The Farmington lab where Steven Henck has worked for the past year smells an awful lot like stale beer. But the only thing he is brewing is a solution to the country’s need for energy independence.
Henck, the founder of Arbor Fuel, and his research team spend their days searching for efficient methods to convert biomass — typically, sugar and wood products — into alternative fuels like ethanol and butanol. A former CuraGen Corp. researcher who worked on drug manufacturing, Henck left the Branford-based company after 10 years in 2007 to form Arbor Fuel.
It wasn’t much of a stretch for Henck and his current employees, all former CuraGen researchers, to go from biotech to biofuels, he said.
“More and more recently, a lot of people are catching on,” Henck said. “There are a number of startups coming out of biopharma now going into biofuels.”
Much like how Henck used advanced genomic targeting at Branford-based CuraGen to manufacture more effective drugs, he and other biofuel companies are now manipulating genes to find more effective and efficient processes for converting biomass to fuel.
It’s an idea that has high-tech startup companies around the country racing to the finish to find a solution. With just $2 million in initial financing, Arbor Fuel lags behind some of its better-capitalized competitors.
Well-Funded Competitors
Gevo, a Pasadena, Calif.-based developer of synthetic biofuels, just wrapped up $17 million in its third round of financing in May. Verenium Corp., a Cambridge, Mass-based company developing cellulosic ethanol, is backed by a $90 million investment from BP. It just announced plans to build a plant in Florida.
While Arbor Fuel may not match the competition’s financing, Henck believes his company’s innovative approach has the edge in efficiency and quality. Arbor Fuel’s scientists genetically modify its biomass materials before mixing them with yeast.
The yeast goes through a fermentation process — that’s the beer smell — and through a distilling process that creates ethanol. A similar version of the same process can produce butanol, a fuel that can be swapped directly for gasoline.
The biggest financial challenge in ethanol conversion has been the excessive waste that usually results in the process, said Rich Gurney, an assistant professor of chemistry at Simmons College in Boston.
“The higher efficiency, the more ethanol you’re going to get,” Gurney said.
In terms of efficiency, Arbor Fuel’s methods are “definitely at the forefront” of conversion efforts, Gurney added.
Arbor Fuel’s butanol conversion process holds a lot of promise, Henck believes.
“Butanol is kind of a stealth thing,” Henck said. “No one knows much about it.”
Though ethanol production far exceeds butonal’s, there are greater advantages to using butanol. Specifically, it has a much greater energy capacity and can be swapped directly with gasoline or mixed with diesel to burn cleaner. But because of the complicated processes now used to make butanol, it costs about $5 per gallon. The existing market for butanol is about 500 million gallons a year, much less than ethanol’s 14 billion.
‘Butanol Will Get There’
Much of the government’s alternative fuel push has centered around corn-based ethanol. But if the country is to meet its goal of 36 billion gallons of alternative fuel by 2030, it will eventually have to expand policies to include butanol, said Ed White, professor in the SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry in Syracuse, N.Y.
“The issue is national security, being energy independent. Oil will run out,” White said. “Butanol will get there.”
Henck, who injected some of his own money into Arbor Fuel’s initial financing, figures his company has enough cash to last another year and a half. Within a month, his team will begin production on an industrial strain of ethanol that can be produced in greater quantities.
If successful, Henck thinks he can license the product and use the funds toward doing the same with butanol. It would be a major step for a company that literally started in a garage.
“I know people talk about garage operations, but I think it’s usually in quotations. This was literally a garage operation, over three different garages,” Henck said. “It got really cold last winter.”
