Published August 12, 2024
By Christine Reed
The Center for Carbon Capture and Conversion (CCCC) in the School of Energy Resources is pleased to announce the addition of Mark Behrens to the carbon engineering team as the new Program Manager for technology scale-up.
Having previously worked with the CCCC as a contractor, Behrens has proven himself to be a vital part of the research center dedicated to the growth and commercialization of the coal processing technologies under development.
Behrens enjoyed a tremendously successful career working in project development engineering, manufacturing engineering and product commercialization, and brings a wealth of experience and specialized expertise to SER.
Hailing from St. Paul, Minn., Behrens attended Trinity Western College and earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware. He went on to embark on an international career with the company 3M, spanning decades and continents. He worked to move products from the laboratory, through the research phase toward the manufacturing scale-up in over a dozen 3M plants located in South America, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Asia, Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.
He was directly involved in the successful development and commercialization of household and industrial products such as carbon black window tint film, retroreflective sheeting used in signage, porous films, and hook and loop fasteners which are used regularly in healthcare transportation industries.
“A large part of what I do is to make sure a product can be commercialized, and then make sure that it remains commercially viable,” says Behrens. “There is a lot that goes into that, including the economics of the product itself, but also streamlining the manufacturing process and ensuring that the product can be produced on a large scale.”
Behrens explains that there are lot of different challenges associated with moving a project from lab scale to pilot plant, to field demonstration, considering many interacting variables to control and optimize when something is being produced at a 100-times larger scale.
“In process development we are trying to make sure the residence time is similar, and that the shear stresses on the particles are similar on the larger scale,” he says. “This means we are constantly making adjustments to factors such as temperatures to hit the reaction rates needed without creating negative byproducts.”
In his new position at SER, Behrens will be applying his scale-up expertise to the coal solvent extraction process which produces the feedstock necessary to develop downstream products like coal-derived asphalt and coal-derived polymers.
“I cannot even begin to express how fortunate we are to have someone like Mark working for us,” says Trina Igelsrud-Pfeiffer, director of the CCCC. “What he is capable of doing will be instrumental in the success of our entire carbon engineering initiative, and we are so grateful that he moved his family to Wyoming to lead this massive endeavor.”
Currently, the solvent extraction technology is in the pilot plant phase and located in the University of Wyoming’s Lutz Building in Laramie. Following the approval of an exception funding request to the Wyoming Legislature, planning is underway to start to designing the field demonstration in Gillette, Wyo. later this fall, which will be housed in the Wyoming Innovation Center.
“I am really happy to be at SER,” says Behrens. “I wasn’t ready to retire and there is a lot of important and interesting work here and fun people to work with. Furthermore, I really believe in what we are trying to accomplish. If we are not going to burn coal, then let us find another use for it. I want to be a part of helping people keep jobs and to create new ones in Wyoming.”
