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Eric Fitch Paper

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INTRODUCTION

Eric Fitch, alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is no stranger to new ideas and technology-centered ventures, having fifteen years of past experience in fields such as biotech, healthcare, smart materials and others (IdeaMensch, 2011). His latest company allies this entrepreneurial spirit with another of his passions, beer, for the creation of PurposeEnergy, a way to reuse the waste in the production of the beer to create energy and other sub products. This report describes the background of Eric Fitch, and the process of the creation of PurposeEnergy, as well as detailed view on how it works and the future developments. The sources of this information are PurposeEnergy's website, and articles from TechnologyReview, …show more content…

With that, he chose Magic Hat, in Burlington. The company was funded mostly by angel investors. Because of his connections to the MIT, specially to the Phi Alpha foundation, a group of alumni from the institution, he was able to get most of his initial funds (Luttrel, 2012). Additionally, for the first plant in Burlington he also got a $850,000.00 loan from the Vermont Clean Energy Development Fund (Noblet, 2010).

PRODUCT

The sole product on PurposeEnergy is the Tribid Bioreactor. It is a structure that uses the Biphase Orbicular Biodigester to process organic waste stream and use it to generate biogas (Morris, 2010). This energy will then be resold to the brewery in below-market price rates (Noblet, 2010). Even more, it also treats the water, removing up to 99% of the impurities (Luttrel, 2012). …show more content…

The combined reduction of the costs regarding water, which is about 80% reused, wastewater surcharges and lower energy costs (Boston CityBizList, 2015) can mean an economy of up to $2 per barrel produced (CBS News, 2011). Considering that the most likely targets are medium-sized breweries, as the largest ones have their own systems, this reduction is very significant. This is not counting the significant environmental gains.

MAGIC HAT

The first successfully implanted plant was in Burlington to consume the waste from the Magic Hat brewery. The land, owned by Magic Hat, was leased for only $1. This plant will be able to generate up to 2 billion BTU (Noblet, 2010), can store up to 460,000 gallons of waste and generate 100 cubic feet of gas per minute (Boston CityBizList, 2015).

DOGFISH

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