Iowa State Chemist Hopes Startup Company Can Revolutionize Biodiesel Production
AMES, Iowa -- Line up 250 billion of Victor Lin's nanospheres and you've traveled a meter. But those particles -- and just the right chemistry filling the channels that run through them -- could make a big difference in biodiesel production.
They could make production cheaper, faster and less toxic. They could produce a cleaner fuel and a cleaner glycerol co-product. And they could be used in existing biodiesel plants.
"This technology could change how biodiesel is produced," said Victor Lin, an Iowa State University professor of chemistry, a program director for the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and the inventor of a nanosphere-based catalyst that reacts vegetable oils and animal fats with methanol to produce biodiesel. "This could make production more economical and more environmentally friendly."
Lin is working with Mohr Davidow Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., the Iowa State University Research Foundation and three members of his research team to establish a startup company to produce, develop and market the biodiesel technology he invented at Iowa State.
The company, Catilin Inc., is just getting started in Ames. Catilin employees are now working out of two labs and a small office in the Roy J. Carver Co-Laboratory on the Iowa State campus. The company will also build a biodiesel pilot plant at the Iowa Energy Center's Biomass Energy Conversion Facility in Nevada.
Lin said the company's goal over the next 18 months is to produce enough of the nanosphere catalysts to increase biodiesel production from a lab scale to a pilot-plant scale of 300 gallons per day.
Contacts:Victor Lin, Chemistry, (515) 294-3135, vsylin@iastate.edu
Larry Lenhart, Catilin Inc., (515) 294-5773, llenhart@catilin.com
Mike Krapfl, News Service, (515) 294-4917, mkrapfl@iastate.edu
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