NovoNutrients Gets $300K from DOE Program for CO2 to Feed Technology

One of the projects caught The Digest’s eye in particular – California-based NovoNutrients‘ fermentation technology which utilizes energy from hydrogen to transform industrial carbon dioxide emissions into premium animal feed ingredients and other valuable products. NovoNutrients will partner with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to improve CFD models in order to identify efficient and productive bioreactor designs and operating conditions for NovoNutrients’ fermentation technology. The project that received DOE funding today is called, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Simulation of Aerobic Gas Fermentation to Enable Commercial Conversion of CO₂ into Aquaculture and Animal Feed.

The HPC4Mtls program aims to leverage the national laboratories’ world-class computational resources to advance the President’s energy agenda and increase American competitiveness. More specifically, the program aims to utilize the high performance computing (HPC) technology of DOE’s National Laboratories to help the industry develop new or improved materials that can withstand extreme conditions. The projects selected under this program will have access to DOE’s HPC laboratory facilities, in addition to the laboratories’ expertise in modeling, simulation, and data analysis. READ MORE

Excerpt from Biofuels Digest: In today’s Digest, an in-depth look at the fishmeal supply and demand issue, the technology behind NovoNutrients high-protein NovoMeal, why the partnership with NREL, what this DOE funding is doing to move things forward towards commercialization, a look into the crystal ball of NovoNutrients’ future, and more.

To start, NREL’s existing aerobic bioreaction CFD models will be adapted to NovoNutrients’ gas fermentation (CO2, H2, O2) technology. The multiphysics CFD simulations require thousands of high performance computing node hours to simulate the complex geometries and contents of NovoNutrients’ industrial bioreactors. The experimentally validated CFD models will be used to identify optimally efficient and productive bioreactor designs and operating conditions. Robust, physically-based computational models of the technology will significantly increase productivity and efficiency, accelerating NovoNutrients’ technology to manufacturing scale.

“Using energy from hydrogen, we transform waste carbon – primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) from untreated industrial emissions – into protein and other high-value products for the aquaculture and animal feed industries,” Tze told The Digest. “In doing so, we address three enormous challenges: the rising costs of feed ingredients for meat and seafood at a time when global consumption is increasing substantially; depletion of the world’s fisheries; and climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. The technology is based on high productivity, energy efficient microbial bio-factories that produce nutrition from CO2 and renewable energy. In creating carbon negative, high value products from low value, problematic wastes, we see a path to worldwide expansion of our manufacturing plants.”

Tze (David Tze, NovoNutrients’ CEO) told The Digest that their plants can even be carbon negative if powered by renewable energy. “Our technology has the potential to dramatically increase the energy efficiency and productivity of feed and food production in the United States,” said Tze. “Relative to protein produced by conventional agriculture, a single manufacturing plant will be up to 1000x more productive and 100x more energy efficient. If powered by renewable energy, our plants will be carbon negative, capturing up to 1.9 tons of CO2 per ton of feed produced.”

“In a year, we should be able to talk about a specific market introduction plant site,” said Tze. “That will be a facility where we’d make commercial volumes of Novoceuticals and early volumes of Novomeal. Beyond the protein meal business, we are also building another product family on that same platform: Novoceuticals. That’s what we’ve dubbed our line of feed additives: enzymes, carotenoids, vitamins, and other high-value biochemicals relevant to animal nutrition. Some of that we can achieve through our IP for manipulating the membership of our consortium. Other products will require the application of synbio tools. We’ll have both natural and GMO products in our line-up.”

“Three years after that, we anticipate being active with a mass production plant for a version of Novomeal that has significantly more nutritional value per ton than fishmeal, but sells for less. The feed markets will be mainstream aquaculture and pets, as well as specialty poultry and swine. Also, plant-based protein foodtech companies will be knocking on our door, looking for natural ingredients to replace the relatively expensive and low nutrition-soy and pea protein in their increasingly popular burgers and other vegetarian-friendly products.” READ MORE