Cellulosic Ethanol is Dead! Long Live Biomass Gasification!
My thunder has been stolen. I have been kicking around a post in my head for the past couple of weeks. I just haven’t had time to get around to it, with the move and all. But this has been nagging away at me for a long time. My thinking goes something like this.
Cellulosic ethanol, and by that I mean cellulosic ethanol in the traditional mold of what Iogen has been working on for years – will never be commercially viable. How can I be so sure? For one, I have covered the logistical challenges here and here. These are not going away, and are serious barriers to commercialization. In brief, the cellulose content of biomass is accompanied by a lot of lignin, inorganics, etc. that won’t get converted in a standard fermentation process. But you still have to haul all of this biomass to the plant, convert the cellulose (and get a low concentration of ethanol for your efforts), and then get rid of a sopping wet mess of waste biomass. Sure, it can be burned – if you spend a lot of energy drying it first. Because of the very nature of the process, I don’t believe this challenge will be solved. (I know, I know. I just have to BELIEVE….)
A recent report – brought to my attention by this story in Gristmill (and e-mailed to me by 4 different readers) – says the same thing (and stole my thunder!):
Crop-Based Biofuel Production under Acreage Constraints and Uncertainty
Here are some excerpts of comments by Tom Philpott at Gristmill:
A quiet consensus seems to be forming among people you’d think would know the facts on the ground: cellulosic ethanol, touted as five years away from viability for decades now, may never be viable.
Now we get a new study (PDF) from a trio of ag economists at Iowa State University. For the record, the authors are conventional ag scholars firmly entrenched within the corporate-dominated research world described so well by Nancy Scola in her recent “Monsanto U.” post.
So it’s surprising to see these mainstream economists deliver such a dismal forecast for cellulosic ethanol.
They start by calculating that without the latest round of goodies — i.e., the fat “Renewable Fuel Standard” of the 2007 Energy Act — cellulosic ethanol (and biodiesel, too) would have withered away. In that scenario, corn ethanol would keep ramping up from the current level of about 7 billion gallons, pushed by high oil prices and the $0.51/gallon tax credit that’s existed for years.
The authors seriously doubt the cellulosic target can even come close to being met. They reckon that the mandate can inspire “rational” farmers and investors to churn out 4.5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2022 — but there’s a catch. In order to reach even that level, the government will have to significantly jack up the tax credit awarded to mixers — from the current 51 cents to $1.55.
Also some excerpts directly from the report:
Competition for land ensures that providing an incentive to just one crop will increase equilibrium prices of all. Also, at pre-EISA subsidy levels, neither biodiesel nor switchgrass ethanol is commercially viable in the long run. In order for switchgrass ethanol to be commercially viable, it must receive a differential subsidy over that awarded to corn-based ethanol.
Since switchgrass competes for the same acres as corn, and corn-based ethanol is less expensive to produce, corn-based ethanol will always have a comparative advantage over switchgrass ethanol in the absence of a differential subsidy.
Corn and soybeans compete for the same acreage, so when energy prices are such that corn-based ethanol is stimulated, then the price of soybeans must also increase if the farmer is to continue to allocate some land to soybeans.
We calculate the subsidies required to stimulate biofuel production to the levels required by the EISA RFS. We find that subsidy levels are needed in the range of $0.22 to $0.78 per gallon for corn ethanol, $1.97 to $2.90 per gallon for biodiesel, and $1.55 to $2.11 for cellulosic ethanol.
I can hear the ethanol and corn lobbyists scrambling for a response that involves a character assassination.
What Will Work
However, there are a couple of variations on this that I think will be viable. One is a gasification process. A number of people have taken to calling this process cellulosic ethanol, which to me is unfortunate and confusing. I have explained the differences in Cellulosic Ethanol versus Biomass Gasification. Long story short, cellulosic ethanol processes convert cellulose in a wet process. Biomass gasification converts all organic components in a thermal process. The yield for biomass gasification will be much higher, and the waste products much lower.
The other variation that I think will work is this project I have been working on for a while, but still haven’t been given the green light to talk about. Hopefully soon.
Robert, you big tease!
It’s difficult for me to comprehend the agricultural straw->fuel concept that Iogen is after. We should be building up soils not removing organic matter, and having family and land in the hay business as well as neighbors that made and transported silage, it’s obvious to me that the cellulosic schemers don’t have much for real world experience in transporting bulk or baled straw.
There aren’t that many calories in a bale for the effort involved. I had neighbors that built a large round bale boiler to heat their workshop and after a few years of carting straw, they put in a NG boiler. When you count the cost of baling, hauling and loading the stove, they were better off with NG.
I think a biomass gasification scheme that dries the material in the field and gasifies/bio-oil processes it on the stump and transports an upgraded fuel has a chance. I did a page on this a few years ago.
You still can’t pull all of the organic manner off of a field on a continual basis and maintain any sort of soil, but a crop planted in a 4-5 year rotation explicitly for fuel would be sustainable. Canola and Flax intercropped is the ticket.
“subsidy levels are needed in the range of [..] $1.97 to $2.90 per gallon for biodiesel”
Ouch! I knew that one was bad, but not that ugly.
…it’s obvious to me that the cellulosic schemers don’t have much for real world experience in transporting bulk or baled straw. There aren’t that many calories in a bale for the effort involved. I had neighbors that built a large round bale boiler to heat their workshop and after a few years of carting straw, they put in a NG boiler.”
Bob,
I decided there probably wasn’t much future in cellulosic several years ago when I found out that even back in the pioneer days, early farmers in Nebraska and Iowa found it too troublesome to go and collect dried corn stalks with which to heat their sod houses in the winter.
They would hitch up the horses to travel 10 miles to the nearest grove of trees to haul back firewood, but it wasn’t worth the energy expended to go out and pick up corn stalks to burn. They would do that in only the most dire circumstances.
England in the 1500s
I’m also surprised that more people who advocate meeting our energy needs from biomass don’t mention what happened in England in the 1500s when they were dependent on trees for energy. They denuded much of the country and were facing a serious energy crisis until they realized coal would burn.
I just had a sudden, horrible, thought: how long did it take hydrogen to really die?
Is it even dead yet?
(Engineering death precedes government death by what … 10 years?)
I dunno if hydrogen is dead. As a motor fuel it stands a much better chance in heavy equipment than passenger vehicles. We are going to need a substitute for cracking hydrogen from NG for fertilizer.
I went to this presentation on a planned 4B polygeneration facility that is to gasify petroleum coke to generate power, feed hydrogen to the NH3/urea plant and steam to the potash mine and ethanol plant. 4B is a huge chunk of cash in a province with 1 million people.
I guess in theory they could feed biomass into the gasifier. I am guessing that they won’t because it isn’t worth the effort.
Although this project is just in the initial feasibility/environmental impact stage, it kind of tells you shipping NG to the US is more profitable than making fertilizer out of it.
I don’t see any chance of hydrogen being used as a vehicle fuel in more than one-off demos in my lifetime, and probably ever.
First, we have no source for it. If we did have a source (like solar electrolysis), we’d first have to reach the point where there was excess capacity versus the best use of the electricity, which is directly to the grid. Once we reached that point, any hydrogen produced would have to exceed the needs of its best use, the ammonia (fertiliser) industry. We are a very long way from either, but even assuming we reached saturation in both, it would IMO make more sense to feed the hydrogen into refineries or even CTL processors to boost production of liquid fuels from hydrocarbon sources.
Although I agree with the conclusions, I find it strange that anyone thinks researchers from “Monsanto U” would be baised to support cellulosic ethanol. Monsanto is incented to protect their existing business (corn) over newcomers which might disrupt things. Also, Iowa is almost entirely corn. Switchgrass from non-corn states represents potential competition.
Neat summary, Robert! As I have pointed out before, the logical place to start a gasification plant would be a landfill, where you already get the feedstock collected and ready for conversion. Of potential significance: Catalytic Hydrothermal Gasification, i.e. the ability to gasify wet biomass.
We are going to need a substitute for cracking hydrogen from NG for fertilizer.
No we don’t. Wastewater treatment for the most part consists of doing the opposite, i.e. converting ammonia into molecular nitrogen. There is a huge opportunity to recover ammonia from wastewater, but I guess right now natural gas is just too cheap to bother. Luckily that may change soon.
Cheap fertilizer (like cheap energy) cause all sorts of problems: overuse polutes waterways as farmers have no real incentive to limit the use of ammonia. Etc. etc.
Soooo… Robert…
Any chance we can find out what company the advance will be coming from? Is it publically traded, in otherwords?
If it’s still top secret, though that’s cool.
Thanks.
Of course, it might just be that common sense is slowly catching on. What ethanol is not the silver bullet that is going to enrich farmers while we all drive our SUVs? What, biodiesel is nothing more that a DIYer’s dream – energy independence, yeah! Hydrogen is a lot of hot air?
Man, I’m feeling better, already! In spite of Washington DC’s best efforts, common sense is making a comeback!
I still think there is a place for some non-thermal (biological) conversion of cellulose into biofuels, specifically in the pulp and paper industry. In pulping you start out with a wood chip that contains cellulose, lignin, and hemicellulose. Pulping extracts a majority of the lignin, and a portion of the hemicellulose from the wood chips. The extracted hemicellulose and lignin are then burnt as fuel in a recovery boiler. Alternatively, if you could first extract the hemicelluloses (which will be lost from pulp production anyway), you could then convert the hemicelluloses into ethanol biologically.
Unlike corn to ethanol, where ethanol is the main product and distillers grains are the by-products. By using hemicelluloses to obtain ethanol, the ethanol is the by-product and pulp is the main product, thus the major energy costs of transportation of wood to the mill, ‘farming’ the wood are already included in the economic production of pulp.
Further, the infrastructure for pulping already exists including rail, forests, wood chipping, equipment for extracting the hemicelluloses (pulp digesters can be altered to add a hemicellulose extraction stage), and boilers to supply the steam needed for distillation. The new equipment needed would be bio-reactors and distillation equipment.
A few links:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/
industry/forest/pdfs/
hemicellulose_extraction.pdf
http://maineswcds.org/acrobat/
biomass/vanheiningen.pdf
It will be interesting if the ethanol by gasification is commercial.
It may be we are barking up the wrong tree. If PHEVs are introduced, and they do get 70 mpg (which seems doable, and even more if batteires are used for daily commutes) then why all the hysteria to get alternative fuels?
Our crude oil supplies will last for centuries.
With PHEVs, and green architecture, it is easy to predict energy demand declines, and continually, for generations.
Maybe we don’t need any biofuels, or only those vailidated by the market and which pass envionmental concerns. Jatropha plantations work at $75 a barrel, I think. Hard to think of anythng else.
Since switchgrass competes for the same acres as corn
Huh? I always thought the point of growing switchgrass was that you can use marginal lands and leave the fertile lands for growing food crops like corn.
Funny how many things happen locally, considering I’m not in the middle of nowhere, but I can see it from here.
SHEC labs and City of Regina cut ribbon on Landfill Gas Collection System
SHEC has a solar thermal assisted hydrogen from biogas system and they are piloting it a few miles from my house.
At $900/tonne NH3 isn’t cheap. With current equipment, diesel, fertilizer and herbicide costs, the real base cost of growing hard red spring wheat in Saskatchewan is around $6-7/bu. Theoretically we could produce as much wheat here as the entire US does, but the price has been stuck at $4-5 for the past 30 years. Farms have been kept afloat by off-farm income, not subsidies. For once, I actually have real statistics on that as well as real life experience (owning 1000 acres of wheat/Canola land).
I don’t have a stat on this, but I think it’s probably true: The amount of heat required to boil ammonia out of low concentration animal waste is more than steam cracking hydrogen from NG (or biogas) and baking in an ammonia oven and that’s why it isn’t done.
The amount of heat required to boil ammonia out of low concentration animal waste is more than steam cracking hydrogen from NG (or biogas) and baking in an ammonia oven and that’s why it isn’t done.
Whoops, thinking inside the box, Bob!
A huge problem in many wastewater treatment plant is struvite (MgNH4PO4) precipitation. Some Canadian outfit is working on a way to precipitate the struvite in a controlled manner, and selling the product as fertilizer. Perhaps you should give them a call and see what their prices look like…
The ostara link is interesting. Nothing to do with nitrogen, but a renewable phosphorous supply has a lot of value.
Our land if properly fallowed builds up enough nitrogen from lightning nitrates and biomass decomposition to grow a relatively good crop with monoammonium-phosphate (11-55-0) fertilizer, which adds very little nitrogen. My dad fallowed 1/3 of the acres, but the price of diesel, non-output acres and other factors make fallow unfeasible in most situations now, even in areas with soil heavy enough not to erode.
This isn’t much of a cellulosic ethanol funeral. 🙂
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23464740/
convert heat from the sun into a steam engine? will this work? we need a post on this!
cta. there is a post on that, from last week
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2008/02/running-us-on-solar-power.html
Problem being, it doesn’t matter how effective your conversion process is, if the real problem is feedstock scarcity.
greyfalcon.net/biolimits.png
Even Perlack is beginning to admit that “maybe” US feedstock supplies aren’t enough.
renewableenergyweekly.com/rea/news/story;jsessionid=949B425FDD89554227DFF55970564DAC?id=51756
Additionally, for those complaining about the CARD study, EIA also figures that Cellulosic ethanol (enzyme or gasification) will be a bust.
greencarcongress.com/2008/03/eia-forecasts-s.html
I don’t understand why people are so focused on ethanol and liquid fuels in general when we have the technology to make everything electric. Getting energy straight from the sun by means of cheap $1 per watt solar panels and charging your all electric vehicle by means of better storage technology like this.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/batteries-0208.html
If you think about ethanol its energy from the sun in a extremely inefficient long and convoluted process getting you a 2 EROEI at best.
I think agriculture should stick to food and possibly next generation plastics when fossil fuels are in short supply.
-Crews
Cellulosic ethanol, is dead, IMHO, due to the use of enzymes and other exotics. I understand the promose and potential of enzymes, but I think that sort of thing is best used in the pharmaceutical and food industries. That’s because an enzyme gives you a very exact reaction, down to discriminating between mirror-images of the same molecule. In the fuel business that level of precision is not required. Take your biomass, yank it into a hot tank, get [whatever] out of the other end, and off you go.
Crew, biofuels have the storage thing down, while electrics are still working on it. It may change in future, but why assume that it will be solved? Better to continue developing biofuels as an alternative.
I agree, we should pursue both in our desperate situation. I think from a thermodynamic and engineering standpoint it just makes a lot more sense to go straight from the sun to the car, as oppose to sun to plant to tractor to transport to ethanol plant to ethanol back to transport to filling station to car. Think about it..
Robert–
any comment on plasma gasification ala SOLENA/ACCIONA. how practical? can FT process step be bypassed/replaced by other?
your reaction, however brief, appreciated.
fran
The times I have looked at those plasma gasification technologies, I could never see what particular advantage they would have over conventional gasification.
Regarding FT, there are lots of different things you can make once you have the syngas. Methanol is pretty easy to make following a gasification (plasma or conventional).
Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn
By Chuck Squatriglia
24 Jan 2008
A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn’t interfere with food supplies, company officials said.
Coskata uses existing gasification technology to convert almost any organic material into synthesis gas, which is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Rather than fermenting that gas or using thermo-chemical catalysts to produce ethanol, Coskata pumps it into a reactor containing bacteria that consume the gas and excrete ethanol. Richard Tobey, Coskata’s vice president of engineering, says the process yields 99.7 percent pure ethanol.
Full story Here.
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Robert Rapier: But you still have to haul all of this biomass to the plant, convert the cellulose (and get a low concentration of ethanol for your efforts), and then get rid of a sopping wet mess of waste biomass. Sure, it can be burned – if you spend a lot of energy drying it first.
I don’t think forced drying would be necessary. Mechanical compression of the mash wouldn’t require unacceptable amounts additional energy. It could be compressed into (say) hay bale size bricks containing (say) 10% moisture and stored outdoors to complete the drying cycle. If disintegration of the bricks became an issue they could be enclosed in burlap sacks or similar. The new, “wet” bricks would be shipped by rail to a storage and incinerator location in a very low rainfall area, central Utah or Nevada perhaps and burned upon reaching an acceptable moisture level.
Bob Rohatensky: You still can’t pull all of the organic manner off of a field on a continual basis and maintain any sort of soil…
Don’t remove all the biomass, cut it at a one or two foot level, lawnmower style.
Terry: Huh? I always thought the point of growing switchgrass was that you can use marginal lands and leave the fertile lands for growing food crops like corn…
Right. The logical and ethical approach in my opinion is to concentrate biomass production on lands that will not support high volume food agriculture. In the USA think eastern and western Rocky Mountain foothills along with the large stretches of desert between west Texas and eastern Oregon. The majority of that land is used for livestock graze and on inhabited acreage for small gardens at best today. In general it’s left fallow and considered to be of low agricultural value. Most of that land will however support native or adaptable perennial plants with minimum or no irrigation, fertilizer or human attention. A few examples are honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa), jojoba (Simmondsia chinensis), various sages (genus Salvia), various fast growing pines (genus Pinus), European Hazel (Corylus avellana) and buffalo gourd (Cucurbita foetidissima).
Honey mesquite and European hazel are particularly well suited to regions in the American west as both species have proved they can grow there and both species coppice well, in fact they’re comparable to willow (genus Salix, which thrives in wetter regions). Coppicing an existing plant, rather than replanting every year or three to five years improves overall production efficiency. Mesquite does use significant water but roots deeply to find it. Once the seedlings are established in place the artificial application of water is usually unnecessary.
This primer on Salix production in Finland is interesting:
Willow Cultivation – Liisa Tahvanainen
The willow is burned as fuel.
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