Bringing Biomass to Liquids and Gas to Liquids Down to Size

The Group's technology makes viable the distributed production of fuels from gas biomass, coal and waste. Microchannel processing is emerging at a time of the discovery and development of vast shale gas reserves in North America, increasing focus on the utilization of stranded and associated gas and the emergence of biomass-to-liquids (BTL) and waste-to-liquids (WTL) as a viable option for the sustainable supply of transportation fuel in the decades ahead. In addition, the growing political, geological and environmental complexity of oil exploration and production has focussed attention on the monetization of associated and stranded gas reserves and cessation of flaring, for which distributed GTL is suited, the company says. _GCC

What you see in the image above is a Velocys / Oxford Catalysts microchannel gas to liquids technology. It is an award-winning technology which promises to turn at least 1 billion boe worth of wasted flared natural gas into valuable liquid fuels, each year. Probably considerably more.

The same technology can turn biomass, coal, or any carbonaceous material or waste into valuable liquid fuels. Better yet, Oxford Catalysts is making progress in turning itself from a research group into a commercial company.

The Oxford Catalysts Group has raised £21 million (US$34 million) before expenses from the conditional placing of 26,250,000 new shares, which will be used to accelerate its ongoing transition from a research and development organization to a commercial product company. In particular, additional staff will be hired to support its commercial and manufacturing operation, the Group’s supply chain capabilities will be bolstered and investments will made in development and testing infrastructure.

This is the latest step in the Oxford Catalysts Group’s drive to commercialize its technology for the production of synthetic fuels from conventional fossil fuels and renewable sources such as biowaste, primarily through its microchannel process technology platform which is able to accelerate chemical reactions by 10- to 1000-fold. As a result, microchannel Fischer Tropsch (FT) processes can operate economically when producing just 500 barrels per day of oil equivalent (boe) from a wide variety of carbon-containing wastes, while achieving greater productivities than for conventional FT reactors (earlier post). _GCC

An extra billion boe per year from otherwise-flared natural gas is nothing to sneeze at. Neither is the potential for on-site gtl, btl, and ctl which small portable microchannel-FT units would provide. The rules for fuels are about to change. Peak oil panic will then go the way of the dinosaurs and Y2K willies.

Don't Fear Peak Oil
As you can see, the world is not exactly running out of oil reserves. In fact with amazing breakthroughs in the refining of bitumens from oil sands, global economically recoverable oil reserves are due for another big jump.

All the same, wise people expand their options as much as they feel they need to and can do. See more developments in energy at Al Fin Energy.

This article was published earlier at Al Fin, the Next Level

Why Johnny Can't Predict the Future

All Images: BP Energy Outlook_via_BitToothEnergy
Although the human brain is thought to be a prediction engine, there are limits to the predictive precision and accuracy of even the best human brains and brain products, eg computer models. If the brain or model uses faulty assumptions and data, the output prediction will fail.

BP recently released its annual Energy Outlook report, which projects the world energy future to the year 2030. The report was parsed most helpfully by the Bit Tooth Energy blog, with several images extracted from pdf to html format.

A number of things about the imaged predictions tend to jump off the page:

• The extremely slow predicted growth for nuclear energy
• The rate of growth of energy utilisation for undeveloped countries
• The rate of expansion predicted for "biofuels"

...and a few other things best kept for future examination.

Notice the flat rate of growth for nuclear in the plot above. The best way to understand that prediction is to understand how much of a threat clean, cheap, and abundant nuclear energy poses to the petroleum industry overall. The rapid development of small modular reactors and molten salt reactors in particular, promise to make available huge quantities (trillions of barrels of oil equivalent) of bitumens and kerogens at a much lower cost than are presently feasible. Nuclear energy would also allow oil producing countries to export more oil which would otherwise be spent on cooling, desalination, and other electric power uses.

Notice the apparently rapid rise in biofuels supplies in the graph above. This prediction came as something of a surprise to many readers of the report, although Al Fin energy analysts believe that the prediction is a self-serving underestimate -- although not as blatant an underestimate as BP's nuclear power growth estimate.

Petroleum companies feel that they can live with ethanol as a fuel additive, and ethanol supply is mainly what is being predicted to rise in the graph above. Unfortunately for BP, by 2030 ethanol will be among the least of the biofuels. Ethanol is far inferior to butanol as a fermented biofuel. By 2020, methods for mass production of bio-butanol are very likely to begin to push bio-ethanol aside. In the same fashion, advanced hydro-treating of lipids along with Fischer-Tropsch fuels will produce far more valuable commercially available fuels than ethanol by 2020. Finally, microbial hydrocarbons should be ready to begin scaling up to industrial levels by 2020, with significant market impact by 2030.

So while BP predicts that biofuels as a whole will provide about 10% of liquid fuels by 2030, Al Fin analysts predict that (non-alcohol) microbial fuels alone will provide at least 10% of liquids by that date. Advanced hydrotreated biodiesels, F-T fuels, other advanced catalytic biofuels from bio-syngas and pyrolytis products, plus bio-alcohols will add at least another 10 to 20% of total liquids by 2030.

If you can imagine the impact that replacing 20% of petro-fuels by advanced renewable bio-fuels would have on world markets, you will have a small idea of how the established and highly centralised markets will be shaken by this simple trend alone. If you add to that the impacts from expanding nuclear, expanding shale oil & gas resources, and increasing use of coal to liquids and gas to liquids, and expansion of Canada's oil sands and Venzuela's heavy oils (after Chavez is ejected) -- your image will be closer to the truth, although still a likely underestimate of what is possible.

The US President is very strongly influenced by members of his administration with roots in the environmental movement. The environmental movement has been predicting catastrophic resource depletion, with associated economic ruin and mass human dieoff, for several decades now. Far wiser persons who have pointed out the fatal flaws in the environmentalist's predictive process have been largely ignored and scoffed at. And so we see US national energy and environmental policies being set and enforced by persons enmeshed in a system of thought that has invariably led to failed predictions of doom. The same is true for most European and Anglospheric nations.

If the developed world becomes hog-tied by regulations spurred by visions of doom and resource scarcity, we will fall into a self-fulfilling prophecy of energy starvation -- political peak oil. Political peak oil combined with the demographic contraction of Europeans, Koreans, Japanese, and other advanced cultures of high achievement -- the groups who have largely spurred technological improvement and the environmental improvements of the world from the mid 1900s onward -- the world will indeed be plunged into a serious state of turmoil.

Those optimistic predictions BP made regarding the rapid energy use growth in the undeveloped world, will surely fail in an environment of political peak oil, falling demographic global "smart fraction", and increased autocratic controls over most economic aspects of every person's life. The current president of the US is setting policies which lead unerringly toward that destination, and he is joined by most of the political leadership of the developed world.

Al Fin futurologists do not expect things to work out the way that the US revolutionary-in-chief intends. That is a good thing. Because there are actually revolutions which can lead the planet in a good direction. Revolutions which Mr. Obama will never be capable of comprehending.

It is not important that BP or any other institution or conglomerate be able to predict the future accurately, as a whole. It is only important that enough persons understand the mechanisms which drive innovation and human economic activity. Even if the masses continue to tend toward an Idiocracy, the competent cores of individuals with the better ideas will find ways to network and interact with each other.

Are Baboons Running the Environmental Movement?

Source

Sorry, the title above is unkind -- to baboons. In reality, you would have to remove at least one half a baboon's brain for the primate to be as unintelligent as the average (faux) environmentalist. One of the latest of the host of environmental faux-llies is the organised movement against waste-to-energy gasification plants. Wisconsin legislators are trying to attract a gasification waste-to-energy plant to Milwaukee. But (faux) environmental organisations have banded together to stop them:

Earlier this year, the state Legislature passed a law that would qualify the waste-to-energy system as a renewable energy technology complying with the state’s green-power mandate. At the time, Gov. Jim Doyle said the technology has real potential to help us address the growing need for clean renewable power."

But bill was opposed by environmentalists who objected to the trash-to-energy project and its potential impact on air pollution. Environmental groups that are actively opposing these types of projects in other states have branded them as “incinerators in disguise.”

Josh Morby, a spokesman for Alliance Federated Energy, said that characterization is unfair because no incineration is involved in the plasma gasification process.

Under this technology, the municipal waste is not burned but is instead converted into a syngas that can be used to generate electricity, steam or biofuels. _JSOnline

Gasification -- particularly ultra-hot plasma gasification such as is being planned for Milwaukee -- reduces waste to its component atoms and plasma. Environmentalists may lack the brain power to understand the difference between simple incineration and plasma gasification, but most humans would perceive the distinction fairly quickly.

In New York state, SUNY Cobleskill plans to install a gasification plant on campus as part of a research and training program for the new Environmental and Energy Technology Program. Not a bad idea, given how much garbage is generated at the average institution of higher indoctrination learning. But SUNY plans to turn the gasification program into a 4 year degree! Sorry, SUNY, but while 4 years may be required for a rigorous thermochemical / thermomechanical waste and biomass to energy program, learning to tweak and operate one single gasifier should not take nearly so long.

Tampa Electric will be installing a 250 MW IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle) demonstration plant in partnership with RTI. Not a bad idea. But what genius is forcing them to incorporate CO2 sequestration as part of the demonstration? Don't they know they will lose up to half the generated energy and do no one any good at all by sequestering the plant food otherwise known as CO2? Oh, yes -- the idiots geniuses at Obama - Pelosi's DOE!

And to prove that gasification is nothing if not versatile, companies in Israel, Colorado, and elsewhere are developing solar powered gasification plants, using concentrated sunlight to gasify biomass and waste.

Faux environmentalists, deep down, want to reduce the human population of Earth by at least 90%. You do not expect these neo-Luddites to be looking for solutions to real world problems such as potential energy shortages. No, they oppose every form of energy that might possibly work -- including nuclear, biomass gasification, IGCC for clean coal, shale gas, and so on.

It requires a lot of energy to support heavily sub-specialised civilisations such as those in the developed world. If your goal is to reduce the human population of the planet well below 1 billion members, cutting off the energy supply to civilisation would be one of the more obvious steps. Clearly, these quasi- half-baboons will not hesitate to take that step and any others they feel necessary to reach their goals.

Cross-posted to Al Fin Energy

Gasify Your World

Image SourceThe technology for advanced plasma gasification of garbage and hazardous waste was developed at MIT and Pacific Northwest National Lab back in the 1990s. With plasma gasification, you can eliminate waste and create useful energy and fuels in one fell swoop. Can you say, "peak garbage?"

....the technology can handle all types of waste, but some can be processed more efficiently than others. Hazardous wastes, they say, are prime candidates for plasma gasification.

"For this sort of process to work, we're focusing on waste materials that have high value in energy content," Vaillancourt said. "Smaller, more segregated waste streams, when they're sorted and prepped, optimize energy production. ... Medical wastes, shredded autos, hazardous wastes are prime candidates."

The S4 technology is currently scaled to handle 25 tons a day, Surma said. That scale is small on residential or commercial waste fronts but "perfect" for regional medical-waste processing, he said. Eventually, the company plans to process 125 tons of waste a day. _NYT_Also more here_and informative video here

Gasification technology can be adapted to turn any carbonaceous material into fuel. The technology is being adapted across much of the globe. From exclusive harbour-side communities in Victoria, BC, to the Green River oil shales of Wyoming, to the mean coal fields of Queensland, Australia, carbon is being converted from less useful to more useful forms.

Adapted from an earlier story at Al Fin Energy

China Outsmarts Obama / Pelosi Carbon Reich

In a brilliant feat of legerdemain, China has demonstrated its own adroitness on the world energy scene. Anticipating the carbon-phobic stance of the incoming Obama / Pelosi reich, China has laid the foundation for supremacy in clean-coal IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle) technology. Coal gasification is a critical component of any intelligent "bridge energy policy" meant to span the gap in time between the "cheap oil age", and the "abundant clean sustainable energy age".

Coal is an abundant energy resource worldwide, and using IGCC technology coal can be cleaner than most other current large-scale forms of energy production. But US carbon-hysteric politicians in the Obama / Pelosi reich are afraid of coal, and are unlikely to allow most large scale coal gasification projects to proceed. That carbon-phobic stance leaves the door wide open for any nation willing to develop this vital bridge energy technology.

The oil and gas giant BP reinforced China's position as a clean-coal technology leader last month, by establishing a $73 million research center in Shanghai with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to help commercialize technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and gasification. In another sign of the country's suddenly bold role in green technology, China's battery giant BYD launched the world's first mass-produced plug-in hybrid vehicle yesterday.

Underpinning China's potential leadership in carbon-neutral coal power is broad expertise with gasification. By 2010, China will have installed 29 gasification projects since 2004, compared with zero in the United States, according to the Gasification Technologies Council, a trade group based in Arlington, VA. Most of these Chinese projects turn coal into synthesis gas (or syngas)--a blend of carbon monoxide and hydrogen--to feed catalysts that synthesize chemicals and fuels. IGCC technology uses the same syngas to drive turbines and generate electricity with far less pollution than conventional coal plants. For example, mercury and soot levels are close to those seen at natural gas-fired plants, while carbon dioxide comes out in a pure stream that should be easier to capture and sequester.

...The project plans to start up a 250-megawatt IGCC plant in Tianjin in 2010 using a novel gasifier designed by the Thermal Power Research Institute in Xi'an; the plant will also supply some syngas and heat to local chemical plants. GreenGen plans to catapult the output of the gasifier design, from a 36-tons-per-day pilot plant, directly to commercial scale of 2,000 tons per day.

And GreenGen is already preparing to scale up further: in April, GreenGen and Tianjin officials signed an agreement for two 400-megawatt IGCC units. Meanwhile, Chinese utility firm Huaneng, GreenGen's majority stakeholder, started up a CCS pilot project at its Beijing coal power plant this summer. _TechReview

With the experience and expertise of building and operating large scale IGCC projects under their belts, Chinese enterprises will be in the driver's seat, energy-wise. As Europe and the Anglosphere grow more carbon-phobic and energy-starved, China will be the only one experienced enough with IGCC and "clean coal" to bail out the foolish carbon hysterics.

Of course if the west pursues advanced generation nuclear fission, or gets lucky with scalable nuclear fusion, coal can be used for making chemicals and polymers instead of energy and fuel -- sometime in the next 30 or 40 years. In the meantime, several decades will need to be spanned with some form of plentiful energy source.

China is betting on a sure thing, the same "sure thing" at which the Obama / Pelosi reich turns its nose up. In fact, the O / P reich turns its nose up at a lot of things, including oil sands, oil shale, coal, nuclear, offshore oil, arctic oil, and almost any other form of energy you can think of.

Solar thermal and geothermal are two likely sources of energy with big futures, which are also sustainable. In 20 or 30 years, they could both be a hugely important part of the energy portfolio. Wind is too unreliable for anyone but airheads to rely on it. Photovoltaics are still waiting for large scale energy storage that is affordable. Even biomass -- the best renewable -- will take decades to scale up to its potential.

Any way you slice it, coal gasification (IGCC is the best form), is a very good bet. You can judge the good players and the poor players by how they react to that technology.

Peak Oil: Meet Cellulosic Biofuels 2030!

German researchers have published a study revealing that by 2030 cellulosic biofuels using pyrolysis and gasification can provide transportation fuels to meet global needs using land not suitable for growing food.

According to Prof. Jürgen O. Metzger from Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, and Prof. Aloys Hüttermann from the Universität Göttingen, a global energy supply based on biomass grown to generate electricity and produce fuel is both a sustainable and economical scenario, contrary to some other current research. Their findings are published online this week in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

The solution, according to Metzger and Hüttermann, is to plant fast-growing trees on degraded areas, and harvest the biomass for energy usage. This afforestation would not compete with the need for arable land for food production. The authors argue that the investment required for afforestation and transformation of the biomass to electrical energy, heat, fuels and chemical feedstock is actually sustainable and not more, probably even less, than what would need to be invested in infrastructure for non-sustainable fossil energy.

For their global overall estimations for transportation fuels, the two used the conversion of the lignocellulosic biomass to biooil (“bioslurry”) via pyrolysis and its subsequent gasification to a syngas followed by Fischer–Tropsch synthesis (biomass-to-liquids, BTL). _GCC

These conclusions suggest that there is no "food vs fuels" issue, and that current technology can solve the global transportation fuels demand in the intermediate future.

Al Fin feels that this study did not go far enough, since huge areas Earth's surface can be used to grow ocean biomass and haplophytic organisms on salty soil. In addition, the potential for growing abundant algae in desert areas using saltwater will multiply potential biofuels much more.

Further development of plant genetics, chemical catalysts, other synthetic and separation technologies, etc. will be helpful--but not necessary for biofuels to play a huge role in the future energy menu.

Previously published at Al Fin Energy

Gasification: Turning Any Carbon Into Any Fuel

High temperature, oxygen-free gasification turns carbon sources such as coal or biomass mostly into gaseous H2 and CO (syngas). These two gases can be converted via either chemical or biological means into a wide range of fuels--including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, ethanol, methanol, etc etc. These carbon-to-fuel processes can be made very clean, with virtually no toxic byproducts remaining after the conversion process. Brian Westenhaus reports on progress coming directly from the long work of the Gas Technology Institute (GTI) in Illinois.

The GTI has been researching gasification for over 50 years and now has extensive experience in designing, constructing and operating gasification systems. Two systems are patented, and licensed now. One is coal gasification and the other is biomass gasification. Multifuel plants that combine the two are now commercialized and built and building in Finland and China for a world total of 4 industrial sized gasification units. These actually work with tens of millions of dollars behind the projects and serious production coming to consumer markets..... _NewEnergyandFuel

Brian goes on to describe several gasification ventures, and their various ongoing commercial projects. A very nice summary update.

Canadian company Nexterra is a subcontractor for a gasification plant at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in the US.

The Nexterra system will replace ORNL's existing natural gas steam plant by converting locally sourced woody biomass into clean burning syngas. The syngas will produce 60,000 lbs/hr of saturated steam to displace 75 MMBtu/hr of fossil fuel traditionally used to heat the campus. Once operational, the system will reduce campus fossil fuel consumption by 80 per cent.

Nexterra is supplying the complete gasification system from fuel handling and storage through to the exhaust stack. Engineering design is underway and the system will be delivered in late 2009. _Biotech

As Brian relates above, gasification projects are being built around the world, at accelerating rates. Coal gasification to liquid fuel provides the option of producing the full range of liquid fuels.

Small gasification and refining plants located at the coal mines themselves, provide a much more economical and clean way of turning low-grade coal into cleaner, more versatile fuels. It will take time to build the infrastructure, but expect significant (around 5%) displacement of petroleum by gasification within 5 years. As experience builds and technology improves, the growth rate should accelerate.

Coal deposits exist to provide hundreds of years of production. Biomass production is essentially limitless, when taking into account marginal lands and coastal onshore and offshore biomass production.

Coal to Liquids: Smart Coal

Coal can be converted to liquids profitably as long as the oil price remains over 80$ a barrel. Brian Westenhaus has an article today on coal-to-liquids (CTL) that looks at some of the details.

The developed world can solve its oil and gas problems with F-T. All the facts and sources are enough to make an oil exporter very nervous, indeed....

...even today with oil coming back to near $100 a barrel the F-T processes can be highly competitive. It’s the carbon and hydrogen available in the feedstocks that make pricing work or not. Coal at $50 a ton, as shown by Sasol can yield 1.25 barrels of oil equivalent, can be worth twice the feedstock price. South Africa found that Sasol profits got so high that excess profit taxes were levied.

In the U.S. several companies have started coal to liquid process experiments that range from pilot plants to commercial installations. The big oil firms like Shell, Exxon and StatoilHydro are already running in South Africa, Malaysia and New Zealand closing in on 60,000 barrels a day of production.

The little guys like American Clean Coal Fuels who is developing a 30,000-barrel per day combined biomass and coal plant in Oakland Illinois uses carbon capture and sequestration to keep the unused CO2 from the atmosphere.

Baard Energy is building a 53,000-barrel per day combined biomass and coal plant in Wellsville Ohio with a market for the excess CO2 headed to oil field enhanced recovery. _NewEnergyandFuel

The CO2 produced can be piped to an algae oil operation conveniently located next to the CTL plant. Biomass can be easily integrated into the gasification and F-T process as well, providing a multi-feedstock, multi-product operation.

Biomass Gasification On The Move

Image Source

Biomass gasification to syngas is becoming the most efficient means of turning waste biomass and garbage into electrical energy. In Iraq, portable gasifier/generators will be undergoing field tests by the US military throughout the summer until August. The use of portable on-site gasifier/generators in Iraq should cut down on the military fuel convoys that have been subject to ambush and deadly IED attacks.

In Washington DC, Auburn University students have been demonstrating their own portable gasifier-on-a-trailer system to the public and hopefully to clueless US legislators.

Auburn University is showing off its mobile bioenergy unit in the nation’s capitol this week, converting wood chips into electricity on the back of a truck near the National Mall.

The mobile unit, used to promote awareness of biomass energy technologies, converts wood chips, switchgrass and other agricultural byproducts into gas, which can be used to generate electricity or converted into liquid fuel. __Source

Gasification of waste biomass and garbage creates H2 and CO, or syngas. Syngas, once cleaned, can either be:

1. burned in gas turbines to generate electricity
2. fired to create steam--which can then be used to drive steam turbines to generate electricity.
3. fermented to make alcohols
4. run through a F-T process with catalysis to make a wide range of hydrocarbons.

The most economical and high yield methods of performing all of the above tasks--and likely others--are being intensively worked out by scientists, engineers, and inventors around the world.

Vinod Khosla is only one of the shrewd financial backers of this particular form of renewable energy. Some of the world's largest oil companies and automobile manufacturers are also jumping on the gasification wagon.

Previously published at Al Fin Energy
H/T Checkbiotech.com

The Future of BioEnergy I: Biomass to Liquid (BTL)

This image illustrates one reason why biomass to liquid (BTL) approaches to producing biofuels will quickly surpass current food-to-fuel government mandated schemes. BTL is simply more efficient, does not use food as feedstock, and does not require high quality food cropland to grow the feedstock. BTL is an example of biomass gasification to liquid fuel, which has been discussed here at Al Fin many times.The particular version of BTL highlighted here is the Choren venture, which is heavily backed by Shell Oil, and partnered by Mercedes and Volkswagen. Here is more on Choren, from Spiegel:

€180 million ($285 million) has been injected into the Choren venture, says Tom Blades, who has led the company for the past four years. The savvy Brit, who formerly worked for the oilfield drilling giant Schlumberger, turned out to be just the man for one of the company’s major diplomatic missions: An oil company had to come on board, ideally one that was a leader in green technology.

It took Blades a little over a year. In the summer of 2005, Shell acquired a stake in the company. The oil corporation contributed a key component in the refining process, the Fischer-Tropsch technology, which converts the synthesis gas into a BTL (biomass-to-liquid) fuel.

Researchers at the oil conglomerate appear to be completely convinced: “BTL is a dream fuel,” says Wolfgang Warnecke, CEO of Shell Global Solutions in Hamburg, "the best of all the biofuels."

Toward the end of the year, the plant at Freiberg will go into operation, fed primarily with old, untreated bits of lumber and other scrap wood. It will take approximately five tons of dry material to produce one ton of fuel. The small refinery will consume nearly 70,000 tons of waste wood a year. “It should be pretty easy for us to get our hands on this amount,” says Michael Deutmeyer, who is responsible for supplying biomass to Choren.

It will be considerably more challenging to keep up with the needs for raw materials at the full-scale refineries Choren is planning to build. The first of these larger plants should go into service in 2012 in the eastern German city of Schwedt, right near the border with Poland. The planned facility will produce 200,000 tons of BTL diesel a year -- and devour a million tons of wood and other dry material. Waste products alone won’t be enough to satisfy this hearty appetite.

To meet this increased demand, Deutmeyer is planning to plant trees. Wood is the most suitable raw material for biofuel processing. Three years ago, just east of Schwerin, the capital of the federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Choren converted 20 hectares (50 acres) into experimental “rapid sapling-to-sawmill plantations,” where willows and other fast-growing trees are flourishing.

Such cultivation, says Deutmeyer, requires significantly smaller amounts of pesticides and fertilizers than crops like rapeseed. This type of forestry also reaps considerable public subsidies. The Ministry of Agriculture in the state of Brandenburg has already indicated that it will provide government funds for the plantations destined to supply the wood for a plant to be built in Schwedt. Up to 45 percent of the investments for saplings, preparations and soil-improvement measures will derive their financing from state coffers.

The experimental fields in Mecklenburg have already been harvested once, the trees reduced to wood chips by a special chopper from Sweden. The results look very promising. Annual yields of up to 20 tons of dry material per hectare can be harvested from good soils. This would work out to a top production rate of four metric tons -- or 5,000 liters -- of BTL diesel. Until now, rapeseed fields that are comparable in area have only yielded 1,500 liters.

With numbers like these, BTL is the first plant-based liquid fuel that could constitute a viable replacement for fossil fuels while not directly competing with food production. According to the FNR, up to six million hectares of land in Germany could be used to grow energy-producing plants. This corresponds to over a third of the area currently used for agriculture. The agency says this acreage could form the basis for BTL products to satisfy a quarter of Germany’s domestic fuel needs. On a Europe-wide scale, the replacement potential could even reach as high as 40 percent, owing primarily to the vast areas available in the new EU states in Eastern Europe. __Spiegel

Although this particular approach to large scale biomass-to-liquid-fuel is better financed than most, and more advanced in terms of production schedule, it is by no means an isolated example of BTL by gasification. As knowledge of this obviously superior approach to bio-fuels and bio-energy slowly percolates up through the layers of bureaucracy in government, academia, and the media, perhaps you will finally hear about it in the mainstream North American press. But don't hold your breath. Currently, the media is too busy scapegoating biofuels to waste its time looking at genuine solutions.

Biomass Gasification: Plasma and Otherwise

Image Source

Gasification of biomass promises to be the best route for small to medium scale regional energy independence. For the purposes of most people, thinking locally and regionally is far more intelligent than trying to solve all the world's or nation's energy problems in one fell swoop. Intelligent bio-energy is both accessible and affordable. It should be at the top of the list for areas such as North America that are blessed by a prolific biosphere.

Qi-Bioenergy blog has a good assortment of April 1st postings that are not jokes. They are part of the patchwork quilt of approaches to bio-energy that can take a tremendous financial burden off of many regions of the continent (and world) while pumping in much needed financial stimulus the old-fashioned way--letting the market work.
Gasification is currently the best approach to start off the process of biomass to bio-energy. Plasma gasification may be the best all-purpose approach for the widest variety of feedstocks. Here is a description of Skygas, one of many approaches to gasification:

Skygas™ is the code name for an innovative technology for the disposal/gasification of carbonaceous wastes. It is a newly developed electric arc conversion process that converts solid and semi-solid waste into clean, medium BTU synthesis gas that can be used for steam production or direct fired gas turbine generation of electric power. The composition of the gas (primarily CO and H2) are useful building block chemicals. They can be taken through well-known chemical processing steps to produce products such as methanol and acetic acid, or downstream chemicals such as formaldehyde, acetic anhydride, vinyl acetate, acetate esters and many others. The reducing gas may also be combined with nitrogen to produce chemicals such as ammonia and urea.

The electric arcs produced in the primary reactor by three electrodes are sufficiently energetic to cause the generation of ionic reactive species by homolytic bond cleavage. Both the carbonaceous materials and the water molecules can be broken into ionic reactive species. These species will react in a chain reaction with other feed molecules to form still more ionic reactive species and cause the breakage of more chemical bonds. The net result of these ionic homolytic reactions is the conversion of the relatively high molecular carbonaceous feed material into low molecular gas products, primarily carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane. ___Skygas__via__Qi-bioenergy

Following the flow diagrams above, the synthesis gas can be either used to drive a gas turbine, to create steam, to make hydrogen, alcohol fuels, gasoline and diesel fuels, or to generate electrical power. The image at the top of this post comes from BRI Energy, which is one of the many small companies at the forefront of developing biomass energy from waste products and other non-food materials.

Recent criticism of bio-energy from Time magazine and other media outlets only serve to emphasize the disconnect between the pioneers and informed observers of bio-energy and the lazy and ignorant media analysts who keep the public in ignorance of this valuable resource. As ligno-cellulose bio-waste resources are more easily converted into useful energy and fuel resources, the usefulness of biomass energy will become more difficult to conceal and obfuscate.

Radical 7000 Degree Celsius Plasma Reactor Converts Hazardous Medical and Radioactive Waste to Energy and Useful Products

Image Source

Garbage and hazardous waste are becoming valuable energy feedstocks, thanks to researchers from Ukraine, Russia, and Israel. Even low level radioactive wastes, medical wastes, and toxic wastes can be converted to useful products and energy, using a new high temperature plasma reactor.

Using a system called plasma gasification melting technology (PGM) developed by scientists from Russia's Kurchatov Institute research center, the Radon Institute in Russia, and Israel's Technion Institute - EER combines high temperatures and low-radioactive energy to transform waste. "We go up to 7,000 degrees centigrade and end at 1,400 centigrade," says Moshe Stern, founder and president of the Ramat Gan-based company. Shrem has said that EER can take low-radioactive, medical and municipal solid waste and produce from it clean energy that "can be used for just about anything including building and paving roads.

Shrem added that EER's waste disposal rector does not harm the environment and leaves no surface water, groundwater, or soil pollution in its wake. The EER reactor combines three processes into one solution: it uses plasma torches to break down the waste; carbon leftovers are then gasified and finally inorganic components are converted to solid waste. The remaining vitrified material is inert and can be cast into molds to produce tiles, blocks or plates for the construction industry.

EER's Karmiel facility (and its other installation in the Ukraine) has a capacity to convert 500 to 1,000 kilograms of waste per hour. Other industry solutions, the company claims, can only treat as much as 50 kilograms per hour and are much more costly.

"We are not burning. This is the key word," Shrem said. "When you burn you produce dioxin. Instead, we vacuum out the oxygen to prevent combustion."

EER then purifies the gas and with it operates turbines to generate electricity. EER produces energy - 70% of which goes back to power the reactor with a 30% excess which can be sold.

"In effect, we are combining two of the most exciting markets in the US - the environment and clean energy," says Stern, "We also reduce the carbon footprint."

The cost for treating and burying low-radioactive nuclear waste currently stands at about $30,000 per ton. The EER process will cost $3,000 per ton and produce only a 1% per volume solid byproduct.__NextEnergyNews

This is but one of many exciting new "garbage to energy" processes coming on line currently, and within the next year or two.

Safe conversion of toxic waste, medical waste, and radioactive waste that also produces energy and useful materials for construction, would appear to be exactly what environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Earth First and WWF would promote. Unfortunately, many of those groups have more mundane monetary and power concerns other than actually making the environment better. Watch and see what they are actually promoting, as opposed to what they ignore. A cleaner, more energetic world may not be what they actually want.

Biomass to Petroleum Equivalent Gold: National Science Foundation Report

Oil has become the new gold in the modern world economy. The US National Science Foundation has discovered what Al Fin has been telling readers: there is gold in biocrude and biofuels.

1. * First, green hydrocarbon fuels are essentially the same as those currently derived from petroleum, except that they are made from biomass. Therefore, it will not be necessary to modify existing infrastructure (e.g. pipelines, engines) and hydrocarbon biorefining processes can be tied into the fuel production systems of existing petroleum refineries.
2. * Second, biomass-based hydrocarbon fuels are energy equivalent to fuels derived from petroleum. In contrast to the lower energy density of E85 flex fuel, there will be no penalty in gas mileage with biomass-based hydrocarbon fuels.
3. * Third, hydrocarbons produced from lignocellulosic biomass are immiscible in water; they self-separate, which eliminates the need for an expensive, energy-consuming distillation step.
4. * Fourth, biomass based hydrocarbon fuels are produced at high temperatures, which allows for faster conversion reactions in smaller reactors. Thus, processing units can be placed close to the biomass source or even transported on truck trailers.
5. * Fifth, the amount of water needed for processing hydrocarbon fuels from biomass can be greatly reduced, compared with the dilute sugar solutions to which enzymes are constrained. This is because organic or heterogeneous catalysts work well in concentrated water solutions or even in the absence of water if ionic liquids are used.
6. * Finally, heterogeneous catalysts are inherently recyclable. So they can be used over the course of months and even years, which significantly reduces costs compared to biological catalysts. The elimination of energy-intensive distillation, the higher reaction rates, and the much smaller process footprints can also lead to lower biofuel costs than are possible using currently available biological pathways for producing cellulosic ethanol.

[Here are the six areas of concentration in the NSF report]

1. * Selective thermal processing of lignocellulosic biomass to produce liquid fuels (bio-oils) in distributed biorefineries.
2. * Utilization of petroleum refining technology for conversion of biomass-derived oxygenates within existing petroleum refineries.
3. * Hydrocarbon production by liquid phase processing of sugars to a heretofore “sleeping giant” intermediate, hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), followed by HMF conversion to “green” diesel and jet fuel.
4. * Process intensification for diesel and gasoline production from synthesis gas (CO and H2) by Fisher-Tropsch synthesis (FTS), which dramatically decreases the economically viable size compared to traditional FTS processes with petroleum derived feedstocks.
5. * Conceptual design of biorefining processes in conjunction with experimental studies at the beginning of research projects to allow rapid development of commercial biofuel technologies.
6. * Design of recyclable, highly active and selective heterogeneous catalysts for biofuel production using advanced nanotechnology, synthesis methods and quantum chemical calculations.___NSF(PDF)___via__Biopact

According to the NSF report, petroleum-equivalent biofuels can be made for the equivalent of US $15 a barrel!

This is energy dynamite, virtually unknown in the mass media--although well known to readers of Al Fin. While bloggers and journalists on all sides of any conceivable debate have joined together in condemning "biofuels", the real story has gone virtually untold. I recommend a close reading of the above linked documents, for anyone who wishes to be in a position to take advantage of the new "gold rush".

We can hope that now that the NSF has given its "official blessing" to this new potential economic oil boom, the media, academia, and mainstream science reporting will finally catch on to what has been happening. After all, most modern people have been psychologically neotenised and academically lobotomised by normal modern upbringing and education. We cannot expect them to be able to think for themselves.
;-)

The Biomass Promise

Biomass energy promises to change many of the rules the energy world has been operating on for over a century. For rural areas, centralised production and distribution of liquid fuels and electric power by mega-energy corporations, will begin giving way to smaller, de-centralised producers and refiners--closer to the end-consumer.

Brazil and India are at the forefront of this energy revolution.

The Brazilian government has unveiled a multi-billion dollar anti-poverty program to provide jobs, electricity and infrastructures in the poorest, rural parts of the country. Bioenergy and biofuels are a key part of the plan, because the sector offers major opportunities for rural development and poverty alleviation. Biofuels create jobs for the country's vast rural populations, improve incomes and livelihoods, and help boost local access to energy. Modern energy is key to health and development, which is why rural electrification is seen as a priority.___Biopact

India has been at the forefront of the utilisation of Jatropha biodiesel village scale agriculture. The small scale approach has worked for many Indian villages, and promises to bring many more villages into the electricity and communications age. But some in the upper reaches of Indian national government, are looking at going big-time in biofuels. They are considering using GM biotech:

"Biotech can solve bio-fuel needs of the world...India, the second biggest producer of sugar, is likely to gain," James said.

Mayee said India is working towards getting technology for developing GM sugarcane with better ethanol output from Brazil.___Checkbiotech

My advice to India is to stick to small and medium scale projects. Trying to outcompete Brazil in cane ethanol is the last thing India should be trying to do. That is obsolete, last century thinking.In the US, West Virginia is a perennially impoverished state. It is also a US state looking closely at using biomass to reduce its dependence on foreign liquid fossil fuels.

The most common biomass resources are residues - agricultural wastes (corn stalks, cereal straws, sugarcane), forest waste (sawdust, pulp waste from paper mills, wood chips) and municipal solid waste (paper towels, newspaper, cardboard and yard waste). These residues make West Virginia, and other U.S. states with strong timber or agricultural industries, the perfect place to develop these homegrown fuels.___Source

Unfortunately, West Virginia's government appears to be another bureaucracy that is stuck on the idea of bio-ethanol as the be-all and end-all of bio-energy. That is the type of "hick thinking" that could keep West Virginia in the impoverished grouping.Converting bio-mass (including waste and garbage) into electricity is the smartest approach to bio-energy. One company that would be worth including in your stock portfolio is Renegy (NASDAQ: RNGY).

Budd Zuckerman, president of Genesis Select, stated, "Renegy is well positioned to address a growing demand for clean, sustainable power, and to lead the biomass to electricity segment of the renewable energy industry in North America. Its first biomass plant is scheduled to come online in the second quarter of 2008 to supply electrical power to Arizona's two leading utility companies. Renegy has also identified and begun to explore multiple additional biomass to electricity project opportunities totaling more than one gigawatt...of power output. In addition to operating a growing portfolio of renewable energy facilities that convert organic waste into electrical power, Renegy has built a world-class fuel aggregation infrastructure and a solid fuel procurement strategy to harvest, collect and transport wood waste material to power existing and future biomass plants.___Source

What is the overall energy promise of biomass? Theoretically, over 90% of world energy needs could be met by sustainable bio-energy.

Initially, the easiest promise to fulfill is at the local level. Regional crops and bio-residues can be matched to appropriate technology bioreactors and small-scale power plants to produce liquid fuels (biodiesel, bio-alcohols, biocrude), gas fuels (methanol), and electricity.

For the larger scale promise, it will take time to grow the infrastructure to rival the enormous infrastructure devoted to petroleum, coal, and gas. But it will be done, incrementally. As long as petro-fuel prices remain high (above US $70/barrel) the development of the infrastructure for bio-energy will continue, and accelerate.

Image credit to zero.no, fes.ng, and World Bank

Biomass-->Pyrolysis-->Biocrude

Forget about burning food. Any kind of biomass--including garbage--can produce biocrude. Biocrude is similar to crude oil. It can be refined to the desired hydrocarbon product.

Pyrolysis is a process in which organic materials - any type of biomass - are heated in absence of air in a reactor (schematic, click to enlarge). Under these conditions, organic vapours, pyrolysis gases and charcoal are produced. Depending on the residence time and the temperature to which the biomass is exposed, varying amounts of these products are obtained.... Under fast pyrolysis (temperatures of 450 - 600 °C), the vapours are condensed to bio-oil and typically, 70-75 wt.% of the feedstock is converted into this oil (also known as 'biocrude' or 'pyrolysis oil').__Biopact

Biocrude projects are proceeding at full speed in Europe, Australia, and North America. The main problem remaining to be solved, is the wide dispersal of biomass. It costs energy to collect and concentrate biomass--to bring it to the central pyrolysis station.

Fortunately, pyrolysis is a scalable process. The pyrolysis infrastructure can be built closer to the source of biomass, and the resulting oil can be transported in bulk via pipeline, river barge, or rail, to refineries.

Currently, political obstructionists have prevented construction of refineries. The bottleneck in hydrocarbon refining keeps costs high to end consumers. We can hope that the obstructionists who prevent energy refining and new energy exploration, will relent in the case of biomass to biocrude to bio-refinery.

Biofuels Three Different Ways

ZeaChem--the company using the termite gut organism, moorella thermoacetica, is making plans to secure a supply of fast growing poplar trees as feedstock for their bio-ethanol from cellulose project.

ZeaChem, Inc. and GreenWood Resources, Inc. (GWR) signed a non-binding Letter of Intent for the supply of poplar tree (Pacific Albus) feed stock under a long-term agreement to support the operation of an initial 1.5 million gallon per year (GPY) ZeaChem cellulosic Biorefinery near a Greenwood Pacific Albus tree farm in the Columbia River Basin.

The ZeaChem biofuel process combines the outputs of two traditional fuel production pathways (fermentation of sugars and gasification of biomass) into a third catalytically-driven step—hydrogenolysis—to produce cellulosic ethanol fuel and cellulose-based intermediate chemicals. ZeaChem’s technology will produce 50% more ethanol per ton of feed than the current best-in-class technology.___Source

Solazyme is an algal biofuels company working to produce both biodiesel and more conventional "bio-petroleum" hydrocarbons from algae.

Solazyme, which recently announced the road-testing of blends of Soladiesel, its first algal biodiesel (earlier post), has successfully taken the test blends up to B100, according to Jonathan Wolfson, Solazyme’s CEO....Solazyme has also received funding from NIST to support a project to use algae to produce biopetroleum, which will match the composition of light sweet crude oil. The biopetroleum would be fully compatible with the infrastructure that refines, distributes retails and consumes petroleum products—not just automobile fuels but aviation fuel and chemicals as well.___Source

Meanwhile, back in India, Dwarikesh Sugar Industries Ltd. is using biomass from its sugar production to generate 56 KW of cogenerated power, as well as producing 30,000 liters of bioethanol daily from molasses.

Dwarikesh now has a capacity to generate 56MW of renewable energy as well as 10.95 million liters/year of ethanol from molasses.____Source

Actually, that would be four ways--bioethanol, biodiesel, biopetroleum, and biomass electricity. All of these approaches are far more efficient than corn ethanol and palm oil / seed oil biodiesel.

It is unfortunate that Chinese companies are spending many billions of dollars to destroy tropical rainforests in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, etc. to produce palm oil biodiesel, when there are far more efficient and environment friendly approaches already gearing up. But then, judging from the pollution oozing from China's rivers and air, the environment has never been a top priority there.

It is even more unfortunate that US Senators Ben Nelson and Chuck Grassley (among others) have done so much to waste US taxpayer's money to pursue maize / corn ethanol, when it is such a dead-end approach to biofuels.

Combined Heat and Power Biomass, More Biofuels

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is a highly efficient form of power production. One such plant in Denmark that utilises biomass in its fuel mix meets the heating demands of 200,000 homes and the electrical demands of 1.3 million homes.

Avedore 2, inaugurated in 2002, made the green switch successfully and is now a set of superlatives: it is the world's largest biomass power plant as well as the cleanest and most efficient cogeneration power station. It meets the heating demands of 200,000 households and supplies electricity to over 1.3 million homes (Denmark has a population of 5.47 million). The green plant covers more than 20% of Eastern Denmark's needs - the most densely populated region of the country - and supplies 570MW of heat to Greater Copenhagen's district heating system. The combined heat and power efficiency comes in at a whopping 95%.
___Source

A new type of external combustion engine that will burn biomass-based syngas, is developing 10 1MW generators for the Florida market.

The companies' plans are to power these industrial generators using a glycerol-based synthesis gas produced through Florida Syngas' proprietary plasma gasification process called GlidArc. Glycerol (glycerin), the waste product of the biodiesel industry, yields a hydrogen-rich, carbon neutral gas with its only waste products being hot water and useable heat.....Cyclone engine technology is a new type of external combustion engine but relies on established technologies, such as those used in gas turbines, diesel engines, and steam engines. The engine is based on the Schoell cycle, a cross between a Rankine, Diesel and Carnot cycle engine (schematic, click to enlarge). Its main characteristic is that it will burn any combustible fuel, including biomass and municipal waste. Advent Power Systems claims the engine has other advantages:

* Clean burning – Provides complete combustion and a very clean exhaust
* Efficiencies comparable to diesels, when all required subsystems are included
* High horsepower to weight ratios – about a 2.5 to 1 advantage over full diesel systems.
* Low noise, vibration, and infrared signatures.
* Large range of sizes possible – from 1 KW up to over 1 Megawatt.
* Facilitates conversion to a range of synthetic fuels, including biomass.
* Provides an ideal power source for hybrid and conventional vehicles.
* Does not require a radiator, water pump, oil pump, complex fuel injection, or catalytic converter, reducing cost, weight, space and increasing reliability.___Source

I am particularly curious to learn more about the external combustion engine mechanism, that will be driving the 1 MW generators. The global glycerol glut from world biodiesel production should provide inexpensive fuel, and the ability to convert to biomass fuels, there should be no "peak fuel" scenario for these facilities.

Finally, China and Brazil are said to be collaborating on development of bio-ethanol from a newly discovered type of cassava--a sweet cassava mutant.

China currently cultivates around half a million hectares of cassava, of which 200,000 are destined for ethanol production. The People's Republic chose cassava as one of its future biofuels crops, because it is considered to be an industrial plant, and not a food crop. According to Wenquan Wang, researcher at CATAS, cassava has gained importance because of its low environmental footprint and because it has a well established industrial presence. "For 30 years, cassava was a staple for many Chinese people, later it became a crop for animal feed, and nowadays 60% of the entire harvest is destined for the industrial production of starch, 20% goes to ethanol and the remainder is turned into pig feed."

However, China's cassava ethanol initiative is mainly based on starch rich varieties. Together with Brazil it is now looking at introducing the sweet varieties instead, which demand less costly and complicated conversion steps.

Source

I wonder how the sweet cassava alcohol yield will compare with the yield from sugar cane? Regardless, it has to be a much higher yield than from maize.