Walk through the maze of metal kegs, six-packs of boutique beer,
and cartons of pop, juice and fruity syrup on Tim Curtiss'
production floor, and you'll think for a minute that you're
in a beverage warehouse. However, these are just raw materials for
Liquid Resources of Ohio LLC in Medina, Ohio. Beverage companies
pay Curtiss, 45, to take out-of-date or flawed products off their
hands. Curtiss' company then smashes the containers and,
through fermentation and distillation, converts the liquid contents
into fuel-grade ethanol.
Launched in 2003, Liquid Resources has the capacity to produce
about 3 million gallons of ethanol a year. As both gas prices and
fears of global warming rise, ethanol looks better and better-it
burns far cleaner than gasoline and reduces our reliance on oil
imports. Most cars already use fuel that contains up to 10 percent
ethanol-usually produced from corn -- but Curtiss says some experts
think cars could run on a mix of up to 40 percent ethanol. Many
city buses run on fuel that's 85 percent ethanol.
And not only does Curtiss' company produce clean fuel, but
it also helps fight the burgeoning piles of waste that threaten to
overwhelm our landfills. The company uses every bit of its raw
materials: Metal, plastic and cardboard containers are crushed and
shipped to recyclers; glass is sold to abrasives and road-building
companies. The company's only waste product is water.
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A self-styled "serial entrepreneur," Curtiss
didn't set out to tackle America's energy crisis, but in
waste processing, he found a business model he couldn't resist.
He took the plunge even though he had no background in energy. He
now projects $1 million in sales for 2006.
Renewable, clean energy is a booming field these days-even in
the U.S., which has lagged behind other countries. "The best
evidence of this was at the second annual conference of the
Renewable Energy Finance Forum in New York City," says Michael
Rosenfeld, vice consul of UK Trade & Investment, an
international economic development agency for the United
Kingdom's government that works on trade export and investment
opportunities, including renewable energy projects with U.S.
companies. "You used to just see VCs and smaller players
investing in renewable energy, but now you see the big
institutional investors putting in billions. But because it's
still a relatively young market, the opportunities for
entrepreneurs are fairly wide open."
According to John Anderson of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a
Snowmass, Colorado, energy think tank, Curtiss is typical of a lot
of the entrepreneurs headed into the renewable energy field: Many
are experts in something else.
"Energy has been dominated by the regulated-monopoly
utilities structure," says Anderson, RMI's team leader for
energy and resources. "Energy has not had an entrepreneurial
culture. A lot of the most successful energy entrepreneurs I'm
seeing right now are immigrants from other tech areas."
Anderson says that the regulated-monopoly paradigm has made it
tough in the past for entrepreneurs. However, as energy
deregulation proceeds, he expects to see a huge wave of energy
innovation and opportunities. "The flood will be so big and
widespread that it's tough to know where the cool things are
going to be," he says.
Curtiss' business is certainly one cool thing to develop as
the energy picture changes in this country, but there are many
others, even outside the now almost-mainstream areas of wind and
solar power. Near a Butterball turkey processing facility in
Carthage, Missouri, Renewable Environmental Solutions is converting
270 tons of turkey offal into 300 barrels of crude oil every day.
Formed in 2000 as a joint venture between Con-Agra and Changing
World Technologies, a West Hempstead, New York, company that
developed a thermal conversion process, RES uses water, heat and
pressure to convert the turkey parts into energy. In addition to
creating oil, the process reduces solid wastes and destroys prions,
the mutated proteins that are suspected to cause mad cow
disease.
"People are amazed that we're using animal parts to
create energy, but years ago [people] took parts of whales and made
lamp oil," says Changing World CEO Brian Appel, 47.
"That's not so different from what we're doing
here."
Changing World's technology works for a wide variety of
other wastes, from municipal sludge to worn-out tires. "In
fact, our initial focus was to find a sensible solution to
waste," Appel says. "Energy production was second, but
now that's become primary."
Another energy solution puts a new spin on power derived from
water. Arlington, Virginia-based Verdant Power has spent years
examining new designs for turbines that create energy from the free
flow of water in rivers, canals or tidal areas without using dams.
The 5-year-old company is now testing one of its designs and
anticipates its first commercial revenue in 2007 with the
installation of a few hundred turbines in New York's East
River. The installation will produce about 10 megawatts of
electricity per day for New York City--a tiny percentage of the
city's daily 1,500 to 2,000 megawatt gulp.
Verdant Power has faced a difficult uphill climb toward its
first commercial project. Since its technology is being deployed in
a highly prized and regulated natural resource, getting the
necessary permits has been tough. Beyond that, the company faces a
seeming lack of urgency for dealing with the energy crisis in the
U.S. Fortunately for Verdant Power and others, the global market
for renewable energy is brisk. Says Verdant Power CEO Ron Smith,
57, "We're talking to people all over the world."