Marlborough-based bio-energy company Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation is dipping its toes further into international markets in a US-government funded demonstration project.The United States Department of Energy has awarded $US1.5 million to technology and m
Marlborough-based bio-energy company Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation is dipping its toes further into international markets in a US-government funded demonstration project.
The United States Department of Energy has awarded $US1.5 million to technology and manufacturing company Honeywell (NYSE:HON) subsidiary UOP, for a demonstration biofuel project in Virginia.
Aquaflow worked closely with the company to bid for funds. UOP licenses crude oil refining technology, catalysts, adsorbents and process plants and consults to the petroleum refining, petrochemical and gas processing industries.
Aquaflow director Nick Gerritsen said the six-month long first phase of the project had already begun. Aquaflow had partnered with UOP to apply some of its technology to grow the algae used to make biofuel.
It would be allocated some of the $US1.5 million fund, although Mr Gerritsen declined to say how much.
He said the partnership said something for the opportunities for New Zealand in the clean technology sector, given that UOP was a subsidiary of a large corporate organisation.
The project aims to demonstrate technology to capture carbon dioxide and cultivate algae for use in biofuel and energy production.
Aquaflow will work with US based staff on a series of monitored algae cultivation trials involving carbon dioxide (from exhaust stacks) and nutrient wastewater from a Honeywell manufacturing site in Hopewell, Virginia.
Algal oil will be extracted from the algae and converted to biofuels, while the residual algae will be converted to pyrolsis oil (that can then be burned to generate renewable electricity).
The US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory will manage the project.
“We are now working across four continents. The company has graduated through that first step and is dipping its toes into international markets,” Mr Gerritsen said.
He said the key thing was proving that the technology was of interest to the world. “We have some very big and significant players verifying the value in what we’re doing.”
The company has struggled to find sufficient funding but continues to wedge its way into new markets.
In November last year, Aquaflow announced it had teamed up with a Chinese company Greenleaf Environmental of Sichuan, to look at sites in China to harvest wild algae for biodiesel.
Milestone capital's managed fund, the Rutherford Innovation Fund includes Aquaflow into its portfolio and says Aquaflow has a market capitalisation of $27,9 million (being 96,437,422 shares on issue at $0.29c/ share).
