On May 19, 2022 the Department of Energy announced the winners of the Phase I Release 2 SBIR/STTR winners, CF Tech has been awarded a grant to conduct research and development of an innovative supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) process to extract and purify rare earth elements from Florida's phosphate mining waste streams!
CF Tech has been using scCO2 for decades to replace hazardous and expensive chemicals in process operations. This extraction process aims to open a new pathway for access to valuable critical materials - which are in desperate need.
The CF Tech team will be partnering with industry leader and expert, Dr. Patrick Zhang and the Florida Polytechnic University's FIPR. Finding value in waste streams is something that CF Tech is very good at, whether it's biodiesel or astaxanthin, we're finding ways to find, separate, purify and produce the good parts!  
The Department of Energy release quoted U.S. Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm "Tackling the climate crisis and securing America’s economic competitiveness will require the full scope of American enterprise, especially the small businesses that are propelling clean energy advances. These projects will not only unlock a range of equitable climate solutions, but also create good-paying jobs, lower costs, and forge a better future for underprivileged American families and communities."
CF Tech is so proud to be included amongst the awardees! In parallel with this grant, CF Tech will look at a variety of streams from mining to recycling to pursue domestic, economical methods of rare earth element collection and production.

Yesterday, the Department of Energy released their list of SBIR/STTR Phase II award winners, CF Tech was selected to continue their development of ASTM biodiesel! CF Tech is honored to be on this short list of winner and wishes the best to all of the other award winners.

The list of EERE winners can be found on the Energy.gov website here:
https://energy.gov/eere/technology-to-market/downloads/fy-2017-sbirsttr-phase-ii-release-2-award-selections

In this program, CF Tech will work with a Federal Laboratory and WRR to turn waste water treatment plant and consolidation plant "brown grease", trust me, it's some nasty stuff, into ASTM certified B100. Additional research is on-going and we plan to be providing commercial scale systems to waste water treatment plants and consolidation facilities all across the country within a few years, stay tuned for more info!

Two of our current CO2 extraction projects are for the neutracuetical and fragrance industries.  Trust me, the fragrance experiments smell much better!  Although both used our go-to bench scale R&D system, the experimental programs were night and day.  One of the experiments, we ran at high temperatures, 180C and high pressure, 15000psi; the second experimental program started off with high temps and high pressure, but as the testing matrix was expanded, we found, through sensory and visual testing that the preferred operating conditions was a liquid CO2, about 1200psi with the feedstock extraction vessel maintaining temperatures below 105F!  CO2 extraction of natural feedstocks has so much variety and potential to extract differing compounds, oils, and value items...only tests will tell!