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Seeking Biomass Feedstocks That Can Compete
Biofuels and biobased chemical makers hope to win with cellulosic sugars By Melody M. Bomgardner On the hot, dry agricultural land of California’s Imperial Valley, 17 new varieties of an unusual crop are being tested on a 100-acre plot. If the tests are successful, the valley’s bounty of lettuce, cantaloupes, and broccoli may someday be joined by plants that are converted into fuels and chemicals. The crop, energy cane, is a less sweet cousin of sugarcane. It is a perennial grass that was developed by plant scientists to create a large amount of biomass quickly. Canergy , a biofuels start-up, plans to grow enough energy cane to power one or more commercial-scale fuel ethanol plants starting in 2016. Although the valley is known for producing fruits and vegetables, more than half of its 450,000 acres are actually devoted to crops such as Sudan grass, used for hay. If enough farmers decide to add energy cane to their crop rotation, the region would produce a huge amount of biomass. “It grows extremely well there—we’re expecting phenomenal yields,” says Timothy R. Brummels, Canergy’s chief executive officer. He estimates that 1,800 to 2,200 gal of ethanol per year can be made from 1 acre of energy cane, compared with about 400 gal from 1 acre of corn. Energy cane is a dedicated energy crop, a category of plants that also includes the giant reed Arundo donax, napier grass, switchgrass, and hybrid poplar. Investments in energy crops are one part of a larger push by the biobased fuel and chemical industry to secure cheap, abundant feedstocks. Chemical companies can use the material to produce acrylic acid and butadiene, for example. Genomatica, Gevo , and Myriant have built their processes to take in sugar from corn or sugarcane. Those sources carry downsides. For instance, prices rise and fall along with other commodities such as petroleum, and the supply of sugar may not be ample enough to meet the needs of high-volume chemical makers. To ensure the viability of their industry, they are eager to replace those food sugars with a cheaper, more stable cellulose-based raw material. Executives say they are watching the growth of the cellulosic ethanol industry closely. Its success would pave the way to securing new cellulosic feedstocks for chemicals, they believe. “Just about every one of our chemical partners is interested in the potential for using biomass feedstocks,” says Christophe Schilling, CEO of Genomatica. “The motivation comes from a couple of different potential advantages—the first one is the potential for lower-cost feedstock. It still needs to be proven, but that is the hope. Then it is the stability of a secure supply of feedstock that doesn’t have the volatility of hydrocarbons or commodity agriculture.” Schilling adds that getting feedstock from nonfood sources is also important. Thanks to a half-decade of effort by the ethanol industry, clues are now emerging about how a cellulosic feedstock supply chain for chemicals would take shape. One thing is certain: The route is more complicated than for fossil-fuel feedstocks. “Part of the challenge is that shale gas is shale gas no matter where on Earth it comes from. But biomass is different with each crop,” says Brian Balmer, chemical industry principal at the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan . For that reason, making inexpensive sugars from plant-based feedstocks has become its own specialty. Canergy, Genomatica, and Gevo have partnered with Beta Renewables , which is a joint venture between the engineering firm Chemtex, owned by Italian chemical maker Mossi & Ghisolfi; private equity firm Texas Pacific; and enzyme maker Novozymes. The biobased chemical makers are interested in Beta Renewables’ process for breaking down cellulose with steam and enzymatic treatment to release sugars. Beta Renewables is already using the process to produce ethanol from wheat straw and A. donax at its commercial-scale biorefinery in Crescentino, Italy. Chemtex plans to build a facility in Clinton, N.C., that will run primarily on a mix of energy crops that includes A. donax and use the Beta Renewables technology. Beta Renewables says its process can deliver sugar from biomass for 10 cents per lb, a substantial discount from today’s corn-derived sugars, which cost around 18–20 cents per lb, notes Michele Rubino, the company’s chief operating officer. That is a price that pleases Gevo’s CEO, Patrick R. Gruber. “I hope he’s right. To make it big we will want cellulosic sugar,” he says. “To get more carbon per unit of land is better for everyone.” Gevo makes isobutyl alcohol from corn-based sugar. The output of Gevo’s first plant, in Luverne, Minn., is being used as a solvent and in jet fuel for the U.S. Air Force, but isobutyl alcohol is also a candidate to be an intermediate for p -xylene in Coca-Cola’s project to make 100% biobased soda bottles. Biobased chemical maker Myriant is working to adapt its organisms to squirt out succinic acid on a diet of cellulosic sugar, which contains both five- and six-carbon molecules. However, Alif Saleh, Myriant’s vice president of sales and marketing, says chemical industry customers have not yet demanded a switch away from corn sugar. Poet-DSM is contracting with farmers to obtain 285,000 tons of corn stover for its 25 million-gal-per-year plant. The companies need lots of local growers, so they have started a major outreach campaign , including advertising on local radio stations . DuPont plans to collect stover from a 30-mile radius for its similarly sized facility in Nevada, Iowa. Neither firm has disclosed its cost to make sugar. An alternative is to grow biomass on purpose by planting energy crops on agricultural land that cannot be economically used for food crops. That so-called marginal land may be ideal for some types of energy crops, particularly perennial grasses. By not shifting land use away from food production, companies can also defuse much of the concern about the impact of biobased fuels and chemicals on the food supply—the crux of the food-versus-fuel debate. “For us, having a base load of a dedicated energy crop is a pretty nice way to set up the supply chain,” Rubino argues. “It gives us high density, high yields, and requires less land. We base the facility off of that and take additional locally available residues from agriculture or mills.” The relatively modest amount of land needed to grow dedicated energy crops is appealing to biobased chemical makers. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, A. donax should produce as much as 15 dry tons of biomass per acre. In contrast, DuPont estimates it will collect 2 tons of corn cobs, leaves, and stems per acre. Of course, that land also produces corn. Obtaining feedstock can be further simplified by contracting with companies that control large amounts of land or biomass. In July, Beta Renewables signed a long-term agreement with Murphy-Brown, a livestock subsidiary of Smithfield Foods that is arranging for energy crops to be grown on land where hog farmers spray animal waste. The high-yielding perennial grass crops will help take up the excess nitrogen in the waste. Similarly, cellulosic sugar firm Renmatix has signed a development agreement with UPM, a pulp and paper firm, to develop sugars from UPM’s woody biomass. Renmatix CEO Mike Hamilton says the most cost-effective biobased chemicals will be manufactured on a site near the feedstock, perhaps at a pulp and paper mill. “If people are planning to ship low-value biomass around the country, that is not an effective process,” Hamilton says. “If you can assemble the end-to-end value chain, that is where the economics are optimized to compete with fossil-fuel chemicals.” Hamilton and other biobased chemical makers know that newly abundant natural gas is challenging the economics of their business. Indeed, the rise of shale gas will create biobased winners and losers, experts say. “What biobased chemical makers should focus on is the higher carbon chain lengths that you don’t get in natural gas,” Frost & Sullivan’s Balmer advises. Two- and three-carbon biobased chemicals, in contrast, will struggle to be competitive because petrochemical versions can be made from natural gas. “The rise of natural gas is a fascinating situation,” Genomatica’s Schilling says. “In our case, we benefit because of the products we make.” The firm has developed sugar-based routes to butadiene, which is used to make synthetic rubber, and to 1,4-butanediol, a raw material for urethanes, plasticizers, and coatings. The petrochemical industry has historically made 1,4-butanediol, butadiene, and other four-carbon chemicals by processing by-products from ethylene facilities that consume crude-oil-based feedstocks. But ethylene plants that run on ethane and propane extracted from natural gas produce a much smaller C 4 stream. In the past few years, experts say, prices for 1,4-butanediol and butadiene have significantly increased, and the trend should continue for the foreseeable future. Still, traditional companies aren’t going to cede territory to biobased chemical makers without a fight. For example, one company, TPC Group, is planning to make butadiene via butane dehydrogenation at a plant it owns in Houston. And the seven giant shale-gas-based petrochemical plants that have been announced for the U.S. are going to flood the market with chemicals of all sorts. At Renmatix, competing with chemicals made from shale gas has been on Hamilton’s mind lately, but he believes he is on the right side. “First, natural gas is not renewable. Second, it is also a volatile commodity, whereas biobased materials are significantly more reliable. Where there is competition, the least volatile, more long-term option will win.” [+]Enlarge Credit: POET-DSM (corn stover), Wikimedia Commons (grain sorghum), Beta Renewables (Giant reed), GreenWood Tree Farm Fund (hybrid poplar), USDA (energy cane, napier grass), Shutterstock (switchgrass) Chemical & Engineering News Continue reading
Tilbury Power Plant Closes After Biomass Grant Refused
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/50907714-0374-11e3-b871-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2bqG9g4oW By Guy Chazan One of Britain’s oldest power stations will close on Tuesday after the government refused to award it a subsidy to switch from coal to biomass. RWE npower, the energy supplier, said it had taken the “difficult decision” to shut down Tilbury on the river Thames in Essex after the government said a project to convert it to biomass was ineligible for its new low-carbon support mechanism. The decision brings the curtain down on a plant that has been generating electricity for 46 years and casts a shadow over Britain’s plans to source a growing proportion of its power from wood pellets. Tilbury B was scheduled to close under an EU environmental measure known as the Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD). Under the legislation, Tilbury was allocated a quota of 20,000 hours of operation from January 1, 2008. In 2011, RWE decided to switch it to biomass for the remainder of its LCPD hours, due to end at midnight on Tuesday. RWE had hoped to convert the plant from coal to biomass, which would have given it an extra 10-12 years of life. But after the Department of Energy and Climate Change decided the project was ineligible for its low-carbon energy subsidy, the “contract for difference”, RWE said the plan was “no longer economically viable”. The decision will be a blow to the biomass industry but will be welcomed by environmentalists, who have argued that increasing demand for wood pellets as a feedstock for biomass plants could lead to the destruction of biodiverse forests, as more land is taken up for tree plantations. A fire at the Tilbury biomass plant in February damaged storage units holding thousands of tonnes of wood pellets, weeks after the facility began commercial production. Continue reading
How To Get Sustainable Forestry Right
12 August 2013 How to get sustainable forestry right Mark Brown Professor of Forestry Operations at University of the Sunshine Coast DISCLOSURE STATEMENT Mark Brown is affiliated with Institute of Foresters Australia (IFA). We can develop a logging industry that works for everyone. Flickr/Ta Ann: Behind the veneer Australian forestry is shifting: in recent months some states have moved to log less, some more. More logging brings protests about environmental values; less, complaints about how it will affect the state’s economy. But there is a way to extract timber sustainably, and keep everyone happy. Different sides to the forestry story Tasmania is transitioning native forests to non-timber-producing reserves. Meanwhile in Queensland native forests that were to be removed from timber production may now be reopened to forestry. The harvest in Tasmania and Queensland is largely driven by a small portion of wood going to high-quality, high-value products like flooring and furniture, which can’t be made from plantation timber. The problem is that sustainable forest management, by its very nature, is a field that can be highly divisive. In 2004, Heiner Schanz from the University of Freiberg reviewed the literature on sustainable forest management and found more than 14 different definitions. He noted that controversy should almost be expected. Any one definition of sustainable forestry valued one of the five dimensions of forest management (ecological, economic, social, temporal and spatial) at the expense of others. Competing ideologies of how forests should be managed has led to conflict in Tasmania Flickr/Ta Ann: Behind the veneer In my experience, responsible forest managers and environmental groups often want the same thing. Both seek to have a healthy, productive, vibrant and diverse forest for future generations. The difference tends to emerge with economic expectations. Forest managers see the extraction of timber as a cornerstone of sustainable forest management. Environmentalists see it as the main destructive force for all the potential forest values. Learning from the past In industrialised nations like Canada and Australia, concerns about the forest damage and devastation caused by timber harvesting and extraction are largely linked to practices from decades ago. You will be hard-pressed to find a forest manager who won’t openly acknowledge these past mistakes. But management of these operations was based on the knowledge, technology and social interest of the time, all of which have since improved. We have better forestry today. I have even seen a number of examples in recent years where forest harvesting activities have been used to correct past mistakes. For example , management plans and harvest operations in Germany try to return forest biodiversity to the state it was in decades or even centuries ago. Over the past century, forest management favoured certain species in the mixed forests in Germany’s Bavaria. Over the last few decades, forest management has promoted the growth of those under-represented species. The economic value is still important but clearly being managed in balance with other forest values. Some environmental groups in Victoria have acknowledged the potential for sustainable forest management. The Wombat State Forest was over-exploited in the past, and was placed in reserve as a community forest in the early 2000s. It has become a focal point for regeneration of native forests. Community groups advocating for the protection and regeneration of that forest do not want to see it go back to traditional timber production use. But when plans to eliminate timber cutting entirely were raised, many of those groups indicated that active forestry interventions were critical to rebuilding the ecological, environmental and social values of that forest. Even with the problems caused by past forest management, many of the forested areas identified in Tasmania for protection as “high conservation value forests” have been harvested in the past. Some would argue they are in such good shape as a result of good sustainable forest management. Sweden has managed its forests for economic gain and environmental values. -bjornsphoto-/Flickr Can we get it right? I believe native forests can be sustainably managed with timber extraction. This balance can give a region a thriving forest industry while sustaining and enhancing the many other values we have for forests in our society. Examples around the world show that forests can be managed to deliver the economic values of timber for construction, fibre for pulp and paper, and increasingly as a feedstock for renewable chemicals and energy . Finland and Sweden not only have sustained and grown their traditional timber industries but are emerging as world leaders in renewable energy from biomass. And they are still considered to have some of the most pristine landscapes in the world. I have a small family property in Canada that has been owned by our family since the original settlement of the area. Over the years it has provided timber to the mill, but still been a favourite spot of the community for hunting, fishing and other recreation activities. It is well on track to provide the same for future generations. As the contrasting policies in Queensland and Tasmania play out it will present many research opportunities related to the five dimensions of sustainable forest management. I for one will watch with great interest how the regional development in the forested regions of Queensland stack up to those in Tasmania. Continue reading
