SBIR-STTR Award

Most biomass (crop and forest) residues are loose wet and bulky making them logistically costly to collect and convert into useful biofuel/bioproducts. As such in Western States such as California excess woody residues either are burned in prescribed fires or cost landowners tremendously to move out of wildfire-prone regions. Takachar is developing small-scale low-cost portable equipment that can be latched onto the back of pick-up trucks to deploy to remote hard-to- access landings and vegetation management operations to locally densify/upgrade the woody biomass into higher-value biofuels and bioproducts before transportation. As more equivalent energy or value can be now packed onto the same truckload compared to moving raw biomass this saves electrical utilities such as Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) hundreds of millions of dollars in vegetation management. This project will validate a feedstock-robust control system over a wide range of input biomass characteristics consistently producing a biofuel of a heating value specified by a prospective customer despite the input fluctuations. If successful this project will lead to an integrated hardware-software system that allows Takachar to scale our operation to different vegetation management operations with different biomass types and moisture contents producing different user-specified bioproducts on demand. When commercialized in the beachhead market we can help landowner expand vegetation management increase biomass utilization and reduce wildfire risk thereby helping state and federal governments avert $4 billion/year in wildfire damages and suppression costs sequestering around 800 million tons of CO2-equivalent and creating $150 million/year of livelihood in rural underserved communities.