Trent grads have turned biogas research into burgeoning local business
Speaking to Carbon Control Systems’ Chris Ferguson over the phone from his farm in Millbrook, it’s clear that not even a blanket of snow is going to slow him down. Outside, the unassuming young Trent Environmental Life Sciences graduate has a construction crew at work building the full-scale version of a biogas project he started in a lab at the university just a few years ago.
What they’re building is a small power plant that uses a messy microbial process called anaerobic digestion to break down manure, fats, grease, and plant remains to make heat, power and fertilizer. “We’re trying to finalize the big tank for the concrete pour next week,” Ferguson says.
He and fellow Trent grad Lawrence Gibson founded Carbon Control Systems in 2008. The Millbrook plant is a big project that began with Ferguson’s master’s project at Trent, turning Jerusalem artichokes into ethanol and biogas. This plant will double as a showroom model for their business constructing similar plants.
If you’ve ever eaten at the Seasoned Spoon or been up to the rooftop garden, you might be familiar with the Jerusalem artichoke. The plant is native to North America, and its earthy brown tubers are packed with nutrients. Ferguson worked with graduate supervisor Tom Hutchinson to design a project that showed anaerobic digestion of these tubers could produce ethanol more efficiently than breaking down corn, and produce a biogas, in the form of methane, to burn as fuel to boot.
Corn-based ethanol is being aggressively pushed in the United States and Canada as a sustainable fuel, with programs like Canada’s ecoABC initiative pouring in $200 million for building and expanding biofuel facilities. But studies like a 2009 California Air Resource Board report have shown that the energy required to produce corn-based fuel is almost as much as gets produced. Ferguson says his process produced more than seven times as much energy as is needed to produce it, but it’s not likely it’ll catch on any time soon.
“Everybody knows how to farm corn. Nobody knows how to farm Jerusalem artichokes,” he says. And there’s already so much infrastructure to harvest, plant, and transport corn, it’s going to be a major player for a while.
Before he even began his project, though, Ferguson had bigger plans in mind. A physicist originally, he had previously studied how biogas plants can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their Millbrook plant won’t produce ethanol, but will make a mix of methane and carbon dioxide.
Like natural gas plants, they burn methane to generate heat and electricity, which also produces carbon dioxide in the process. But because anaerobic digesters are making methane from breaking down plant debris and animal manure from farms, they’re capturing methane that would otherwise be produced in the fields and added directly to the atmosphere. And while carbon dioxide is the poster child for global warming, methane is actually 23 times better at trapping the Earth’s heat once it’s in the atmosphere.
Ferguson says he had a good time on that early project, and knew he wanted to get involved in the energy sector. “I know what I wanted to do before I even started a thesis,” he says, “so I designed a thesis based on that.” To do so, he applied for a unique source of funding, which encourages scientists to commercialize their research, through the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE).
OCE is a funding program run by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. Its aim is to help universities turn science and technology research into business projects, through funding, business development and training. Ontario is putting increasing emphasis on commercializing research in the province, funding centres like the well-known MaRS initiative in Toronto and genomics and agri-food networks in Guelph, which specialize in making these connections. Trent’s DNA Cluster is just one of the almost 40 such centres scattered around the province.
Advocates of these networks, such as Dr. John Wallace, a biotechnology entrepreneur and scientist at McMaster University, have argued that it is actually unethical not to commercialize important research. Wallace is the director of McMaster’s Farncombe Institute for digestive health, and in 2009 he received the $5 million Premier’s Summit Award in Innovation. His research on inflammation and gastrointestinal disorders has led to the development of new drugs that take a radically unconventional approach to treating intestinal dysfunctions. Before a recent symposium, Wallace said too many scientists in Canada are afraid or uninterested in filing patents on research that could have important public benefits, so it gets shelved or left as theoretical work.
But overemphasis on finding ways to make research profitable can also divert funding from “pure research,” or investigations done just to explore interesting questions. A 2005 report by the Council of Ontario Research Directors cited “major concerns” that funding criteria from many programs has become too focused on linkages to business and intellectual property potential. They noted that selection criteria from the Ontario Research Fund, for example, “raise a concern that projects will be funded only if they have commercial potential and/or an industry partner.”
Most natural sciences research at Trent is funded through agencies that don’t require that kind of business emphasis. Ferguson says he actually had trouble convincing his thesis committee to let him do such a complicated project. He was the first to receive OCE funding at Trent, and says he didn’t have much of a model for his work at that point.
Still, with a 100 kilowatt biogas plant set to begin running next year, and a new business helping farmers produce renewable energy, Ferguson and his partners show academic research at Trent can translate into not just a career, but an innovative job helping make Ontario’s economy and energy supply more sustainable.
The plant is smaller than they’d hoped, mostly due to the capacity of local transmission lines, and many biogas producers in Ontario have complained that the government’s new green energy legislation makes it hard to turn a profit in the industry. But with the province’s goal to phase out coal generation by 2014, those in the business say it’s in the public interest to let biogas meet more of our energy needs and help recycle farm waste.
As for other aspiring researchers-cum-businesspeople, Ferguson advises using a master’s thesis to develop a technology that can be commercialized, finding an enthusiastic professor, and going out and looking for funding agencies that want to see commercialization.
He says although Hutchinson was a great supervisor, students shouldn’t rely on them for everything. “If you let your professor do it, it probably won’t get done. They’re busy guys, so you’ve got to do it alone,” he says. “You’ve got to be the front line, and get all the criticism for your plan you can.” Whatever the risks of diverting funding from more pure research, Ferguson’s seems like a path more science students in Ontario are destined to take.
