1/17/2007 10:14:44 AM
Quest for a Super Fuel
by By Marcia Zarley Taylor
Since President George W. Bush promised to wean America’s addiction to foreign oil in last year’s State of the Union address, the hunt for alternatives to corn-based ethanol has gained serious momentum. Key policymakers in Congress and inside the administration now want the U.S. to displace 60 billion gallons of gasoline—30% of the nation’s fuel—with renewables by 2030, equal to more than tenfold today’s ethanol industry capacity.
But all economic studies show that to expand on that scale, ethanol will need to diversify with feedstocks other than grain, especially inexpensive biomass, such as wood chips, corn stover and dedicated energy crops like switchgrass. More than 60 investor groups—including Shell Oil, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—are pouring billions of private research dollars into the effort.
“We all know we can’t do it with corn alone,” concedes Mike Muston, executive vice president of Broin Companies, which operates 19 dry-mill corn ethanol plants and has proposed construction of a cellulosic plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa, by 2009.
Grants. Government grants—currently up to $160 million to fund construction of three or four pilot plants—are key to getting cellulosic ethanol off the ground. “The technology per se is not a big mystery like splitting the atom,” insists Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary Andrew Karsner. “You can do it today [on a demonstration level]. The question is how to scale plants up to a commercial size.”
Ultimately, DOE’s goal is to make these new biorefineries competitive with corn ethanol, which now averages about $1.07/gal. to produce. In comparison, cellulosic ethanol typically costs $2 to $3/gal., Muston says.
Although biomass is a cheap feedstock, the capital needed to build a cellulosic plant is at least five to six times more than a conventional ethanol plant, says DOE. What’s more, few private lenders have been willing to bankroll construction of experimental technology. Lenders recall that after the 1979 energy crisis, some poorly designed ethanol plants became white elephants in the 1980s and were sold for scrap.
Like dozens of others vying for the DOE grants, Broin stresses its 2009 timeline is contingent on DOE backing. Unlike competitors’ proposals that would convert wood chips or wheat straw, Broin’s project would adapt a conventional ethanol plant to be capable of converting corn hulls and stover, as well as grain. At the same time, it would boost capacity to 125 million gallons/year. If it works, it could demonstrate how other corn-based plants could be retrofitted with the new technology.
Technology. Project Liberty, as Broin’s Iowa effort is called, involves three special technologies. At the front end of the process, Broin will fractionate the corn grain, separating the germ and hull fiber from the starch (see “Two-for-One Fuels,” December issue). That allows for corn oil to be removed from dried distillers’ grains and boosts ethanol production 11%/bu. of corn used.
More unique, Broin hopes to be the first plant to convert corn stover into ethanol, claiming to generate an additional 27% fuel per acre. The project will also use a solid-fuel boiler that will help the plant reduce natural gas consumption by 83%, Muston says.
There are hurdles, however. “We’ll need 275,000 acres of stover to feed the plant,” he says. “How to harvest, transport and store it is an open question.” Efforts to work out glitches in machinery design and logistics are still underway.
With so many unknowns, DOE cautions that it could take a decade or more for cellulosic ethanol be commercialized. “Where we’re at with cellulosic ethanol is like the early 1990s in biotech seeds,” says James Fischer, a senior technical adviser on agriculture at the DOE. “There’s a lot of hype and promise, but it’s premature to identify anything as a breakthrough at this point.”
Web Connection
To see economic impacts of ethanol expansion, visit www.agpolicy.org/ppap/REPORT%2025x25.pdf.
—Top Producer, January 2007
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