Organic Drive
Case Studies
Organic Drive is active across a wide range of areas.
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Below is a brief overview of some of the areas in which Organic Drive has been involved for the last decade. These areas range from waste disposal, energy from waste, and higher value chemicals. This broad experience allows the company to turn its capabilities to solve new problems and take advantage of new opportunities.
Fats, Oils, and Grease
Organic Drive has designed, built and commissioned a first-of-its-kind plant in Dartford, Kent, bringing together a team of leading actors in the separations industry and Thames Water Utilities. Using a proprietary process, the plant can treat, separate and add value to fats, oils, and grease (FOG) that would otherwise be a burden on the sewage treatment industry.
FOG is a generic term using in the water utilities industry for fatty material passed into the sewer network by domestic and commercial users that eventually contributes towards sewage blockages and other operational issues in pumping stations and sewage treatment works. FOG is a major concern to the water utilities sector due to the high cost of sewer blockages for which it is responsible each year. Any solution that can both remove the problems FOG causes while simultaneously supply useful renewable power is obviously of great benefit.
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The proprietary process developed by Organic Drive takes the incoming FOG material and separates this into a valuable organic oil stream, a pasturised nutrient rich water stream, and a sterilised dried solid. The key to the process is that, by using some unique and innovative energy integration, the overall processing cost is kept to an absolute minimum, something that would otherwise make the process uneconomic by simply trying to use existing technologies from other industry sectors.
The oil stream is converted into a biofuel for road transport and combined heat and power, while the solids can be used as either a high-energy anaerobic digestion feed, a soil amendment, or gasified through Organic Drive's proprietary entrained-flow gasification technology. The nutrient rich water stream can be sent to high-throughput, low-retention-time anaerobic digestion, where the size (and therefore cost) of the anaerobic digestion plant is more than an order of magnitude less expensive due to the extremely low solids content.
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Process Intensification in Terpene Derivatives
We have made great inroads in the understanding, control and exploitation of consecutive-competitive reactions. These regularly occur in commercially important situations but are rarely well understood even by the incumbant players in their respective industries. One such area where such reactions are important is in the conversion of terpenes obtained from turpentine and citrus oils.
We have developed the ability to be able to convert any number of terpene compounds, such as alpha and beta-pinene, carene, limonene and camphene into any number of higher value products such as l-(-)-menthol, alpha-terpineol and campholenic aldehyde.
Biodiesel from Waste Oils
Biodiesel is produced from vegetable and animal fats and oils. It involves the reaction of oil or fatty acids with methanol in the presence of catalysts to produce a fatty acid methyl ester. For the past couple of decades it has been the most widely produced biofuel in Europe and hence the greatest contributor to the reduction in the carbon footprint of road transport.
The first plant built by Organic Drive was designed to produce biodiesel from waste oils and fats. Since then great strides have been made in developing a unique process that is able to produce biodiesel to the international standard EN 14214 from even the most rancid and degraded feedstocks, while simultaneously minimising the operational cost to the lowest in the industry and maintaining control of capital expenditure.
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The process combines the techologies of complete hydrolysis and molecular distillation with reactive distillation. In doing so the process has the lowest operating costs of any technology available on the market, while still ensuring the highest quality of fuel.
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The development of the reactive distillation process and the use of molecular distillation has lead to the development of novel procedures for manufaturing synthetic ester based lubricants, as well as aiding in the design of a unique triglyceride molecular distillation system for one of the UK's leading biodiesel manufacturers.
Synthetic Ester Lubricants
Synthetic ester based lubricants offer superior performance in a wide variety of applications: whether it be for high-duty, high-temperature environments, or situations where extremely high viscosity indices are required, ester based lubricants are often the better choice. Some technical areas, such as aircraft jet engines, now use exclusively synthetic polyol based ester lubricants.
From the experience gained in development of reactive distillation for the production of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME, commonly known as biodiesel), Organic Drive has developed a unique method that is able to produce synthetic esters from a multitude of different combinations of alcohols, polyols, and short and long chain fatty acids, at minimum production cost and at highest quality and reproducibility.
Acrolein and Methionine
Acrolein is an intermediate in the manufacture of several chemicals, the most important of which is the amino acid methionine, where it forms the major consituent cost. Methionine is used as a growth aid in the rearing of poultry, and global demand is forecast to sore in the coming years.
Acrolein is traditionally produced onsite from propylene at considerable expense. One of the by-products of the biodiesel process is glycerine which has caused a global glut in the the supply of glycerine and hence a great reduction in its price.
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Organic Drive has developed a proprietary process that is able to produce acrolein from virgin and crude glycerine as a feedstock at apprroximately a third the cost of the propylene route through the use of process intensifcation techniques.
Oleochemicals
Working in the fields of fats, oils and grease, as well as in 3rd generation biofuels and synthetic esters, has lead to the development of a novel approach to the chemistry, rheology, thermodynamics, and interphase phenomena surrounding the world of oleochemicals.
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This work has covered areas from recoverying value from fatty acid amide dissolved air floatation sludge, to the recovery and purification of vegetablle lecithin from phospholipid degumming.
Aviation Biofuel
The advent of driverless cars, the reduction in cost of renewable electricity production from wind and solar, and the ever increasing capacity and performance of battery powered road vehicles points to a future where carbon emmissions due to transport will be vastly reduced.
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However, one energy intensive sector that will prove particularly difficult to decarbonize is aviation.
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Organic Drive is developing new ways to take advantage of the low grade fats, oils, and grease (FOG) that have come on tap since the implementation of the proprietary FOG conversion technology. The main area of this research has focused on the creation of a drop-in replacement bio-kerosene that exceeds the technical specifications for Jet A and Jet A-1 aviation fuel.