Ramgen Company History

Ramgen Power Systems, Inc. is a privately held Washington corporation located in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Washington. Shawn Lawlor founded the company in 1992 to engage in the research, development, construction and testing of compressors and engines based upon the high efficiency and the simplicity of ramjet shock wave compression principles. Mr. Lawlor had been exposed to groundbreaking research on ramjet projectiles at the University of Washington, before being employed by Rocketdyne to work on flight ramjet engine designs. In forming Ramgen, Mr. Lawlor believed that harnessing the ramjet principles of compression in a stationary environment could have important and lucrative impact in industrial equipment markets.

Mr. Lawlor founded Ramgen to work full-time on the development of stationary ramjet technologies. Six months later, he filed his first patent which began a five-year effort to design the first proof-of-concept test rig. Douglas Jewett became an investor and a member of the Board in early 1998 and soon thereafter assumed the role of President and CEO, providing general management and overseeing capital formation and business development activities.

The stationary application of the ramjet technology was successfully demonstrated for the first time in early 1999 at a test site in Tacoma, Washington. The proof-of-concept test “rig” was in fact, an integrated, pre-prototype Ramgen 10MW Engine designed for electric power generation. The design and test results attracted considerable attention from the DoE, which then sent scientific teams to assess the technology and the test results. The scientists’ consistently positive assessments have since led the DoE to become a critical partner for Ramgen, both in terms of technical assistance and as a non-dilutive source of funding.

This pre-prototype Ramgen Engine operated through early 2001, by which time the Company had secured enough data to support the further development of its technology. The Company was poised to raise additional capital in the spring of 2001 to complete prototypes as the next step towards commercial engine development, and it engaged Credit Suisse First Boston to conduct a private equity round of financing.

The capital requirements for this next step were projected to be in excess of $30 million. This high level of funding was needed to overcome the challenges of operating a Ramgen engine with the compression, combustion and nozzle elements of a gas turbine fully integrated on the rotating disk. The collapse of the private and public new energy sector equity markets in the summer and fall of 2001 effectively prevented the Company from securing the funding it required under the plan it was then pursuing. In early 2002, Ramgen began re-evaluating its options for commercializing its technologies in light of the harsh realities of the financial markets.

This process was accelerated in April 2002 when the DoE sponsored a formal Design Review that included Company, DoE, NASA and DoD scientists. This design review team confirmed the scientific validity of the Ramgen technology and developed an approach in which essential components of the overall technology were to be systematically completed in staged development phases. The shock wave-based compressor technology and the advanced vortex combustion “AVC” technology were identified as the first two priorities.

It was agreed that the first and most logical step was to concentrate on the compressor development. It was universally recognized that the advantages and value of Ramgen’s technology could be achieved at a fraction of the investment capital, in a shorter time period, and with considerably less technical risk, by developing a compressor technology that could be operated as a stand-alone product or inserted as component in larger and more highly integrated gas turbine and compressor designs. This commercialization path would take full advantage of the basic efficiency improvements achieved through ramjet shock wave compression, without necessitating near-term development of the completely integrated, Ramgen Engine fully suitable for electric power generation.

The Company successfully pursued and was awarded DoE support for an air compression technology development. The DoE went one step further by introducing the Company to the DoD for application of the compression technology into a Fuel Cell Hybrid cycle. As with any energy producing cycle involving compression, a more efficient compressor makes for a more efficient overall cycle. In recognition of the efficiency potential for Fuel Cell Hybrids specifically and energy cycles in general, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratories granted the Company a multi-year award to apply its core technology to a Fuel Cell Hybrid system.

One of the most progressive projects sponsored by the DOE is the FutureGen project. The principle goal of FutureGen is to develop a new generation coal-fired power plants that have zero pollution emissions including CO2, the recognized Green House Gas. To support that effort, the department published a solicitation for a high efficiency CO2 compressor for carbon dioxide sequestration in 2005.

The DoE recognized the unique potential of the Ramgen compression technology to address the two critical impediments to the full scale deployment of Carbon Capture & Storage systems; capital cost and operating cost penalties, and their combined effect on their cost of electricity goal. The Company was awarded an $11 million contract to develop a CO2 compressor demonstration project by the end of 2010.

The Company was also successful in proposing and winning a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Program Authorization, better known as DARPA, for the development of a new, compact and high efficiency gas turbine engine for military vehicles and systems. The first DARPA award was intended to demonstrate the potential of the technology. Successful performance during the seedling phase could lead to the proposed full engine development contract.

All of the recent interest in application development, however interesting, is still dependent on the continued successful demonstration of the core compression, combustion and expander technologies.
Ramgen is now ready to raise an additional $2 million in capital to accelerate its Rampressor and Ramgen Turbine development efforts and match the government investment of $6 million expected through the end of FY 2005. Ideally, Ramgen would prefer an institutional investor that can bring access to key suppliers or customers in the global compressor, turbine and fuel cell marketplaces.