Cleantech

I co-founded a startup focusing on wastewater remediation on California’s dairy farms. The problem is that most dairymen must focus on the economics of their milk production rather than on waste management, which results in highly-inefficient processing of cow manure (storage in large holding lagoons before disposal onto crop fields). Our goal was to greatly increase the energy utilization in waste manure by coupling it to the production of microalgae to generate value in three outputs shown below:

Our competitive advantage is that we combine existing but previously uncoupled wastewater treatment systems (anaerobic digestion and algae raceway ponds) along with our strain engineering expertise to generate an economic multiplier. In other words, while the capital investment for a standalone digester or  standalone algae ponds is generally too high to achieve an appreciable rate of return, the cost of our integrated system is nearly the same as a single standalone component while generating all of the benefits combined (compressed natural gas, high value feed and clean water). During my tenure we secured $1.7 million in grant funding from various state and private funding agencies to deploy a demonstration facility of our system in Lakeside, CA.

Read more about our system in our final report to the California Energy Commission by following the link below: