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Lagniappe
The
Energy Challenge
A Renewed Push for Ethanol, Without the Corn
By
Matthew L. Wald and Alexei Barrionuevo
JENNINGS, La. — The sun shone brightly on the crowd
gathered at the rusting old oil refinery here, as company
officials
showed off diagrams explaining how they planned to turn weeds
and agricultural wastes into car fuel.
Government officials gave optimistic speeches. In the background,
workers prepared a new network of pipes, tanks and conveyor
belts.
That was in October 1998, when ethanol from crop wastes seemed
to be just around the corner.
It still is. Last February, company officials gathered here
once again, to break ground on a plant designed to make ethanol
by yet another method.
At the time of the first ceremony, the Energy Department was
predicting that ethanol produced from cellulosic waste would
be in the market by about 2009 in the same volume as ethanol
from the conventional source, corn.
But no company has yet been able to produce ethanol from cellulose
in mass quantities that are priced competitively with corn-based
ethanol. And without the cellulosic ethanol, the national goal
for ethanol production will be impossible to reach.
“Producing cellulosic ethanol is clearly more difficult
than we thought in the 1990s,” said Dan W. Reicher, who
was assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable
energy at the time of the first ceremony and who spoke here
then.
To
be sure, swarms of innovators, venture capitalists and government
officials are optimistic. Over the last year, money
has begun to pour in from all corners — government, private
foundations, venture capitalists and Wall Street — to
sort out the myriad production problems preventing cellulosic
ethanol from becoming a reality. And recent advances in gene
sequencing have raised hopes for a breakthrough in mass producing
the enzymes needed to do the work.
If
making the technology work to produce ethanol from cellulose
was
important in the 1990s, it is even more critical now. Because
of growing concerns about oil imports and climate change, Mr.
Reicher said, “it is essential that we figure this out,
and fast.”
Mounting concerns over excessive demands for corn as both
food and fuel only add to the urgency. In January, President
Bush set a goal of producing 35 billion gallons of alternative
fuels, probably mostly ethanol, by 2017.
But the more than six billion gallons of ethanol that will
be produced this year have already helped push corn to its
highest price in years, raising the cost of everything from
tortillas to chicken feed. Poor people in Mexico have protested
against the higher prices, and now China and India are starting
to suffer from food inflation.
So why has no one figured out a way to make ethanol from materials
like the sugar cane wastes engineers are working with here?
In
fact, engineers at several companies have done that — but
only at the lab level. One company, Iogen, has a pilot plant
running in Ottawa and hopes to build a larger operation soon.
Abengoa, a Spanish company, says it plans to open a plant
in northern Spain late this year, and wants to build a factory
in Kansas. Broin Companies, of Sioux Falls, S.D., is planning
to expand a corn ethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa, to use
cellulose as well.
But
everyone is still struggling to develop a method that is
cost competitive
with corn ethanol — not to mention
competing with gasoline and other fuels from oil without subsidies.
The
pilot plant that opened here in 1998, after the first ceremony, “worked like a charm,” said
Russell Heissner, a biofuels expert at Celunol, the company
building the Jennings
plant. But Celunol, then called BC International, shut it after
a few months because of a lack of money and because it could
not figure out how to turn the process into a commercial-scale
project.
Now the company is building a much larger plant to tackle
another part of the cellulosic puzzle.
The broad concept is the same everywhere. Yeast is used to
turn sugar into alcohol, a process learned thousands of years
ago. The easiest way to get sugar is from sugar cane. Corn
provides carbohydrates, long chains of starch that are easily
broken into sugars.
Mr. Heissner is hopeful that stems, stalks, wood chips and
other materials will replace the corn. The founding brew master
at Harpoon, a Boston beer brand, Mr. Heissner later designed
and built microbreweries and pubs.
That experience is relevant. Beer is made from barley, a seed,
or cereal grain, like corn. It is exposed to warmth and moisture
that resemble the conditions for germination, and the barley
begins to produce an enzyme that converts its starch into sugar.
The brew master roasts the barley to kill the plant, but the
enzyme continues to convert the starch to sugar. Hops are added
for flavor, and then yeast is added to convert the sugar to
alcohol.
Cellulose
is also made up partly of sugars, but they are linked tightly
in a more complicated
chain. Breaking them up requires several enzymes. Most processes
start with using steam and sulfuric acid on the feedstock,
which can be corn stems and leaves, switch grass, wood chips — or
bagasse, the material left when sugar cane is processed and
which is being used here in Jennings.
Manufacturers rely on a variety of organisms to make the necessary
enzymes. They are the product of gene splicing, turning out
enzymes in quantities far greater than any natural organism
would.
Unlocking the sugar represents a gold mine. Mark Emalfarb,
the president and chief executive of another competitor, Dyadic,
said corn now makes up about half the price of corn ethanol,
while some cellulosic materials are free, beyond the cost to
haul them to a factory.
But the enzymes needed to break corn starch into sugar are
cheap, costing 3 to 5 cents a gallon of ethanol. His goal for
the enzymes that work on cellulose is 10 cents a gallon, but
it does not appear that anyone has gotten the cost anywhere
near that low yet.
“Some people are still underestimating how difficult
it is going to be,” Mr. Emalfarb said.
The Energy Department has set a goal of bringing down the
overall cost to produce cellulosic ethanol to $1.07 a gallon
by 2012. That is less than half the cost of producing it now
and lower than the current cost of about $1.50 a gallon for
corn-based ethanol.
“Anybody’s number is just basically a guess,” said
Brent Erickson, executive vice president at the Biotechnology
Industry Organization in Washington. “Until we get these
plants built, we aren’t going to know what the cost is.”
The race to commercialize cellulosic ethanol has been helped
by the recent flood of investment from public and private sources.
The Energy Department has devoted $726 million for renewable
energy projects this year, including wind and solar energy.
It recently awarded grants totaling $385 million over four
years to six companies working on cellulosic ethanol plants.
The Agriculture Department is seeking to increase its bio-energy
financing to $161 million from $122 million, which would include
$21 million in loan guarantees for cellulosic plants.
Venture
capital firms, Wall Street banks and even oil companies have
invested about $200 million in the last six months alone.“There
is nothing in the last several decades that has generated such
private sector enthusiasm and investment,” said Keith
Collins, the Agriculture Department’s chief economist.
The investment is risky but the potential benefits are enormous.
A cellulosic ethanol process would raise the ethanol yields
from sugar cane by about one-third an acre by using parts of
the sugar plant that are now thrown away as waste. For corn
wastes, the number is similar.
The cellulosic process also promises to use less energy than
corn-based ethanol. And it can work on material that is not
currently considered a crop, like switch grass or wood chips
left over from paper making.
In
Louisiana, Celunol is experimenting with an aboriginal sugar
cane that
grew 200 years ago, before farmers started
selectively breeding for the varieties with more sugar. Native
to the local environment, “it doesn’t need fertilizer
and it grows everywhere, like weeds,” said Matthew Gray,
a research engineer with the company.
Mr. Heissner, who studied viniculture and enology at the University
of California, Davis, said he was happy to move from microbreweries
to vehicle fuel, which would be a much bigger business, he
predicted.
Andrew
Karsner, the current assistant secretary for energy efficiency
and renewable fuels, said that he agreed. The original
Jennings project, despite its earlier failures, was simply “well
ahead of the killer wave that is here with us now.”
Matthew L. Wald and Alexei Barrionuevo are journalists with
The New York Times
Petroleumworld
not necessarily share these views.
Editor's
Note:This article was published by The New York Times, April
17, 2007 .
Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our
readers.
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