2012-04-18 "Oakbio aims to make plastic from plant's pollution" by David R. Baker from "San Francisco Chronicle"
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/17/BUFM1O4PF5.DTL]
At a sprawling cement plant near Cupertino, researchers are trying a kind of eco-friendly alchemy, turning carbon dioxide into biodegradable plastic.
The researchers, from startup company Oakbio Inc., take carbon dioxide from the plant's exhaust and feed it to specially selected microbes, along with some hydrogen.
The microbes create a kind of plastic from the gas. They also make compounds that can be used in cosmetics, food, perfume and industrial lubricants.
Oakbio has already tested the process in its own Sunnyvale lab. At the Lehigh Southwest Cement Company plant, the 3-year-old startup will try it in the field.
"We're going to make products that are going to be functionally equivalent to products made from oil," said Russell Howard, Oakbio's chief executive officer, who announced the project at a news conference Tuesday. "We know the process works. Now we want to measure it and make it better."
Oakbio represents the latest attempt to capture the carbon dioxide spewed by power plants and other industrial facilities, emissions that heat the Earth as they build up in the atmosphere.
Although efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions have stalled at the national level, they are pressing ahead in California. The state is creating a "cap and trade" system that will eventually force large industrial facilities to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases. Hence the cement plant's interest in Oakbio.
"Businesses have been searching for a viable solution to reducing these emissions, and so I am particularly excited to stand here with Oakbio today and announce this partnership," said Lehigh plant manager Henrik Wesseling.
Technology exists to capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and store the gas underground, but no one has built a convincing business model around it. Some companies, meanwhile, want to use algae to consume the carbon dioxide from power plants and produce a type of oil that can be turned into fuel. Howard, however, argues that the ponds needed to grow algae at power plants would occupy too much space to make the idea practical.
Oakbio's lab at the Lehigh plant is decidedly small, packed into a metal shipping container painted blue. The researchers use microbes found in nature - they won't reveal which ones - and feed them the plant's flue gas, along with hydrogen. Not all the microbes survive on this diet, but some do. The researchers keep breeding the microbes that survive, making them more efficient at processing carbon dioxide.
With just five employees, Oakbio remains in its very early stages. Howard, former CEO of the Maxygen Inc. biopharmaceutical company, says Oakbio's funding to date comes from "friends and family," in addition to his own bank account. He declined to disclose the total raised so far.
He sees great potential in the technology, even if commercial deployment remains several years away.
"We're on the cusp of taking off," he said.