When the floor of the Hilton Coliseum in Ames, Iowa—home to the Iowa State University Cyclones basketball team—was ripped up during a renovation in 2023, some of the historic hardwood was preserved for superfans looking for the ultimate piece of memorabilia.
For the trio of Iowa State researchers behind Rise Energy, a startup founded in 2022 and focused on designing more efficient biofuels, the floorboard (as well as the rough particle-board subfloor) was more intriguing to use as feedstock, not just a conversation piece.
Rise took some of the used wood and placed it in one of its custom bioreactors, a truck-trailer-size machine that efficiently turns biological waste into useful biofuels, and turned the basketball court into fuel that can work in a diesel engine. It was part marketing stunt, part proof point of how effective the company’s technology is at using just about any biowaste to make fuel.
Cofounders Tannon Daugaard, Jordan Funkhouser, and Ryan Smith developed the proprietary technology behind the process. It turns biowaste—from scraps of grass and almond shells to sorted municipal solid waste—into a combination of three by-products: phenolic oil, a liquid that can be used as a fuel source; biochar, a charcoal-like substance that can lock away carbon dioxide in the ground, which serves as a fertilizer; and different sugars that can be further processed into useful by-products.
“How can we do things that can be used practically and get them to market? That’s specifically what our team has been focused on for going on two decades now,” Smith said.
This process isn’t new; it was developed, and has been refined, at Iowa State over the last decade. What sets Rise and its bioreactor apart is that the process introduces a little air and oxygen into the reaction chamber to create heat. (Other methods use an anaerobic environment without oxygen.) The heat generated by the biowaste is what’s used to help further power the reaction, making it more energy efficient.
Rise Energy’s process also produces more pure fuel and works in a smaller reactor, allowing it to more easily be located near sources of biowaste, like farms or sawmills. That reduction in cost makes it easier to scale and more commercially viable. So far, the company has operated a test reactor for a nearby private seed company, Stine Seed, but the team is looking to build out a larger series of modular reactors.
In effect, Rise’s technology rapidly takes the usual glacial natural process of turning plant matter into fuel and accelerates it into a technological transformation that takes mere minutes. The end result (after refining) is akin to fossil fuels and can be used in a diesel engine. It simply uses material that would have gone to waste, and due to the production of excess biochar—which locks carbon dioxide in a stable, solid form that can secure it in the ground for centuries—also helps sequester significant amounts of carbon.
“This uses material that’s being wasted or landfilled or underutilized, and can be acquired at very low cost or nothing,” Funkhouser said. “It really blows open the market.”
Unlike the production of other biofuels, such as ethanol, which is typically made from corn and needs to be mixed with a significant amount of gasoline, the Rise process is feedstock agnostic, meaning most any biowaste will work, and it doesn’t require further blending with other fuels to make it usable.
Until recently, the startup had just been funded through local accelerators and university awards; the three founders are currently the only employees. But in February, the company won $340,000 from the DARPA Embedded Entrepreneur Initiative. The national defense R&D lab sees promise in Rise’s technology, believing it could help make bases and military installations more resilient by giving them another alternative fuel source from waste.
The Rise team hopes the company will eventually be able to mass-produce reactors that can hold 250 tons of waste at a time, and create the precursors to make biofuels for jets, among other things. Another helpful aspect of the Rise method is that it can process out pollutants like PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and microplastics, two emerging health threats that are very tricky to sequester.
The end result, as one can imagine, does not have a very pleasant odor. Some of the by-product has been compared to liquid smoke. But for the startup, it’s the smell of success.