A new age of fuel is budding, bubbling and brewing in local lab beakers, garages and orange groves, promising to break up the nation's love affair with foreign oil.
Florida, with its sunny climate, and the Space Coast, with its science savvy, stand poised to become key players, helping to shift the balance of energy power away from hostile and terrorism-funding nations.
"We have no fossil fuel natural resources in Florida, but we have biomass and sun," said James Fenton, director of the Florida Solar Energy Center. "We have a port. We have a work force that's probably the most educated in the entire state of Florida."
This bioenergy revolution is cropping up in unexpected places.
In the garage of a remote house off Grant Road, scientists with Florida Syngas LLC use temperatures hot enough to nearly melt metal to transform waste glycerol from hog and chicken fat into energy.
In glowing green tubes and in tanks at a former Fellsmere greenhouse operation, chemical engineers at PetroAlgae prod microalgae to grow 1,000 times faster than in nature, yielding a thick oil for biodiesel.
And in old citrus fields northwest of Sebastian, Global Renewable Energy harvests a sweet sorghum it says nets three times the energy as ethanol from corn.
"It's like we've just discovered the steam engine," said Florida Syngas' Larry Bell of his company's patented process for deriving methanol from glycerol waste.
Much of the science behind biofuels spawned from NASA and other government research programs launched to combat the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' 1973 oil embargo.
The spike in oil prices last year renewed interest in alternative fuels.
But the prospects for biofuel startups, such as those in Brevard and Sebastian, could depend on how long the recent return to cheap oil lasts.
Glycerol to the rescue
Past John Sessa's restored World War II-era Harley in the garage of his Grant-Valkaria home laboratory, smoke billows from a cylindrical reactor that the electrical engineer built.
The reactor, about the size of a scuba tank, pumps in glycerol from a beaker at the rate of a gallon per hour.
Inside, a plasma arc heats the glycerol to about 970 degrees Celsius, ripping apart the molecule and reforming it into a gas of mostly hydrogen and carbon monoxide — the raw materials of biodiesel. The resulting synthesis or "syn" gas then can be converted into other clean liquid fuels, such as methanol, which can be converted into biodiesel.
Florida Syngas traces its origins to a talk that Polish chemist Albin Serginchowski gave in spring 2006 at a scientific conference in Long Beach, Calif. Serginchowski's presentation drew Sessa, an electrical engineer, to the edge of his seat when Serginchowski said that all one needed for the process could be found at Home Depot.
Not entirely: Sessa had to visit eBay, too.
The two joined forces in August 2007. They chose waste glycerol as their feedstock, anticipating an exponential rise in the material as biodiesel ramps up worldwide. Unlike in ethanol production, which relies predominantly on corn and sugar, their process requires no food crops.
The thick, sweet colorless liquid resembles corn syrup and is used to make toothpaste, soap, candy and shampoo.
But there's much more of it than there is a demand for it. Biodiesel plants wind up with 10 percent glycerol left over when they make fuel, so Florida Syngas plans to sell them reactors to power their plants.
"It closes the loop on sustainability in the biodiesel process," Sessa said. "It comes back full circle. We can make all of the electrical energy they need."
Their process can transform any plant waste to fuel or even fat, grease and french fry oil.
They hope to attract investors to move their revolution beyond Sessa's garage. In 2008, the company got a $4,000 state grant for research and has applied for $75,000 from the state this year for equipment.
Promising algae
About a dozen miles southwest of Sessa's garage, at a former greenhouse operation in Fellsmere, a light green brew that resembles pea soup bubbles up in long, thin vertical plastic tubes.
The tubes, or bioreactors, span about 40 feet in length.
"This is where we grow our babies," said Fred Tennant, vice president of business development for PetroAlgae.
Their goal: 6,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre per year, making their algae competitive with other biofuel feedstocks.
Pumped-in bubbles of carbon dioxide and a specific cocktail of nutrients feed the algae. And large white paddle wheels spin like old Mississippi riverboats to keep the algae on the surface, where it grows faster.
Their plan is not so much to sell the algae, but to sell their production technology system. They breed algae to maximize growth rate and oil content, which can range from 20 percent to 50 percent. The oil then can be made into biodiesel.
Basing their operation in Fellsmere, which is in Indian River County, made sense: fewer freezes, plenty of sun. And the company could tap NASA technology at Kennedy Space Center.
The Melbourne-based company leases environmental simulation chambers at the space center. NASA built the simulators to study how a future station on Mars might grow lettuce and other food.
The metal closet-like chambers allow PetroAlgae to control temperature and other factors to study ideal conditions for algae growth.
"People tease us because everybody in the world is trying to kill algae," Tennant said.
The company was started in 2006 with private funds from XL TechGroup Inc. of Melbourne.
In September, Laurus Valens, a private hedge fund in New York City, acquired most of PetroAlgae's stock from XL.
On Dec. 24, PetroAlgae announced that it had raised $10 million through the sale of about 3.2 million in newly issued shares of common stock to two existing investors.
'Camel of crops'
Global Renewable Energy in Sebastian is betting on sweet sorghum, dubbed "the camel of crops" because it grows in arid soils and can withstand prolonged drought.
The company's founders aim to someday grow 8,000 to 10,000 acres of sweet sorghum and build an ethanol distillery.
In March, they planted a 10-acre test crop in an old citrus grove. They also have harvested 70 acres near the St. Lucie County border off Florida's Turnpike.
"Ethanol isn't the silver bullet; it's just part of the solution," said Ray Coniglio, the company president and former vice mayor of Sebastian. "It's just going to take time."
Global Renewable Energy has applied for an $800,000 to $1 million grant for equipment through the state's Farm to Fuel program.
A green bubble?
Such local "green collar" entrepreneurs said the time is ripe for biofuel and other alternative energy startups.
Gov. Charlie Christ has pledged that 20 percent of the state's energy would come from alternative sources such as biomass by 2020.
And at a July conference in Orlando, he said the state's sunny climate could make it "the Silicon Valley of green."
In 2008, the state Legislature allocated $15 million for matching grants for demonstration, commercialization and research and development projects related to renewable energy technologies.
Even many local governments got into the act, converting their fleets of cars to biodiesel.
But some consider alternative energy to be over-hyped. In a February article in Harper's Magazine, investor Eric Janszen dubbed it the next big bubble, already showing similar frenzied patterns as the dot-com and housing bubbles.
The economics were there six months ago when oil peaked at $147 a barrel, said Frank Leslie, an adjunct professor who studies renewable energy at Florida Tech's Department of Marine and Environmental Systems.
But with a barrel of oil now at about $46, "suddenly, it changes their economic balance sheets," he said.
James Fenton, director of the Florida Solar Energy Center in Cocoa, remains optimistic.
"I hope these folks are successful," he said. "I want to keep all our money in our state. This idea of keeping your own wealth in your own area is a foreign concept to some people."
