On a quiet lane in Broomfield on the border with Weld County, a barbed-wire-topped fence lined with a green privacy screen surrounds a four-acre research site run by what may be Colorado’s quietest New Energy Economy company.
Sundrop Fuels Inc., which set up shop in nearby Louisville last summer, is testing a theory that uses the sun’s rays to produce fuel, said Andy Minden, director of product management.
But it’s not your typical solar-energy enterprise. Privately held Sundrop is believed to be working on a technology that uses solar energy to “crack” carbon dioxide — breaking the greenhouse gas into its component parts with high heat — that, in theory, could be used to produce motor fuels for cars and trucks.
If the theory is proven to be commercially viable, it might be an answer to America’s energy needs for years to come and maybe even help solve global-warming concerns.
But the company isn’t saying much of anything right now. Minden politely declined to answer questions about what’s going on behind the green fence, saying only that its site is expected to be “operational” by the end of July.
Even scientists in the hydrogen program at Golden’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) don’t know much.
“The company has kept a tight lid on its technology this far, and we have not been given access to the technical details of their approach,” NREL spokesman Joe Verrengia said.
Here’s what is known:
The notion of cracking carbon dioxide isn’t new — nor is the potential of using carbon dioxide to create fuel. It hasn’t been pursued much because burning fossil fuels to reach the high temperatures would add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the process would absorb. That’s why scientists have wondered aloud in scientific journals whether some alternative energy source, such as solar, might be used instead.
Sundrop’s research on Lowell Lane in Broomfield, where the company has a 30-month lease, uses an array of moveable mirrors, capable of tracking the sun’s rays, to concentrate them on a 60-foot tower on the south side of the research site’s field.
What’s actually happening inside the tower isn’t known. Minden allows this much: “It’s using a concentrating solar power to make fuel.”
There are some big players connected to the mysterious company. There are links between Sundrop and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which is a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture-capital firm involved with clean-tech companies, and sun-tracking technology from a solar company that’s backed by Google.
But Sundrop’s roots lie in a small New Mexico company called Los Alamos Renewable Energy LLC.
One of its founders, Reed Jensen, spent more than 30 years at the federal Los Alamos National Laboratory — where the atomic bomb was developed.
Jensen holds several patents, including one for using the sun to crack carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide has been the bane of the developed world for years. Power plants emit large quantities of the gas that’s blamed for causing the planet’s climate to shift — bringing bone-dry droughts to some areas, horrific storms to others.
Using the gas as a feedstock to help power the world’s economy could not only cut existing carbon-dioxide levels in the air but also avoid new emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
“[The] benefits and advantages of the present invention include the preparation of liquid fuel while removing an important greenhouse gas from the atmosphere,” according to a March 1998 patent assigned to Jensen that’s titled “Solar reduction of CO2.”
Jensen’s company, Los Alamos Renewable Energy, virtually disappeared from view last year after its CEO, John Stevens — later named CEO of Sundrop — told the New Mexico Business Journal in March 2008 that it was about to land $20 million in new financing. About 90 percent of it was coming from a “very prominent and very highly regarded Silicon Valley-based firm,” a co-investor told the newspaper.
The technology heats carbon dioxide above 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit — high enough to melt steel — to split carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. The carbon monoxide then is combined with water to make hydrogen and other synthetic fuels, the story said.
“Once the carbon monoxide is converted to hydrogen, it can be used as fuel for transportation, or to power a turbine generator to make electricity,” Jensen said. “You can also make methanol and other fuels, because carbon monoxide is the base product for the synthetic fuel industry.”
Today, Los Alamos Renewable Energy’s website says only that it’s been acquired by Sundrop and Solarec Inc., and information about its technology and market deployment would be released to the public “at a later date.”
Sundrop also popped up in a Sept. 30, 2008, press release from Pasadena, Calif.-based eSolar, a solar technology firm that Google backs.
ESolar said it had landed a multimillion-deal to license its sun-tracking technology to “Kleiner Perkins-backed Sundrop Fuels, Inc.”
Asked by a reporter about the press release, Minden simply shook his head and said “no comment.”
“Until we have something to show the world, we’re not saying much, for a variety of reasons,” he said. “We’re keeping it close to the chest.”