Ulrich’s son, Brad, who is the director of technology at MOR Technology, says that even though MOR team members have diverse backgrounds, one thing each share in common is that they’ve all been successful in their particular ventures. This combination of varying expertise has resulted in the development of a fractionation system that produces coproducts that are considerably more valuable than those of traditional fractionation systems, the company says.
Pieces of the Puzzle
Jones, whose background is in microbiology, participated in a host of early, cutting-edge research in the ethanol industry, Brad Ulrich says. He was a lead researcher for Southeastern Illinois College’s Ethanol Production Program, where he led plant operations and training and performed research on carbon dioxide utilization, feed byproduct improvements and algae growth research.
Years after founding Dippin’ Dots, a $50 million company, Jones had become less involved in the daily operation of the ice cream business and desired to once again work in the ethanol industry, which had gained a lot of momentum since his departure. “He had done early work in cellulosic ethanol and algae research, so he understood the broad possibilities for renewable fuels,” Ulrich says. “One of the things he was frustrated with is that, after working on a number of research projects in the 1980s, he hadn’t observed much change in process technology in the 20 years since he left the industry.”
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The initial observation Jones made was that ethanol plants can be more efficient than they are right now, Ulrich says. “At the time, we had been working on developing a project in southern Illinois,” he says. “One of my main jobs was to develop and select second-generation technologies for that plant, and it was during that project that we became familiar with SEMO Milling and Dan Claycamp, one of the leading corn milling engineers and scientists in the country.”
Claycamp has designed and operated a wide range of milling systems and equipment with a focus on corn milling. He is the designer and contractor for the newest food-grade corn mill in the country, SEMO Milling in southeast Missouri, with which he developed the concept for a unique fractionation technology.
“As we got to know them, we became very impressed with what they were doing and became familiar with the relationship they had with Rodger Marentis, a Pennsylvanian who developed a supercritical oil extraction technology,” Ulrich says. “All of that, over the course of the next couple of years, led to the formation of MOR Technology and MOR Supercriticial, to take both the fractionation technology and the oil extraction technology to not just the corn-based ethanol industry, but broader—the oilseeds and renewable fuels industries as well.”
Distinctly Different
MOR Technology sees itself as significantly different from any other fractionation offering out there, Ulrich says. “The biggest differentiating factor is a germ wet-mlling technology, where we take the germ produced from the dry fractionation process and perform an additional wet milling step on it,” he says. “At the end of the day, it gives you product quality and yield that you would typically see with a wet mill, but with the capital and operating costs of a dry mill.” That’s because the wet milling step is performed on a smaller scale for only a short period of a time, making it cheaper to operate and build, Ulrich says. “I think other people who have approached fractionation—not particularly designed for the ethanol industry—have approached it based too much on traditional food-grade corn milling applications,” he says. “That’s why you see systems with so much starch loss.”
Compared with other types of fractionation systems, most of MOR Technology’s equipment is the same but the process and the way the equipment is arranged is set up differently, Ulrich points out. “That is the most important factor in an ethanol-specific fractionation system,” he says.
MOR Technology doesn’t source all of its system components from the same provider, which is also a common practice. “From his experience in the corn milling industry, Dan has operated just about every type of equipment out there, and he understands that one company may make the best roller mill, while the other makes the best sifter, while another makes the best degerminator and the best bran finisher,” Ulrich says. The process, which is suited for ethanol production, was formulated by finding the best pieces of equipment to perform each specific task, he says. MOR Technology went a step further by designing proprietary modifications to pieces of the milling equipment, and filed for patents on the modifications. “We are operating the equipment significantly differently than it was intended to be used.” Ulrich says. “So that’s a novel aspect, which no one else that we’re familiar with has done.”
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