OriginClear Inc (OCLN)

[Chance To See]

This is a transcript of the Domestic Fuel Cast interview from December 28th which you posted a link to. I transcribed it because it was hard to hear in places and there is some interesting information in it.

-- This is the first I’ve heard them say that MBD is expected to use the Hydrogen capture technology as well, when it’s ready.
-- Also the comments about the Sustainable Resources site in New Mexico as a way to prove to Desmet Ballestra that OOIL’s technology is “predictable and profitable.”
-- Also his frank talk about the difficulty of scaling up such processes.

http://www.zimmcomm.biz/domesticfuel/dfcast-12-28-10.mp3

Welcome to the Domestic Fuel Cast, a podcast devoted to news and information about alternative fuels and energy, produced and hosted by ZimmComm New Media.

JOHN DAVIS. Going Down Under to prove the viability of algae-to-fuel technology. I’m your host, John Davis.

OriginOil, the developer of technology that turns algae into renewable fuel, recently announced the successful completion of the first phase of its commercial pilot program with Australian company MBD Energy, OriginOil’s first customer and pilot partner. Riggs Eckelberry, the CEO of Origin Oil, explains this project will allow his company to prove its technology in the field.

RIGGS ECKELBERRY. We were looking for one or two pilot customers that would enable us to scale up our technology in real conditions. And we found a company in Australia called MBD Energy. Now what’s significant about MBD is that they are a company funded to pursue what’s called bio-capture, which is the reduction of CO2 and other emissions from a smokestack using biological organisms, in this case algae. And they are funded by one of the largest mining companies, Anglo-American, to go essentially pursue power plants and mining companies and so forth as customers to reduce their CO2 burden. They really needed a solution to do something with all the algae. They felt they knew how to grow it. And really where they needed to go was, “What do you do with all that green water” and that’s our specialty.

JD. Eckelberry explains what OriginOil’s technology does.

RE. See, once it’s grown, ready for harvest, it’s still sitting in an awful lot of water. It’s 1000:1 water to algae. And you can’t just filter it out. It’s kind of like getting the Kool-aid back out of the water. How do you do that? Well, we have a process by which we basically shock the algae into coughing up[?], called flocculation, and then extracting, the oil. And that reduce – that basically gets it out of the watery phase and also separates the biomass from the oil. That’s our specialty; it’s kind of our focus as a company. And we have a number of other technologies, but we’re really known for our de-watering and extraction activities. And that’s really what we’ll be hired to do there.

They also want to put another technology to use that we have, which is called Hydrogen Extraction, but we’re still very early stage on that, and it will be a while before that’s ready for them.

JD. Eckelberry explains OriginOil is a pure technology company with no plans to manufacture or distribute products. They just want to come up with viable ways for companies to turn their ideas into commercially viable algae-to-fuel operations.

RE. So we now have a process, and from now on it’s about scaling up the volume. We’re essentially going from a very small research site to a pretty big, hectare – one – close to one hectare site, which is about 1.5 million liters of production per day. It’s a lot of water, of course. You have to divide that by 1000 to give you how much it’s going to produce in terms of algae, but it’s still a lot of production. So that’s where we’re going, is to establish, you know lets say about a ton of biomass per day being produced by MBD Energy. And that’s what we have to process. That’s called the display plan[?]. The next size up is to take the one hectare size and take it up to perhaps 10 or 50 [15?] hectares. And just keep scaling up, and we’ll have process challenges at every stage.

And, you know, I used to be many years in software. You know, you – it’s easy to scale up software, You just distribute more of it, more people download it. You might have issues on server traffic or whatever. But in algae you go with a technology and then you have to physically build the system, and it takes years for the system to be engineered and built. It’s just a matter of somebody’s got to construct. And that’s just how it is. The biggest challenge we have today in terms of the growth of the algae industry is the physical engineering of long-term larger systems.

JD. So how long is this program, then? How long is this pilot?

RE. It’s a multi-year program. We’re going to just take a year to just build the one hectare site. So this time next year I hope that MBD, with us, is going to be up and running in full scale. So we did a small scale test earlier on like ________ quarter, but we were talking about a year away. And then they have two other power plants to do that with. And meanwhile, we’ll be, hopefully, expanding at all – at one, two, or even three plants at a time. Perhaps it’ll be two and three years out to get five times expansion from there. Each time we want to get a five- or ten-times expansion of size. So we’ll go what it is now to one hectare, to perhaps 10 or 20, to 100 or 500. I would think that within five years that we would hope to be at a couple-thousand-acre site.

JD. Meanwhile OriginOil is also doing something a little closer to home. The company announced another project to help build a new advanced algae center with Sustainable Resources Incorporated on the site of the original Aquatic Species Program in Roswell, New Mexico, scheduled to start sometime next year.

RE. We were looking for a site where we could work in the U.S. Nobody’s really as aggressive as people like MBD Energy in the U.S. We have a very sort of unsettled carbon regime in our country. And basically the emitters believe that they can lobby their way out of this for now. So we don’t have serious bio customers for this activity. But what we did find was a company, Sustainable Resources, that was eager to start a research and development center on the site of the old Aquatic Species Program that was run by the DOE from ’78 – uh, sorry from 1987 to 1996 – that was the forerunner of everything we’re doing now. And so we’re locating on the same site in Roswell, New Mexico.

JD. Eckelberry jokes they’ll even hold a job fair for any little green men who might be visiting Roswell to work at the facility. But seriously, he hopes that these projects will go a long way toward proving just how commercially viable OriginOil’s technology is.

RE. This is how we then convince large what we call OEMs, original equipment manufacturer companies that make things on their own brand, convince them that they should integrate our technology. In fact, we have a partner who’s waiting in the wings. It’s a multi-national called Desmet Ballestra, in Belgium. And Desmet Ballestra is one of the world’s largest oil seed extraction companies. They have about 1000 engineers in 120 countries, and they want to get into the algae oil extraction business. By this we hope to convince them that this is a predictable and profitable process.

JD. Eckelberry says the algae oil industry is at a critical point and believes it will soon prove its worth.