This article was written by the IP & I Team of EIT InnoEnergy.
The case of Phoenix BioPower is a good example of innovation and a successful business strategy in which intellectual property has played a key role, protecting an innovative technology that was the basis for the creation of a new award-winning company in the field of renewable energy.
Stories of inventors and their inventions: Phoenix BioPower
We all read stories about the innovators of today and how their products or services make a difference. In this series of publications, we shed light on a side that often remains in the dark and unknown to the public: their patented inventions and the impact they have had on other innovators in society. We did the research and summarised our findings.
Bioenergy is a form of renewable energy that is derived from organic materials known as biomass. Biopower technologies convert renewable biomass fuels into heat and electricity using processes such as burning, bacterial decay or conversion to a gas or liquid fuel.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Henrik Båge, inventor Hans-Erik Hansson and CTO Michael Bartlet, Phoenix BioPower is involved in the development of a scalable technology called Biomass-fired TopCycle (BTC) – a high-pressure integrated process and plant to convert biomass to power. By gasifying the biomass through the combination of a high-pressure gas turbine process and massive steam injection, this process results in the highly efficient conversion of biomass to energy.
The technology is based on the inventions of Hans-Erik Hansson and involves the utilisation of waste streams, primarily from the forest and agriculture industries. This includes wood chips, tree branches, straw, corn stover, husks and inshells. With the advantage of not being weather dependent, this technology provides a stable, dependable, and cost-effective source of renewable energy. This prolific inventor has published more than 30 patents.
In contrast to traditional biopower which involves a steam cycle where biomass is merely combusted and passed through a steam turbine generating about 30% electrical efficiency, in the BTC process, the biomass is pressurised and heated up to 900 degrees, breaking apart the molecules to form gas, which is in turn fed into a gas turbine – along with steam – driving the generator to produce electricity. This technology produces power from biomass twice as efficiently as traditional steam cycle technologies, with only half as much biomass being used per unit of electricity produced and at almost half the operating costs. Additionally, the heat generated as a by-product of this process can be used for industrial and commercial purposes, thus providing a replacement for fossil energy which is currently used for the same. The process also results in the production of bio-coal – a carbon-neutral fuel that can replace fossil coal in industrial processes.
Together with its plannable production capacity and overall efficiencies, the BTC process and plant aims to change how renewable power is produced in the future, making it more efficient, scalable and dependable. In June 2019, Phoenix BioPower was selected as a top-100 Global Solution company at the 4th Mission Innovation Ministerial meeting in Vancouver, Canada, where each of the 100 solutions was selected for having a climate mitigation potential of more than 10 megatonnes of CO2 or having strategic importance for 1.5°C-compatible strategies. They have also partnered with the Drax Group to explore ways of driving down the costs of second-generation bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technology.
The company has been able to build significant value during the course of their development so far through having secured their core intellectual assets. They filed their first patent in 2003 and since then have built a portfolio of seven patent families that are currently live and can be found publicly. The company also possesses a high level of know-how gained from various R&D projects and the years of expertise of the founders and other personnel in this field of technology.
The transfer of intellectual property rights (IPR) from one of the founders, Hans-Erik Hansson, to Phoenix BioPower demonstrates the critical role of intellectual property in the life cycle of companies and shows how the use of IPR based on a defensive approach can change and become a mechanism that enables companies to transfer technology and enter into collaborative agreements.
SOURCES
The IP & I team at EIT InnoEnergy specialises in combining public sources and state of the art research tools, to provide innovative member companies with business intelligence. Although this venture is supported by EIT InnoEnergy, in this case only the following sources were used:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/bioenergy-basics