Summerhill Biomass Systems Create Powdered Fuels

By Evan Klonsky

In August of 2006 Kim McKnight was an engineer looking into the best ways to feed chickens using farming facilities. After spending late nights reading papers about fluid mechanics and powder explosions, Kim realized that the work he was doing on the farm could be applied to developing a system that creates renewable energy in an unconventional way.

Later that year, Kim and his father James started Summerhill Biomass Systems and came up with a vision for addressing this country’s growing energy crisis. This vision is based off of grinding wood chips, corn stalks and other agricultural waste into a fine powder that is burned into the equivalent of fuel oil or propane. Instead of using liquid oil, which has been the standard for years in the propane industry, the system uses powder as its source to generate energy for applications such as home heating.

“The world has liquid fuels on the brain,” said Kim McKnight, chief engineer and co-inventor at Summerhill Biomass Systems. “I realized that anything you could do with liquid you could do with powder. This is a classic case of just junkyard engineering,” said Kim, who created the “micro-powdered biomass fuel technology” partly out of a converted chicken feeder in his barn in Cayuga County.

Backyard innovations such as these offer different approaches to the task of alternative energy solutions than those from big oil companies, who have for long focused their research on liquid solutions such as ethanol. This also comes at an important point in the history of a country looking to temper its dependence on foreign oil.

Presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama have both pledged to begin solving the energy problem in the hopes of stimulating our declining economy. Sen. McCain says that he wants to make the United States a “leader in a new international green economy” while Sen. Obama has said renewable energy technology will help to create five million new jobs throughout the country. The team at Summerhill Biomass Systems believes that its newly designed machinery offers not only a green solution but also an economic one.

“This is going to be intrinsically a local industry,” said James T. McKnight, president and chief scientist at Summerhill. “It’s going to help get a lot of people started in the local woodchip production industry and the logging industry,” said James, whose company received a $75,000 grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to develop and demonstrate the technology.

Environmental and alternative energy technologies are beginning to shape the occupational future of the country. Although Syracuse University is only beginning to implement green technology education into its curriculum, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry has long taught classes on the economic significance of energy-efficient technology. ESF professor Charles Hall understands the importance of technology such as the one at Summerhill for the economy.

“One of the best and most profitable things that you can do right now is go and buy farm land and begin producing for this country,” said Hall. “If you look at peak oil projections you will understand that we are running out of oil. We need to look for other ways to create energy and it will help our economy if we do.”

Another economic advantage of the powder biomass technology is that it will save customers money because it can be produced cheaper than oil, whose price will only rise with its scarcity. Summerhill says that it can sell its product for the equivalent of $1.40 per gallon of heating oil, which currently sells for $3.60 per gallon.

“As far as the end user knows, the only difference they will see is that their fuel costs will go down,” said Kim McKnight.

Although the prototype has yet to patented and licensed by the company, it might appeal to SU’s sustainability division, which focuses on cutting costs and making the campus as energy-efficient as possible.

“Energy efficiency will help lower costs, which will hopefully translate to lower tuition increases,” said SU’s chief sustainability officer, Steve Lloyd. “Part of that is buying more efficient equipment for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting and to preserve what natural resources are left,” said Lloyd, who helped to start the sustainability division, part of the Office of Energy and BFAS Computing Management, in July of 2007.

Lloyd also believes that the recent slowdown in the economy isn’t necessarily bad for energy efficiency technology such as the one being developed at Summerhill.

“A lot of people get very creative when their backs are up against the wall,” Lloyd said. “People will be put out of work, but that’s when you see a lot of small businesses begin to start up and inventions being created.”

Another appeal of the micro-powdered fuel system is how much more environmentally friendly and practical it is than other fuels. The combustion process does not release any smoke, odor or toxic air into the atmosphere and it uses resources that are readily available in the environment.

“In addition to being obviously renewable, it can use biomass that is waste,” said James McKnight. “We can use the residue from forest harvests that is ordinarily left in the field, such as cornstalks and straw.”

All fields that are not cultivated to grow food crops will naturally grow trees. These trees create a large amount of biomass that is wasted each year; this new procedure allows the waste to be burned and converted into fuel.

“We can grow our own trees and we can make a ton of tree powder a lot more cheaply than we can buy a hundred gallons of oil,” Kim said. “You drive past thousands of acres of forests in Central New York that nobody’s doing anything with. We can be growing heating oil on it.”

While the main applications of the powder fuel will be for replacing propane in furnaces and heating systems wherever it is used, the developers have gone so far as to run a car on it. Still, the developers hope that they can convert a society that is intent on liquid fuel solutions to powders.

“If you read the federal grants in alternative energies, they always include the word liquid, not solid,” James said. “The mystery that we’ve been struggling with is why hasn’t this been done before. We still haven’t gotten the answer to that.”