Cellulosic Biomass Ethanol Thermal Depolymerization and The Speed of Billionaires
Stafford Williamson
September 24, 2006
It is a brilliant move by a consistently brilliant entrepreneur. Oh, yes, the blinding speed of Mr. Branson, you will recall, also helped fuel the X-Prize winning privately funded first sub-orbital pair of flights by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites company. Still, accelerating from $400 million to $3 billion in just over a week is more than moderately impressive. It is clearly a smart move because he is following the lead of some of the largest corporations in the world (not that Sir Richard is any lightweight himself). General Motors publicity for, and move toward ethanol is a significant factor in the global economy. Or rather, if it isn’t yet, it will be fairly quickly. This course change in fueling technology cannot fail.
Hmmm. He just said, “cannot fail,” didn’t he? Yup! Sounds arrogantly overreaching to some, no doubt. That is true. But if it is going to have any chance of succeeding, it needs an overwhelming commitment from all sorts of global decision makers, and General Motors is not exactly going it alone. Bill Gates too, reportedly has a significant personal investment in a California company (25% of Pacific Ethanol of Fresno, according to an article by Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine senior editor reported on Yahoo). That company, Pacific Ethanol, is proposing to build ethanol refineries. And, of course, as I have mentioned before, Brazil has also already proven the strategy works for lessening, if not removing, dependence on foreign energy sources. But not for corn. In spite of the powerful agriculture lobby’s effort to tariff foreign ethanol, we just do not grow enough corn to fill the needs of the ethanol demand over the next 5 years. At least not without vastly expanded production, or reduction of the corn available for food purposes. The promise for the future is what ethanol advocates call cellulosic biomass.
What they mean by cellulosic biomass is pretty much any random plant parts from almost any plants. Of course, that’s not what the really mean. They mean whatever their favorite (meaning economically leveraged) crop may be. Now, fortunately for the corn farmers, that could be the stalks and leaves of corn plants. This changes the picture significantly.
Cellulosic biomass into ethanol has received some press lately because Honda Research and Development has entered into an production (note, not an exploratory, or experimental, but “commercial production” phase) agreement with the Japanese “Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE)” to provide ethanol using newly developed “bio-organisms” that enhance the yield of ethanol from saccharides (sugars). Instead of allowing fermentation inhibitors to develop during fermentation (as they normally do), these organisms suppress the inhibitors, allowing greater yields.
Honda’s website describes the process this way:
The process consists of the following operations.
1. Pretreament to separate cellulose from soft-biomass
2. Saccharification of cellulose and hemicellulose
3. Conversion of sugar into ethanol using microorgamisms
4. Ethanol refinement
The “saccharificiation” process apparently involves the use of strong alkaline solutions that are then “washed” and (partially) recovered to some extent. Too high a concentration of the alkali also inhibits efficacy in ethanol production, however.
Of course this process also involves the effective “mastication” of the cellulose in the first place. That process is a grinding into approximately 1 cm. chunks. Then to further break down the greenery, the mix is subjected to high temperature and pressures.
Is this starting to sound familiar? I hope so, because if you have been paying any attention to this field, may you know that I have been advocating the use of “post-consumer” long-chain carbon molecules for some time. The difference is that most of the grinding and a lot of the breakdown of those substances has already taken place at the “consumer” level, because it is already sewage, or manure. There is no question that as demand for ethanol grows we are going to be looking for new sources, and “soft-biomass” as Honda calls it, whether that be the “inedible stalks and leaves” of an existing crop or not, a new crop of specifically cultivated vegetation is likely to be needed. But people, let us get past the “it stinks” kind of juvenile repulsion from the locally available, cheaper-than-dirt energy source flowing under our feet every day.
Can international organizations aiming at improving life not see that creating a “collection infrastructure” for sewage as a feedstock for fuel creating refineries is solving both health and energy crises in one beautifully balanced, cyclic process?
Please be aware that in at least some of the corn to ethanol processes today, we already have extensive use of enzyme additives that enhance the efficiency of the process. Alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are used in the process at the saccharification stage. But San Diego-based Diversa Corp. is trying to exploit what many of us learned in high school biology. They started by dissecting termites. They are isolating and synthesizing the enzymes used by the bacteria in the intestinal tract of termites that allows those insects to digest cellulose directly (turning it into sugars), or rather, with the help of their symbiotic intestinal bacteria. This new method of turning long chain cellulose into short chains of carbons that form simple sugars is still, unfortunately, at the relatively early stages of development. That is not to say it is not worth pursuing, but frankly, the “brute force” of extreme high temperatures and pressures (“thermal depolymerization”) and the chemically catalyzed reformation at or after the condensate stages of differential distillation seem like a more practical method for large quantities of production from biomass in the near future.
Now, keeping in mind what I said about my opinion matching Mark Twain’s on the subject of statistics, and their more prevalent cousins, “damn lies”, biodiesel is still the most concentrated liquid fuel for available energy. That is to say, available portable energy. Diversa also says on their web site that according to their calculations, biomass based biodiesel produces about 3.2 units of stored available energy for every unit of energy it takes to produce it. An alternative way of stating that concept (assuming I know what they mean by the statement in the first place, which is not necessarily a rock solid assumption) is that for every 4.2 units of energy contained in the feedstock input (assuming you are using the output of the process to provide energy to the process) you get 3.2 units of useable product. That is a shade better than 75% efficient. But that is just one way of looking at it.
We don’t know, and cannot reliable assume, that this takes into account energy used to produce, cultivate and transport the feedstock. It could easily be that additional calculations for diesel consumed by the vehicles, and the chemicals to cultivate, harvest and deliver this feedstock could well mean we are actually talking about another 2 energy units of input into the process. Those energy input units, however, unlike the processing energy units that reuse the output as an energy source are not “free” (diverting output to provide energy input). They have hard costs associated with them. Nor did we even get into considering the “in depth” cost of the manufacturing of the steel to produce the vehicles, or their tires, or the roads on which they travel at a more comprehensive level of analysis. Still under the new premise that the process might require 6.2 units of energy in input feedstock to produce 3.2 units of output portable energy still leaves us with a process which could be considered to be 51% efficient overall.
But just to be sure that you realize that statistics are a persuasive tool used by liars to refute the statistics of other liars, the Department of Energy’s “Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)” office says that for each British Thermal Unit of input energy used to produce standard (reformulated) gasoline, only 0.79 BTU’s of energy are produced. It then compares this to the 6.8 BTU’s of energy available for each BTU of energy required to produce ethanol from biomass. Flipped the other way, that means that ethanol production from biomass is 860+% more efficient than producing gasoline.
Now, watch. Here’s where we show how the numbers turn from mere damn lies into statistics of the twisted and nefarious variety Mr. Clements and I hate. The self-same DOE report from the office of EERE, shows a table that says:
PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY COMPARISON
(Btus consumed to produce 1 Btu of fuel energy)
EthanolReformulated Gasoline
Feedstock Production.06.01
Feedstock Transport.01.04
Fuel Conversion.02.16
Fuel Transport .05.06
Total.14.27
Then they show the graphic which purports to represent these figures stating that for 1 Btu (sic)* of energy input, you get either 0.79 Btu of reformulated gasoline or 6.8 Btu of ethanol. Maybe we need to add that statistics should be followed by “not-to-scale graphics” to our scale of truth twisters.
(Okay, I mistyped a word in the title of my last column and the editors didn’t catch it, or just thought me crazy enough to be misspelling intentionally, so I won’t harp on the DOE’s strange ideas about lack of capital letters in acronyms or apostrophes in acronyms’ plurals.)
Just to save you the pencil and paper, or the effort of doing the math in your head, 1 BTU produced by using 0.14 BTU of energy is a conversion rate of 7.14285 and similarly, (remember this is not only from the same report, but the same page of the report printed by the DOE’s EERE office) 0.27 BTU’s of energy consumed for 1 BTU produced is nowhere near 0.79 BTU’s net production per BTU consumed in the process. That ratio is, in fact, 1:3.7037037… As a percentage of efficiency (as suggested under the ‘new’ assumptions about biomass energy production in the paragraphs above) this would represent just 44% for reformulated gasoline, and just a whopping 87% efficiency for biomass ethanol. So even tripling the energy required to produce cellulosic biomass based ethanol, it still comes out more effective than reformulated gasoline by a few percentage points, and we are talking about completely avoiding fossil based fuels in the process.) But remember, these numbers are being presented for their internal inconsistency not their reliability.
Oh, yes, the source cited by EERE is from 1993. And to add to the confusion (okay, I contributed my share too, by assuming that you can fuel the process with the output to avoid the use of petroleum based fuels) they are specifying that the BTU’s used in this chart are expressed in terms of “fossil energy consumed”, which allows for coal burning electrical plants to supply the electricity.
That may make coal mining interests happy, but for goodness sake, the Los Angeles Municipal sewage processing plant uses “digesters” that produce some $17 million worth of electrical energy by selling the methane they produce to the electrical generating station next door. That fact was according to a documentary I watched last night that may not have been a lot more up to date than the statistics cited by the DOE EERE report, but then the overall electricity consumption was assumed to be $21 million at the time of that film, so the percentage should be holding fairly firm, regardless of the actual price of either kilowatts or cubic feet of methane. And that has, happily, been going on since 1998 when the Hyperion Plant was renovated to the tune of $1.4 BILLION.
The greatest argument for producing energy from bio-waste mass is that at present it is just contributing to further clogging overburdened landfills, costing taxpayers money, and generally is a nuisance for which we have given scant thought to even considering turning to a practical purpose. It is an item abundantly available. It has more nuisance than economic value in most cases, so can be effectively acquired for little or no cost for the feedstock itself, and probably little or no transportation costs, given reasonable cooperation and efficient planning.
Speaking of “planning” was anyone keeping a scorecard on the UN speeches by heads of state last week. Ben Stein called it a collection of the “world’s wackiest leaders” in his Sunday morning commentary on CBS Sunday Morning program. As much as I want to praise Mr. Stein’s ultimate position on taxing the rich (himself included) by rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans, I have to quibble a bit with his list of the world’s wackiest leaders. It was certainly ironic that poor old Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's military leaders staged a coup while he was in New York to speak before the UN. (Not the first time that has happened to a national leader, by the way.) But if Ben thinks Ahmadinajad of Iran and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela were being laughed at as buffoons, he needs to take his blinders off and look a little closer to home. Did his President behave any more maturely than the others who all avoided being present for the others’ speeches? Was he announcing lower fuel prices for Americans in need as the Venezuelan controlled Citgo plans to do for poor people in this country during the upcoming winter? Was he winning hearts and minds the way that both those wily leaders are doing in the pattern established as so effective by the Hezbollah leaders in Southern Lebanon? Ahmadinajad has Hezbollah as a proxy, but Chavez is taking a more direct approach. Bush? Not hardly. He was up there in front of the world, mispronouncing “nook-u-lar” for all the world to see and saying nothing of substance that hasn’t been said a hundred times before. Chavez also went to a church in Harlem to try to establish a rapport with poorer Americans as, “Chavez also announced that Citgo, the U.S.-based refining arm of Venezuela's state-run oil company, plans to more than double the amount of discounted heating oil it is offering Americans this winter to 380 million litres, up from 150 million litres,” according to www.canada.com in a story by Canadian Press’ Ian James.
Of course among the other major factors in common for Ahmadinajad and Chavez are that they are the leaders of OPEC countries.
And speaking of wily, once more, Old Sir Richard of Virgin wasn’t announcing some charitable donation of $3 billion in the manner of Buffet’s promise of the majority of his billions to Bill and Melinda’s non-profit foundation. Sir Richard just said that his companies will “invest” in finding global solutions to the fuel problems associated with global warming. What he really said, in case you didn’t notice, was, in effect, that he wants more “vertical integration” in his transportation business by owning an interest in the fuel producing entities his companies will be buying from in the future. His attempts to establish the first commercial “tourist” flights into space may seem frivolous, but he certainly made a shrewd investment strategy sound like philanthropy in the context of Bill Gate’s philanthropically oriented gab fest.
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Stafford “Doc” Williamson
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