Seeing leading edge technology with the potential to disrupt the existing way of doing things can thrill anyone, from railway executives to newspaper columnists.
I believe we are on the cusp of several new energy and biological technologies that will over the coming decades change many aspects of our lives and livelihoods, including agriculture.
One such technology is hydrogen as a fuel of the future and another is precision bio fermentation as way to make a range of things, from fertilizer to food, cosmetics to pharmaceuticals to textiles.
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One tiny chapter in the expanding hydrogen story is Canadian Pacific Railway’s testing of hydrogen fuel cell propelled locomotives, which hold the potential for railways to run without the need to burn diesel or create greenhouse gases.
CP ran a test of its experimental hydrogen-powered locomotive pulling a load of rail cars on a main line last month in Alberta.
CP chief executive officer Keith Creel described his reaction to the test in a speech at the RailTrends conference in New York Nov. 15.
“… it made the hairs on my arm stand up because I would have told you two years ago it’s a pipe dream…. Well, it’s not a pipe dream. It’s a reality. Still a lot of work left to do, but it’s super, super exciting,” he said, as quoted in Trains Magazine.
By the end of the year, CP expects to be running three test locomotives. To fuel them, it has contracted with ATCO to install hydrogen-making equipment in Calgary and Edmonton. The Calgary unit will use electrolysis technology and will draw some electricity from CP’s existing five-megawatt solar power facility.
If the experiments prove a success, the company would need to scale up to a larger test and if that proved successful it would need to work with locomotive manufacturers to roll out a new fleet and also create a hydrogen fuelling network.
That would likely take more than a decade if the company decides to go that direction.
Likely the company is also hoping hydrogen production will increase in the coming years and its cost will fall.
This rail project is one step in a global investigation by many companies and governments into how hydrogen can displace petroleum and coal in heavy haul transportation and ocean shipping, as well as in steel, cement and fertilizer production.
I’ve written before how the new interest in hydrogen, and in ammonia, which is an ideal carrier of hydrogen, has captured the interest of multinational fertilizer manufacturers, which have a wealth of history, know-how and infrastructure dedicated to making ammonia as part of the nitrogen fertilizer making process.
But in another case of potentially disruptive technology development, a handful of start-up companies are looking at how they can harness soil microbes to make nitrogen for crops instead of using industrial processes.
One of the higher profile companies is Pivot Bio, started 11 years ago by former University of California researchers who mapped the genome of microbes that can take nitrogen from the air and fix it where it is available to the roots of cereals and oilseeds.
Prairie farmers know well nitrogen-fixing microbes associated with pulse crops, but finding microbes that do the same thing with cereal crops has been like the search for the holy grail.
The researchers genetically modified the microbes to make them super-efficient. Then, through precision fermentation, they grow mega billions of the microbes in vats, much like brewers do with yeast.
The microbes are sprayed on fields and the company says they feed the crop plants over several months of the growing season without the drawbacks of runoff, leaching and volatilization. This would address concerns about fertilizer being a source of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.
The company’s products have been available in small quantities in the United States since 2019 and this summer it started business operations in Canada, including doing investigations into how the products will work on spring wheat and canola.
Pivot Bio has captured the interest of American venture capitalists, allowing it to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for refinement of the technology and its commercial roll out.
The company is aware that it will likely have to tailor its microbes to work in specific geographies because of differences in climate and crops.
Again, this technology is in its infancy and although logging some success, it has yet to prove itself at scale, but the potential benefits are exciting.
And Pivot Bio is not alone in the pursuit of biofertilizers and stimulants. Other startups attracting significant investor interest include Kula Bio, but also long-established bio product players such as Novozymes and traditional fertilizer makers such as Mosaic and Nutrien, which are increasing their research funding into this field.
