As part of this year’s Global Entrepreneurship Week, the Cleantech Open hosted its annual Global Forum in San Jose to showcase promising cleantech startups and provide seed funding and support to the winners. The competition began earlier in the year with regional contests for 120 semifinalists and wrapped up with 21 finalists presenting at the Global Forum this past week. Over the course of two days the companies delivered 15 minute pitches to the judges, as well as 3 minute tech demos, 1 minute elevator pitches and expo booths.

Atmosphere Recovery took home the National Grand Prize of $250,000, besting other category winners; Indow Windows, PK Clean, Whole Trees Structure and GridMobility. Atmosphere Recovery impressed the judges with its laser-based gas analyzer system that improves the efficiency of manufacturing processes. The company already has a solid list of customers and boasts impressive savings, with claims to enhance heat treating facilities’ bottom line profits by 25% or more. Indow Windows, a manufacturer of energy saving window inserts, took home the National Sustainability prize and Biofiltro, a Chilean developer of a wastewater treatment process using microorganisms and worms, won the Global Ideas prize.

After hearing all the pitches, my particular favorites were two waste-to-fuel companies, PK Clean and Kiverdi. Both are developing processes to convert waste products into crude oil and petroleum-based chemicals. Kiverdi’s process takes waste from landfills and wood, agricultural and food processing and uses gas-consuming microbes and syngas bioconversion to produce oil. The process involves low temperatures and pressures and has less than half the capex requirements of chemical catalysts, according to Kiverdi. The company is focusing initially on producing fatty alcohol for consumer products, but claims its technology could eventually be used to produce everything from bio-plastics to jet fuel.

Like Kiverdi, PK Clean is converting trash to oil using a catalytic depolymerization process. The company has a 20 ton per day pilot facility in India and plans to reach the commercialization stage by 2013. Both companies made convincing pitches during the Cleantech Open, but PK Clean’s pilot facility and later-stage development appeared to give it the edge in the “Air, Water and Waste” competition, which it won. Both technologies seem to require high oil prices in order to be competitive, although PK Clean’s CEO Priyanka Bakaya addressed this in her presentation and claimed that the process would still be profitable with oil prices around $35 a barrel. Despite facing major obstacles to scale up this process and to compete with the mammoth oil industry, both PK Clean and Kiverdi appear to have promising technology and skilled management teams (and both boast female CEOs, a rarity Kate mentioned in her blog post last week).

Agilyx is further along in developing a similar waste-to-fuel process using heat and pressure to produce synthetic crude oil. The company is operating a pilot project and has produced and shipped over 120,000 gallons of oil. Last spring Agilyx presented at the Entrepreneur Showcase at the 2011 San Francisco Cleantech Forum shortly after completing a $22 million Series B financing round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. If you are a cleantech startup looking for similar visibility and potential funding, we are currently accepting applications for the next year’s Entrepreneur Showcase, an opportunity to tell your story to top investors and industry leaders at the 2012 Cleantech Forum San Francisco.

Finally, we are celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week by offering a free conference pass to our March 2012 Cleantech Forum San Francisco with the purchase of a new i3 research subscription purchased through November 30. Contact us today for pricing, to see a demo and to view your profile.