 Decades ago, coal mining helped define Northeastern Pennsylvania as an innovative, powerful, and economically strong region; however, today’s generation of thinkers is focusing on sustainable energy and stretching its ideas across the globe.
Jim Abrams, King’s College alumnus and co-founder of EthosGen, a company located at 1124 Memorial Highway, in Dallas, is driven to give people another option when it comes to energy– a concept much easier said than done, especially with the current state of the economy and such dependency on fossil fuels.
EthosGen began in 2005 on a summer afternoon in June, at King’s College. Abrams met with Father Ryan to discuss an idea that he and his father, Bill, were working on that involved helping “the third world.”
“There’s a race going on in the world to create liquid fuels from alternative sources or
living sources. In our case, we use biomass or living plants,” said Abrams.
Many alternative energy markets are located in places such as the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and California, which are far from where their energy source is manufactured. In the Mid West, it’s impossible not to rely on fossil fuels to transport the final product.
“Our philosophy is to create greenhouses that we can put anywhere– the deserts of Arizona, Afghanistan, Northeastern Pennsylvania,” said Abrams.
The greenhouses, also referred to as Controlled Environmental Agriculture (CEAs), will incubate, stabilize, and extract sugar substrates and biomass by-product and in turn will be converted into various bio-fuels. The biomass is scaled to size and product.
“We can use our biomass to create electricity or we can create a sugar substrate directly to make liquid fuel,” said Abrams.
Feedstock can be produced and sugar substrates extracted without any dependency on fossil fuels. EthosGen’s primary goal is to move away from the 65-million-year-old product and focus on the future of alternative energy.
“In our environment, the plant will yield the sugar substrates that we need; we take those sugar substrates and make ethanol or feed it to algae and the algae can make oil fuel such as jet fuel,” said Abrams. “The solids from the process, the residual biomass, can be burned to create heat and electricity.”
The research and innovation behind EthosGen caught the attention of the Department of Defense, which granted the company $1.2 million last year to build a working production facility.
In the next year, EthosGen is deploying its first military system to a military base in Pennsylvania.
“The push is on to create on-site alternative energy, meaning we don’t need a fuel truck going through the front gate at a military base,” said Abrams. “We are finalizing the plans, but I can’t be specific on exactly where it is in the Commonwealth.”
EthosGen is also working on a project in Hawaii, due to the state’s high cost of electricity, as well as a project based in Tucson, Arizona.
“Hawaii is paying 40 cents a kilowatt. Hawaii is a great environment and has a great agricultural history similar to Pennsylvania’s. We feel this is a great place to show our economic value,” said Abrams.
EthosGen consists of four employees in Dallas and six employees working in Tucson. Mark Leffler is Abram’s business partner, a fellow King’s alumnus, and the company’s first angel investor. Mike Finarelli is EthosGen’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO). The company has funded research projects at local universities such as Wilkes University, King’s, the University of Scranton, and Keystone College.
“EthosGen is in a growing phase and we are making really tough decisions for a better future. We continue to forge ahead,” said Abrams.
Abrams is working on a project developing solar-powered cars in Wilkes-Barre. He is currently working with Wilkes-Barre Mayor Tom Leighton on this project and hopes the city of Wilkes-Barre may see its first solar-powered car by April.
“Because energy is a huge commodity and everyone uses it, it’s going to take longer and it’s going to be a longer fight. We really have to think of the full cycle, the circle of life that goes into our energy products- that’s where EthosGen is at,” said Abrams. “We are looking at the larger picture, picking a plant that, at 90 days or 60 days, we can utilize and produce power rather than utilizing a product like natural gas or oil that took 65 million years to create.”
For more information about EthosGen, visit www.EthosGen.com, call (570) 674-5701, or e-mail
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