advocacy to strengthen the circular economy.
This year’s conference them is “Advancing Prosperity in Indiana through Circular Economy Principals”. Learn from speakers how they are advancing circular economy thinking and practices within their products, organizations and client base. Learn best practices from and network with other sustainability professionals. Contribute your insights into how Indiana can prosper through circular principals.
Mike Schultz will be presenting at ACHEMA 2024
Presentation topic: Navigating the Bumpy Road of Industrial Biotechnology Scale-up
We have seen a growth in products from Industrial Biotechnology, with commercial technologies emerging in areas such as:
• Fuels. Sustainable Aviation Fuel, Green Diesel, and Ethanol from low cost feedstocks
• Chemicals. Drop-in replacements for industrial chemicals such as propanediol and butanediol, made through biological routes instead of conventional petroleum based options
• Alternative routes for proteins, fats, and meat
• Materials for building projects, fabrics, electronics
The drivers for this growth include a focus on sustainability, and a drive to enable circularity through reuse of carbon and carbon-based products. Some technologies offer the potential to make use of a lower cost source of carbon, through use of waste feedstocks such as industrial gaseous emissions, biogas, end of life plastic, and waste biomass. In addition, in some cases the bioproduct is a better product than the petroleum-based version, coming with a cheaper, safer processing route and performance advantages over traditional materials.
The road we travel while commercializing new technologies like these is often bumpy, with many challenges along the way. In order to be successful we must address these challenges while also: 1) reducing technology risk 2) reducing time to market 3) optimizing/minimizing cost and 4) maximizing value.
These are often competing objectives, and usually reducing time to market and reducing risk win out. Of course, if the capital and operating cost are too high, then a new technology will not be successful, so these criteria cannot be ignored.
This presentation will provide guidelines and best practices for the scale-up and design of industrial bioprocessing technology, to reduce time, cost, and risk of commercialization. These guidelines include elements such as:
Creative Process Engineering: The flow scheme is developed, the material balance is estimated, and key process design decisions are identified to establish the best process flowsheet for the technology.
Modeling & Analysis: A good model can save time and resources in the lab. Coupled with the right analysis, the scale-up team can prioritize objectives in the lab, pilot, and demo units.
Experimental Data: The right data is needed to prove out breakthrough ideas, secure partners and investors, and develop engineering data for equipment design. Multi-scale data is critical to this effort, and with good planning, multiple assets and external resources can be leveraged.
The key benefits of this approach are:
• Prioritization of R&D to de-risk and optimize the new technology.
• Identification of cost reduction opportunities throughout the scale-up effort.
• Anticipation of process design needs as early as possible.
In this presentation, these concepts will be illustrated with real world examples from personal experience with scale-up of industrial bioprocessing projects.
Mike Schultz will be presenting in the ‘CO2 Utilisation Technologies’ Session
Presentation topic: Gas Fermentation – An Emerging Technology for CO2-based Fuels and Chemicals
Gas fermentation is an emerging technology in the field of industrial biotechnology, with the potential to play a key role in the growth of CO2 based fuels and chemicals. While much of the work in the field of gas fermentation to date has been focused on the conversion of methane or carbon monoxide, we are seeing growing developments in the field of direct CO2 conversion via fermentation to useful products. These products include a diverse array of fuels and chemicals such as ethanol, ethylene, triglycerides for fuel or chemical applications, proteins, and polyesters for polymer applications.
Gas fermentation provides inherent benefits as compared to thermochemical pathways for CO2 conversion, including lower cost operating conditions, robustness to fluctuations in feed rate and composition, and tolerance to contaminants in the gaseous feeds.
In addition, interesting hybrid applications are emerging in which thermochemical and electrochemical conversion pathways are coupled with gas fermentation to convert CO2 to a feedstock for gas fermentation, as well as thermochemical conversion of products from gas fermentation.
A key challenge of gas fermentation is the need to design an economic reactor system with high mass transfer coefficients for the gaseous feedstocks into an aqueous media. While CO2 is generally quite soluble in the fermentation media, the most common coreactants, including hydrogen and possibly oxygen, are much less soluble. Various reactor types have been developed to address this challenge, ranging from relatively simple bubble columns (a lower mass transfer option) and more complex designs such as air lift reactors and external loop designs. Typically, higher mass transfer is possible with the tradeoff of a more complex design.
Additional challenges include a limited (but growing) knowledge base in the design of appropriate reaction systems, as well as kinetic data to support reactor design. This presentation will review the industrial applications of gas fermentation for CO2 conversion and provide a detailed assessment of the benefits and challenges of gas fermentation.
This presentation will also provide an overview of the gas fermentation reactor options and design considerations that can enhance mass transfer of the reactants. Finally, the presentation will propose a call to action for areas of research and development that can support the emerging f
Presentation Title: Managing the Risky Business of Scaling Sustainable Technology
Developing a new technology is inherently filled with risk, and a key objective of any successful scaleup effort is mitigating and reducing risk while managing timeline and budget. There are three key components to this approach:
Assess Risk. A risk assessment should be completed in the early stages of scaleup, evaluating risk areas such as technical, commercial, supply chain, etc. Scoring each risk by impact and probability provides an understanding of the most critical risks, so that these can be prioritized with mitigation steps outlined to support the scaleup effort. This risk assessment should be re-evaluated periodically to assess the impact of mitigation steps of addressing high risk areas, and to determine if any changes internal or externally have changes the risk factors.
Decouple scaleup parameters. Next, it is important to decouple and prioritize the scaleup parameters. This effort is informed by the risk assessment. The lab scale is best for evaluating the intrinsic parameters associated with the chemistry/biology of the system, while engineering parameters are better evaluated using calculations and modeling at early stages, with data generation at larger scales. We can use this approach to develop a scaleup plan in which we define critical objectives for each stage.
Develop multi-scale data in parallel. Finally, multi-scale data is critical to any scaleup effort. A very sequential approach to scaleup—aiming to hit commercial targets at each scale before moving to the next--can reduce risk significantly, but at the expense of timeline. Timeline is a key driver for any new technology, so an alternate approach is to make strategic risk decisions and do much of this work in parallel—advancing to the next scale even while working on proving out commercial targets at the smaller scale. With the risk assessment in place, and a clear scaleup plan, this risk can be managed while accelerating the timeline.
This talk will elaborate on this approach, illustrated by real world examples in which these principles have been applied to effectively manage risk during the scaleup of sustainable fuel and chemical technologies.
Join Evergreen Climate Innovations (formerly Clean Energy Trust) for Co_Invest Climate, the Greater Midwest’s premier showcase for climate tech startups, on Wednesday, September 7th in Chicago!
This annual event showcases climate technology startups from around the Greater Midwest region – and beyond – and brings together a community of stakeholders invested in the future.
Throughout the course of the day, Evergreen will feature its recent investments, highlight portfolio company successes, present inspiring keynote speakers, and gather influential professionals across a variety of fields to spark ideas and new relationships.
This year, Evergreen will host the AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator as part of the event. Meet the AWS Mobility & Transportation Cohort.
Hear from captivating speakers including Dr. Julio Friedmann of Carbon Direct, Dr. Paula Gant of GTI Energy, and Sophie Purdom of Climate Tech VC!
https://evergreeninno.org/events/co_invest-climate-2022
