a public-private corporation for economic development, has awarded a Biomass Commercialization Award to Packer Engineering of Naperville, IL, a diversified, multidiscipline, full service engineering firm.

Growth Dimensions encourages economic development through investment in research and

commercialization projects. The organization has the authority from the US Department of

Energy to award funds for projects that lead to marketable biomass products or processes. The

Commercialization Awards program focuses both on strategic technology development and on

commercialization.

“Our goal is to create the dual benefit of energy driven biomass product platforms through

generating a critical mass of projects that flow through our region that can be commercialized

and manufactured here,” says Mark Williams, Growth Dimensions executive director. Growth

Dimensions was recently recognized by the International Economic Development Council for

the organization’s sustainable and green initiatives. Packer Engineering is developing a gasifier which uses biomass waste to generate electricity and produce heat. Packer will use the $80,000 Biomass Commercialization Award to build a prototype of the gasifier and test out the design.

The project has two components: efficiently converting crop waste into gaseous fuel and then

producing electricity and using that electricity to produce fertilizer. Packer is working with NOvations of Savannah, IL and Northern Illinois University on the project. The three are the corecipients of a $1 million US Department of Agriculture grant for research efforts that relate to

this project.

says Packer Engineering Senior Director Peter Schubert, Ph.D. “Our founder challenged us to

see what we could do to advance that research to help farmers. We started applying our methods

of vaporizing materials on the moon to vaporizing materials on the farm to extract gases to make

electricity and heat.”

There about 2 million farms across the US. Packer is designing a system that will be safe,

reliable, and that a farm hand can run. The input is crop waste; the output is electricity plus heat

which can be used on the farm, sold back into the power grid through net metering, or used to

produce fertilizer.

“We’ve been very aggressive in pursuing the total solution with the farmer,” Schubert says. “We

are visiting equipment manufacturers and farmers to find out how can the farmer do the best job

of gathering the biomass from field, storing it, and chopping it up properly. Our design intent is

to make a device that the farmer can start up in about an hour and a half in the morning and it

will run for 22 hours unattended.”

Packer expects to have the gasifier prototype up and running in March and anticipates that by

summer they will have enough information from the prototype to construct a business plan and

model to take the next steps toward commercialization. “Our goal is to increase jobs and revenue

in the Belvidere-Rockford area by eventually doing manufacturing there,” Schubert says.

“At Packer Engineering we are passionate about alternative energy research,” Schubert says.

“The gasifer is one of several initiatives we are working on. We have five patents and are

working with Argonne National Labs on storing hydrogen on a vehicle. We are researching

electrical generation using space solar power—putting solar panels in orbit and beaming energy

with low density radio waves back to the earth.”

Growth Dimensions provides the Biomass Commercialization Awards through a competitive,

will have non-federal government matching funds equal to $1.60 for every $1 of award granted.