Penn State Behrend

As an undergraduate student, I spent my summers working on research projects for my professors at the Behrend College of the Pennsylvania State University outside of Erie, Pennsylvania. The first summer was spent analyzing stream water samples upstream and downstream of the campus wastewater treatment plant that discharged into the stream. The third summer was spent injecting wine extracts into a gas chromatograph. These extracts were from the local Lake Erie Wine Country wines. Between these two projects, the second summer was spent working on a US Department of Energy-funded project to optimize the conversion of waste starch to fuel ethanol.

The starch was from a local potato chip plant. At the bench, I performed a full factorial experiment comparing levels of added nutrients, enzymes and environmental conditions on liquefaction, saccharification, fermentation and distillation to recover the ethanol. I still remember the small sample bottles of Novo Nordisk enzymes that we used, and a decade later I was working at the Novo Nordisk plant that manufactured those enzymes. We also did some work with other food wastes, including crumbs from breaded and deep-fried fish from a local processing plant. This was an interesting fermentation as when the starch was hydrolyzed and fermented, the residual vegetable oil in the crumbs separated and accumulated at the top of the beer. The distilled ethanol also smelled like fish. (I seem to remember a story from about the same time of work to make ethanol from waste chocolate. When burned in an engine, the exhaust reportedly smelled like chocolate.)

After developing the fermentation process at the bench, we converted the campus wastewater treatment plant into a pilot fuel ethanol plant, complete with the requisite Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) permit. At the potato chip plant, we had installed a settling tank to collect the starch. I drove my family’s station wagon to the manufacturing plant and we loaded it up with 5-gallon buckets of starch slurry. These we took to the campus cafeteria kitchen and used their big cooking kettles to do the liquefaction. Next, we loaded the liquefied starch back into buckets and into the station wagon and took it down the hill to the pilot plant.

In the pilot plant, we fermented the starch in 55-gallon drums using simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF). One of the Behrend professors, and the principle investigator on the project, had found a homemade still for sale locally made out of an oil storage tank and some 6″ pipe for the column. We set this up in the treatment plant. For column packing, we used scrap Inconel turnings from a local machine shop. The professor had also scrounged up a large variable output power supply with silicon controlled rectifiers (SCRs). We wired this up to some large resistance heaters installed in the still, turned the power on and made a few gallons of fuel alcohol.

Natural Resources Research Institute

After graduation from Penn State, I went to work at the Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) in Duluth, Minnesota. The professor and principle investigator that I had worked for at Penn State Behrend had taken a position as head of the NRRI Energy Division and he hired me to continue our work on fuel ethanol. The NRRI building was a decommissioned Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) building that had been used by the US Air Force. This was renovated into laboratories and offices. My first job was to build out a lab, equipping it with pilot and analytical equipment for fuel ethanol production research. In this lab, I studied conversion of waste starch from a french fry manufacturing plant, including some work with calcium alginate-immobilized yeast cells.

I also visited starch and ethanol plants in Minnesota to work with these industries. However, fuel ethanol tends to be cyclical and as soon as the price of oil began to drop, interest waned and out division was dissolved after two years. In retrospect, small ethanol plants using food processing wastes never had the economy of scale of a modern biorefinery. A more practical means of converting these waste streams to ethanol is to ship them to the nearest biorefinery. This is done, for example, at the Cargill biorefinery in Blair, Nebraska where waste starch from other producers is blended into the feed for the two ethanol plants.