Diversified Energy Moves Ahead With New Projects for Omnigas and Centia Technologies

29 August 2009

Diversified Energy Corporation, an alternative and renewable energy technology development company with a portfolio of several technologies, recently received support for further projects developing its HydroMax/OmniGas molten-metals based gasification technology (earlier post) and its Centia renewable biohydrocarbon drop-in fuel technology (earlier post).

The Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE/NETL) approved the second year of Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) funding for Diversified Energy’s OmniGas molten-metals based gasification technology.

OmniGas uses a 1300 °C molten slag to gasify a wide range of hydrocarbon feedstocks (e.g., biomass, coal, petroleum coke, and wastes) for the production of an ultra-clean syngas. This syngas can then be used for industrial process heating applications, converted into electricity, or synthesized into fuels or chemicals. OmniGas has been demonstrated at bench-scale and is now on track for a one ton per day (tpd) prototype demonstration, using coal and biomass as the feedstock, in mid-2010.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that NC State University had won a 4-year, multi-million dollar award to advance an integrated algae-to-biofuels technology.

The back-end technology for this project is based on the Centia technology licensed exclusively to Diversified Energy. Centia can convert any lipid/oil/fat into transportation fuels similar in characteristics to gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel. The process uses a unique pathway that consumes little, if any, net hydrogen. This in return allows for biorefineries to be placed in close proximity to the sources of feedstock, minimizing undue logistical costs.

Notification by the Department of Energy’s new Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) that two concept papers which included technologies from Diversified Energy had passed initial screening and were being encouraged to submit full proposals. Earlier in the year ARPA-E had issued a call for concept papers for paradigm shifting and truly transformational energy technologies. After receiving 3,500 papers, ARPA-E recently announced that only a small percentage had been encouraged to submit a full proposal.

Diversified Energy was a subcontractor on two such teams. One project involves the production of cyanobacteria-based lipids and processing through Diversified Energy’s Centia technology for fungible fuels production. The second is focused on the generation of syngas from Diversified Energy’s OmniGas gasifier to feed a syngas-to-biobutanol conversion process. Diversified Energy is expecting to participate in the full proposal with these two teams and to be notified of the outcome later this year.