More uses for biofuel byproducts on the way

Researchers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists nation-wide are looking for potential uses for the byproducts from large scale biofuel production. Researchers hope to achieve an industry similar to the traditional oil refinery industry where as the raw material is processed, a multitude of products are produced in addition to the primary product (fuel). Researchers believe that as more value is obtained from these byproducts, the economic viability of biofuels such as ethanol will increase.

One company, Purevision, is working on a way to convert lignin so that it can be used in glues, sealants, and detergents. “Most plans for cellulosic ethanol processing call for burning the lignin to generate steam and heat to run the process. As a fuel, lignin is worth around $40 a ton. PureVision has devised a way to make a different form of lignin–one with a molecular composition that could make it an attractive material for a variety of industrial products like glues, sealants and detergents. Ed Lehrburger, PureVision’s founder and chief executive, said he thought his lignin could sell for $300 a ton or more. Lehrburger said his company was collaborating with a wood and paper products manufacturer that is interested in using the lignin for a biobased glue for its laminates, plywoods and other products.

Lignin makes up roughly 25% of the total mass of most plants.  Suppose that by 2017 we achieve Bush’s goal of 35 billion gallons of ethanol per year.  Since many experts put the maximum corn ethanol production for the US at around 15 billion gallons, this means that roughly 20 billion of these gallons will need to come from cellulosic sources.  At 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of switchgrass (a huge simplification): 20 billion gallons/100 g/t*.25t lignin/t biomass = 50 million tons.  50 million tons *300 dollars per ton= 15 billion dollars/year.  Say that the only half of this lignin is able to be obtained, it is still a 7.5 billion dollar per year industry.  This is huge.  Of course this all depends on how much it costs to convert a ton of lignin from being worth $40/ton to $300/ton and the details in the article seem to be lacking here.

“Lin and his colleagues are trying to turn the resulting glycerol into a substance called 1,3 propanediol, or PDO, the base material for a substance used in upholstery, carpets, clothing and other applications. DuPont uses PDO to make its Sorona line of fabrics.  “For every gallon of biodiesel you make, you make a pound of glycerol,” said George Kraus, a professor of chemistry at Iowa State, where he is director of the Center for Catalysis and a collaborator of Lin. “A lot of people have been contacting us about burning it, and we say there have to be better uses.”  The price of glycerol, now 20 to 50 cents a pound, could drop as low as 5 cents a pound as biodiesel production increases.  Kraus said the higher quality glycerol made with the new process could command a much higher price. “What we see,” he said, “is an opportunity to make something that might cost 80 cents a pound.”  This isn’t exactly relevant to this site but it is interesting none the less.

Many believe that as more uses are found for what are currently waste streams from biorefineries, the economics of biofuels will improve.  Anyway, the article goes through many other examples like the ones I quoted and is definitely worth a read.

KL Group Turning Wood Waste into Ethanol

A newly built plant in Upton Wyoming is grinding wood waste into fine particles that can then be turned into ethanol. The plant, which is operated by KL process design group produces 1.5 million gallons of ethanol per year and once the plant is in full operation will employ 13 workers. The key to the KL process is the way that they finely grind the wood waste which leaves it vulnerable to enzymatic attack. “The way we grind the feedstock is what separates us from other cellulose plants” More information on fine grinding advantages can be found here.

One of the problems that is often brought up regarding corn derived ethanol is that it requires almost as much energy to make as one is able to get out of it. This is not the case with wood waste derived ethanol, KL estimates: “the process at the Upton plant requires less than 20,000 British thermal units to produce a gallon of ethanol, which has about 80,000 BTU of energy.” Since the waste is there anyway and likely would have been burned just to get rid of it, there seems to be very little negative side effect to this process. The only cost of the feedstock is transporting it to the plant. “Bill Baker of Baker Timber Products in Rockerville has agreed to be a supplier of wood waste for the new plant.”

“The U.S. Forest Service and other Black Hills land managers want to thin the forest of its small-diameter trees and other low-value wood materials. A thinned forest is less susceptible to catastrophic fires. It’s also less susceptible to pine beetle infestation.” Plants like these will allow the Forest Service an easy way of disposing of dangerous and excess forest material.

On such a small scale (1.5 million gallons per year is very small for an ethanol plant), the economics of the plant are questionable. KL believes that as larger plants are developed, the costs associated with production will decrease. It will be important to remember though that while the costs of production should decrease as scale increases, the average cost/ton to transport waste to the plant will increase since the average travel distance will increase (the plant will have to pull from a far larger “sphere of influence”). From the Article: “The issue we will need to deal with is purely a transportation cost issue,” Kramer said. He admits that the small scale of the Upton plant makes wood a less cost effective feedstock. “However, on a scaled-up version to 20 million gallons per year, the economics are certainly in favor of the wood waste as a feedstock.”

Cellulosic Ethanol from Rice Straw Plant Being Built in California

Ron Kotrba has written an incredibly interesting article for Ethanol Producer Magazine about a company which hopes to soon be making ethanol from rice straw in California.  Currently, California rice farmers must pay $25 to $45 per acre to have the rice straw baled and removed from their fields.  Colusa Biomass Energy Corp. (CBEC), the company which is currently in the process of building their first plant to process rice straw, has offered to take it off their hands for a mere $15.  There is a general understanding that once the plant is built CBEC will be removing the straw at no charge.

Rice straw has limited other uses since it has a very high sodium silicate content which is not palatable to livestock and is very abrasive for machinery.  CBEC intends to separate the silicate and use it as an extra revenue stream, selling it to a range of manufacturers.

The plant will be relatively small, processing “35,000 acres of rice straw into 12.5 MMgy of ethanol and 33 million pounds of sodium silicate.”  This is not necessarily a bad thing however as it will cut down on average transportation costs to the plant.  Generally 3.5-4 tons of rice straw can be collected per acre.

The amazing thing is that CBEC will be doing this with no federal or state money.  They have generated enough investor interest to fund their project via investment capital.   CBEC has been doing small scale research for years, it is only relatively recently that they hired Harris group, a respected engineering firm to do an analysis to see whether their research can be scaled into an economical, large scale, continuous process.  Harris group seems to think that this is doable, so the project is moving forward.

The actual process is described by the article to work as follows:

“We wash it, then introduce a mild solution of a strong acid then [which] hydrolyzes out the lignin and the hemicellulose,” Bowers says. “Then a second hydrolysis process occurs where we extract the cellulose from the remaining substrate.” He says the process whereby CBEC hydrolyzes the substrate, removing most of the lignin and all of the silica, is proprietary. “We have designed the hardware and the software to propel a reverse osmosis custom filtration device that we built to do the extraction,” Bowers says. “Through filtration, we separate the silica out and precipitate it as silica sodium oxide, and from the other side we pull out the lignin.” Once the lignin is dried down, CBEC plans to use it as boiler fuel. The company’s sales forecasts indicate the ability to retrieve 34-cents a pound from the more than 33.5 million pounds of sodium silicate, a versatile compound used to make everything from micro-electronics to toothpaste.  Once the cellulose and hemicellulose are separated from the lignin and silica, fermentation begins. “Our fermentation will look just like the corn guys’,” Bowers says.”

I hope that they don’t look exactly the same, if CBEC tries to break down the cellulose like corn starch (using amylase), they are going to be sadly mistaken.  They will be needing to use cellulase which as far as I know still acts more slowly than amylase and will be considerably more expensive.  I wonder whether they are going to just take on the cost of the cellulase or if they have figured out a plan for this expensive item too.  I would be extremely interested in the details of how exactly their second hydrolysis process works as well.

“We’re considering separate five-C and six-C lines”–and how do they propose to enzymatically break down the hemicellulose? I could be very mistaken but as far as I know there is not yet an economical way to break down hemicellulose since hemicellulose consists of so many different sugars.  You would need a multitude of enzymes each being unique to the sugar that they attack.  They could break down the hemicellulose via acid hydrolyis however but that is questionably economical.

Anyway, the company hopes to expand to 11 refineries by 2012 located in California, Texas, and Arkansas.   In the long term they see a lot of potential for global expansion since rice is such a staple crop world wide.  Whether they succeed or not, I guess we will have to wait and see.

University of Wisconsin Madison Undergrad Researches Techniques to Grow Algae as a Potential Source of Biomass

Jennifer Jackowski, a senior majoring in botany at the University of Wisconsin Madison is studying algae growth in local lakes. “This summer, she placed four, 30-foot fiberglass screens in Lake Mendota, which she hopes will act as floating beds for algal growth. Her primary goal is to devise a means for cleaning the lakes. But she also plans to study the algae to see if it holds any commercial value.”

Seth Keel, a researcher and co-founder of the Madison-based consulting and distribution company Great Lakes Bio-Fuels, is also looking into the potential of algae. Keel hopes to develop a commercial process to make biofuels from algae that will be competitive with traditional fuels. With the recent global surge in biofuel interest has come a lot of money in the form of investment capital. This will help speed the development of economically competitive biofuels as there will be more people available to work on making breakthroughs and they will have better equipment with which to make the breakthroughs.

“Both Keel and Jackowski envision a process in which algae is harvested from the lake — in Keel’s case, by pumps, and in Jackowski’s, via screens. This kind of cleaning would have a double effect — the algae is removed from the lake and future algae blooms would be diminished because the nutrients from the algae would not be recycled in the water to be used by following blooms.” Whether this is good for the lakes or not has yet to be determined.

Although algae is orders of magnitude more productive in terms of mass per acre per year than traditional bioenergy crops, the costs of the processes of obtaining and processing the algae are also currently magnitudes higher. More research is definitely necessary but from what I can tell we will be seeing mass production of other more traditional forms of cellulosic ethanol (wood, switchgrass, etc) far sooner than from algae simply because the algae process is far more complex and will require more time to engineer. With the enormous potential of algae it certainly is not an option to be overlooked however.

Popper, Ben. “Long green seen in algae in city lakes” Wisconsin State journal, July 30 2007, <http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=203326&ntpid=1>

The Science Behind the Farm Bill

The Center for American Progress is running an article titled the Science Behind the National Farm Bill.  The article is about biofuel legislation that will be included in the farm bill which will soon be voted on by congress.  The Center has put together a quick guide that they are calling Biofuels 101: A beginners Guide to Renewable Energy.  It details the merits of traditional (corn) ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, and biodiesel.

As this is a site about cellulosic ethanol, I wont worry about the corn ethanol or biodiesel sections.  I would like to correct a couple points that they make in the cellulosic section however.  First they say that the process for refining cellulosic ethanol is more environmentally friendly than the process for refining traditional ethanol.  This is not true, both processes can be incredibly clean depending on the preference (and budget) of the manufacturer.  They also say: “cellulosic fuels can yield twice the energy output per unit of energy input than corn ethanol.” Actually it can potentially yield far more than twice as much energy as corn which has an energy input to energy output ratio of roughly 1:1.6 currently.  “The process to derive ethanol from cellulose involves using enzymes to break down the tough and resistant cellulose in plant cell walls into sugars.”  They completely left out acid hydrolysis.  Although many believe enzymes (cellulase) will be the future of the industry, at the moment acid hydrolysis is at least as common as enzyme hydrolysis.  A lot of research currently is going into using an acid pre-treatment with an enzymatic attack.

Anyway, it is at least an interesting read for anyone completely unfamiliar with the biofuel industry.

Wood to Wheels, Michigan Tech’s answer to “Turning down the carbon pump”

With all of the recent press regarding Mascoma’s new wood based cellulosic ethanol plant that will be built in northern Michigan and the assistance that they are receiving from Michigan’s universities, I thought it would be interesting to write about one such program that will be assisting them. The Wood to Wheels program at Michigan Tech is “a graduate enterprise in sustainable transportation utilizing fuels and co-products from forests and other biomass sources.” Basically Michigan Tech is trying to tackle many issues involving creating a sustainable means of fulfilling our nation’s energy requirements.

The four main objectives of the program are to “improve bioprocesses that will utilize woody biomass, improve forest management and apply biotechnology to increase forest biomass productivity/utilization per acre by 65%, demonstrate forest land management, fuels production, and vehicular technologies that close the carbon cycle and stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels, and optimize powertrain technologies that reduce fossil fuel consumption over the life cycle by up to 100% in vehicles that use these technologies.”

In their effort to improve the bioprocesses, wood to wheels participants are working on a number of things. They are trying to genetically enhance cellulase enzymes, take advantage of peptidomimetic modification of cellulase activity, genetically enhance the yeast organisms so that a higher yield of sugar can be converted into ethanol, and improve efficiency of the entire process to reduce waste.

The Wood to Wheels forest resources initiative seems to be slightly more general. They are researching wood formation, defense and fitness (of the plants), natural variation, and carbon sequestrations. Researchers are also looking at metabolite profiling and chemical fingerprinting.

From the Wood to Wheels site, the objective of their efforts to improve engine and vehicle designs is as follows: “Develop technologies that will optimize engines for the use of ethanol and ethanol/gasoline mixtures for vehicles including hybrid applications.” They hope to increase vehicle efficiency by 50% and improve the cold start for E85 to E100 ethanol vehicles.

Finally, their assessment initiative looks at broader issues. From environmental effects, to policy analysis, to huge life-cycle analyses.

Anyway, this program looks to be very promising and should be a boon to Mascoma’s efforts in the state.

University of Florida Receives Royalty Check from Verenium

The University of Florida has received the first ever royalty check for a patent based on the conversion of wood cellulose to ethanol. Verenium, a leading biofuel and enzyme developer has opened a 1.4 million liter per year plant in Osaka, Japan where they turn wooden construction waste into ethanol. They use technology that was developed and patented by Dr. Lonnie Ingram of the University of Florida. The check was for $66,000 with the promise of more to come as Verenium continues to profit from the technology. While 1.4 million liters is not actually that much when compared to many of the larger plants here in the US, given the limited availability of the feedstock that is actually pretty good.

“This initial royalty payment represents a true milestone in our long and productive partnership with the University of Florida”

The company is also looking to invest in cellulosic ethanol capabilities in Florida since according the Verenium: “The Florida climate is ideal for growing the feedstocks needed to produce cellulosic ethanol” This is true as I just covered in my previous post regarding creating cellulosic ethanol out of citrus waste.

Ethanol from Orange Peels?

Yesterday Forbes posted a short read about how FPL energy (a clean energy provider) is working with Citrus Energy, LLC to develop a commercial scale cellulosic biorefinery to process citrus peels.  “The cellulosic ethanol plant will be owned and operated by FPL Energy and is expected to produce 4 million gallons of ethanol per year”  If the technology works out, a potential 60 million gallons of ethanol can be derived from the citrus industry in Florida alone which potentially can replace roughly 1 % of the state’s fuel demand. 

Biopact has a more in-depth article covering the idea.  “Typically citrus processing waste is dried into citrus pulp pellets (CPP) and fed to cattle. But production of CPP requires a large capital investment by the processor with a negative return on investment. The CPP losses are borne by the main product from citrus, orange or grapefruit juice.”  In their review, Biopact highlights the key reasons for using citrus waste.  Some of these include that the feedstock requires no transportation cost since it is already at the plant, there is no need for storage as the feedstock is processed immediately, the process is commercially viable already, and a number of other typical arguments for cellulosic ethanol. 

FPL plans to use enzymes (cellulases) to bring the sugar content in the peels from 23 to 62 percent.  A dilute acid pretreatment is also likely.  Yeast will then turn the sugar into various alcohols, although the main alcoholic constituent of the brew will be ethanol.  The ethanol will then be separated from the rest of the solution by distillation and dehydration.  Since glucose will not be the only sugar (citrus peels have multiple types of sugar in them) there will inevitably be other alcohols in the brew which will need to be separated and a use will need to be found for them.  If this is successful it will change the industry.  Even though it is saving the citrus companies money to be able to just give their waste to the energy companies, it undoubtedly won’t take long until they start charging for their waste (since it is no longer waste) or opening their own cellulosic ethanol plants in order to increase their own profit margins.

This also potentially could increase the cost of cattle feedstock as there will be less of it.  Now the only question that remains is wont somebody please think of the cattle?

E3 BioFuels Celebrates Grand Opening, Nation’s First Closed-Loop Ethanol Plant

Owned by E3 biofuels, a cellulosic ethanol plant began operation this spring processing manure from 28,000 cattle and some other biomass. Not only will this facility produce 25 million gallons of ethanol per year, it will also take care of all of the manure runoff and methane emissions which would have been produced by that cattle. The process also creates something known as distillers grain which is fed to the cattle. The process is extremely efficient and requires virtually no fossil fuels. The plant is located near Mead,

Measuring The Merits Of Corn Stover-Based Ethanol

When corn is converted into ethanol, only a small portion of the corn (the kernels), is used.  The rest of the corn plant (consisting mainly of cellulose, hemicelluloses, and lignin), is returned to the field in order to cut down on erosion and to act as fertilizer.  This corn plant is called the stover.  Wally Wilhelm, a plant physiologist in the Agricultural Research Service’s (ARS) Agroecosystem Management Research Unit at Lincoln, Nebraska, is studying exactly how much of these corn stovers can be removed from the fields before the quality of the field begins to suffer.  The article discusses Wilhelm’s progress concering this field so that we may harvest some of these stovers as an easy source of cellulose. 

 This is extremely interesting because I had a professor who tried to organize a project with local farmers to do exactly this.  The farmers were unwilling because they believed they needed the stovers in order to sustain their land.