This Iowa bioenergy startup is turning almond shells, old wood floors, and grass clippings into aviation fuel

When the floor of the Hilton Coliseum in Ames, Iowa—home to the Iowa State University Cyclones basketball team—was ripped up during a renovation in 2023, some of the historic hardwood was preserved for superfans looking for the ultimate piece of memorabilia. For the trio of Iowa State researchers behind Rise Energy, a startup founded in 2022 and focused on designing more efficient biofuels, the floorboard (as well as the rough particle-board subfloor) was more intriguing to use as feedstock, not just a conversation piece. Rise took some of the used wood and placed it in one of its custom bioreactors, a truck-trailer-size machine that efficiently turns biological waste into useful biofuels, and turned the basketball court into fuel that can work in a diesel engine. It was part marketing stunt, part proof point of how effective the company’s technology is at using just about any biowaste to make fuel. Cofounders Tannon Daugaard, Jordan Funkhouser, and Ryan Smith developed the proprietary technology behind the process. It turns biowaste—from scraps of grass and almond shells to sorted municipal solid waste—into a combination of three by-products: phenolic oil, a liquid that can be used as a fuel source; biochar, a charcoal-like substance that can lock away carbon dioxide in the ground, which serves as a fertilizer; and different sugars that can be further processed into useful by-products. “How can we do things that can be used practically and get them to market? That’s specifically what our team has been focused on for going on two decades now,” Smith said. This process isn’t new; it was developed, and has been refined, at Iowa State over the last decade. What sets Rise and its bioreactor apart is that the process introduces a little air and oxygen into the reaction chamber to create heat. (Other methods use an anaerobic environment without oxygen.) The heat generated by the biowaste is what’s used to help further power the reaction, making it more energy efficient. R