On the heels of the opening of Coskata’s first flex ethanol facility capable of making ethanol from virtually any organic material, GM and Coskata have released a video (below) detailing the Coskata process. Unlike most promotional/informational videos that get dumped on the public, this one is actually rather informative.

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Pennsylvania is beautiful this time of year, but I missed most of it since I made the 400+ mile drive mostly in the dark. It took eight hours of dodging speeding semi-trucks and going through many miles of tunnels, but I finally made it to the Westinghouse Plasma Center in Madison, PA. In case you’re asking, yes, the same Westinghouse that makes flat screen televisions (among other nifty tech stuff).

The Coskata semi-commercial flexible ethanol plant, dubbed “Lighthouse”, is located here. This facility is essentially a working scale model of a full size ethanol plant, and the processes and technology here can one day soon be scaled up to produce as much as a 100 million gallons of flex ethanol annually. The important word here is flexible, because unlike other ethanol products, the Coskata process can use just about any carbon matter to produce ethanol. This means the very garbage filling our dumps may one day instead fill our cars.

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With the attention on first generation corn ethanol fading, the next big thing on the sustainable fuel horizon is nonfood biofuel crops. Within that category, inedible weeds are taking a front-row seat due to their relatively low demands on water, pesticides, and herbicides, and their reduced need for tilling and other mechanized soil prep. Some weeds with biofuel potential can also thrive on contaminated soils, absorbing and cleaning pollutants in a process called phytoremediation.

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For the moment, the price at the pump is reasonable. A spike in demand or a terrorist disruption, however, will quickly remind us that we are desperately dependent on oil as we continue to consume 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year. Even in these recessionary times of moderate demand, we are running out of easy to extract oil from dessert sands. We are turning to sources of unconventional oil, such as tar sands in Canada, to produce oil with ever increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

For a while, corn ethanol was viewed by some as a step in the right direction. Now we are like the character in a Woody Allen comedy who explains, “I used to be a heroin addict; now I’m a methadone addict.” At a time when a billion people go hungry, many as a result of disappearing water on this heating planet, fuel from food is not the answer.

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The 31st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals

One of the world’s most prestigious and established biofuels meetings, the 31st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals, is currently underway May 3-6 in San Francisco, with more than 800 scientists expected to attend sessions on topics ranging from commercialization of biofuels and their long-term sustainability to emerging technologies and turning algae into fuel.

We’re liveblogging (on Twitter) from today’s press meeting for the event.

You can also follow the author here, or just search for hashtag #biofuelsymposium.
The biofuels industry is also under attack due to food-from-fuel and land use issues. Over one billion people are hungry or starving. Agricultural expert Lester Brown reports, “The grain required to fill an SUV’s 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year.” Scientific American: Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

Europe, now California, and soon many U.S. states, now insist that land use must be considered in evaluating biofuels.

During the middle of the conference, a workshop for the media was held. The theme of the workshop quickly became clear - the industry problems were the fault of regulators and we the press.

Professor Bruce Dale, Michigan State University, dismissed corn/soy land use change as an “emotional issue.” He continued, “The California Low Carbon Fuel Standard is intellectually bankrupt.” To demonstrate the flaw of land use, he stated that replacing a gasoline powered vehicle with an electric vehicle would only increase the demand for coal power and therefore do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

The example is quite flawed. Automakers consistently tell me that their gasoline powered vehicles are about 15 percent efficient and their electric vehicles are 60 to 70 percent efficient. EVs need much less energy.  Even if you could find an EV powered purely with coal, it would produce less lifecycle emissions than a comparable gasoline or corn ethanol fueled vehicle. According to the latest figures published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), non-hydro renewable sources of electricity enjoyed double-digit growth during the past year while coal was down by 1.1 percent. Incremental demand for electricity is bringing more renewable energy on-line.

In fact, the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) is based on the peer-reviewed work of scientists using Argonne National Labs GREET model. The work, industry comments, and findings are all available at http://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/lcfs.htm

The LCFS encourages the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy delivered to the wheels of vehicles. The scientific analysis behind the LCFS includes these examples of grams of CO2e emissions per mega joule of energy:

Ø    Gasoline    Oil Refined    92
Ø    Diesel    ULSD Refined    71
Ø    Diesel    Coal-to-Liquid    167
Ø    Biodiesel    Midwest Soy    30
Ø    Ethanol    Corn with Coal Electricity    114
Ø    Ethanol    Cellulosic from Poplar Trees    -12
Ø    Electricity    California Average    27

If the biofuels industry sees a future in biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol, the industry should be encouraged by the findings of the scientists contributing to the LCFS. On the other hand, if the industry is only betting its future on corn ethanol, then the regulation is a threat.

 
LCFS will not help the expansion of E85 stations for flexfuel vehicles. For the 2009 model year, the best rated car running on E85 in the United States was the Chevrolet HHR, with a United States EPA gasoline mileage rating of 26 miles per gallon, and an E85 rating of only 19 miles per gallon – and that’s the best from Detroit with mileage on all other U.S. flexfuel vehicles being worse. In other words, if you passed on using E85 and drove a hybrid with good mileage, you would double miles per gallon and produce far less greenhouse gas emissions than any U.S. flexfuel offering. Top 10 Low Carbon Footprint Four-Door Sedans for 2009

While the press was being scolded and air regulators were being metaphorically burned at the stake, most conference attendees had an afternoon to enjoy San Francisco. Many traveled using electric-powered buses and the hydro powered BART rapid transit system that carriers 100 million riders annually. So much for the press conference dismissing electric powered transportation as not being feasible.

Although attacking regulators, environmentalists, and advocates for the hungry will not save the biofuel industry, the federal government may save it. As the conference unfolded in California, a major announcement was made in Washington, DC, by U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu when he announced that $786.5 million would be made available to accelerate advanced biofuels research and to help fund commercial-scale biorefinery demonstration projects.

One irony for the biofuel industry is that as oil prices increase, their economic model improves, but consumer demand for fuel moderates as consumers drive fewer miles, use more public transportation, and soon switch in growing numbers to electric vehicles. For decades, however, fuel will be in demand for many passenger vehicles, heavy-vehicles, long-distance goods movement, ships and airplanes. The opportunity is ripe for delivering fuel with lower lifecycle emissions. Promising cellulosic biofuel companies will be covered in my next article.

John Addison publishes the Clean Fleet Report. He is the author of a new book about the future of transportation – Save Gas, Save the Planet.

Image Credit: Lee Jordan via Flickr under Creative Commons License.

The Good

The 9 billion gallons of ethanol that Americans used last year helped drive down oil prices. For those of us who fuel our vehicles with gasoline, as much as 10 percent of that gasoline is ethanol. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires that more biofuel be used every year until we reach 36 billion gallons by 2022.

Reduced oil prices are good. We can go from good to great, if we move past fuel from food and haste to fuels from wood and waste. Although the economics do not yet favor major production, pilot plants are taking wood and paper waste and converting it to fuel. Other cellulosic material is even more promising. Some grasses , energy crops, and hybrid poplar trees promise zero-emission fuel sources. These plants absorb CO2 and sequester it in the soil with their deep root systems. These plants often grow in marginal lands needing little irrigation and no fertilizers and pesticides, standing in sharp contrast to the industrial agriculture that produces much of our fuel. (see Dedicated Energy Crops Could Replace 30% of Gasoline: Ceres, Inc. Wants to Make it Happen)

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Beyond these entrenched extremes, ranging from wild optimism to abject skepticism, comes the real heavy lifting - understanding there are significant hurdles inherent in getting second generation biofuel from the lab into full-scale sustainable commercial production, but seeing those hurdles as challenges to be overcome, not as roadblocks from which to retreat, and working to bridge the gap from current reality to potential promise.

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So, from a climate-change point of view, who better to target with the security of their own driveway supply to power their gas guzzlers — from a carbon free fuel in place of oil? The I’ve got mine crowd.

Everyone who drives gas guzzlers could recoup the cost in a bit over a year. How?

Because this home ethanol distillation unit-cum-driveway pump invented by the Los Gatos company E-Fueler can distill ethanol from a nearly free feed stock; waste alcohol from vineyards or restaurants.

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In a new study, researchers have shown that growing perennial grasses to make celluline rather than using corn stover or sugar cane is better for the environment because it increases soil health and stores much more carbon in the soil, thereby reducing greenhouse gases.

Current first generation ethanol is produced by fermenting the starch in corn kernels. This has become a controversial source of biofuel due to food vs. fuel concerns and the relatively low energy gain from the whole process.

But celluline represents a true departure from these concerns in that significantly more liquid fuel energy can be harvested from non-food portions of the plant — the stems and leaves. Celluline is still in the research and development stage, but many people have hung their hats on it as the holy grail that will replace corn ethanol and bypass concerns over food vs. fuel and energy gains (PDF).

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From a biofuels standpoint, the choice of Vilsack would be a clear indication of the direction an Obama administration would likely take. As a political leader from a corn farming state, Vilsack has shown strong allegiances with the corn ethanol industry in the past and has been an outspoken advocate of alternative energy.

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When the only factor that determined if farms lived or died was the price of food, farm income was rather boringly steady. Now that biofuels have given agriculture a value greater than staple food crops, farmers have seen some huge rewards. But with those rewards have come greatly increased risks — risks that farmers are finding out the hard way right now.

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The process works by chopping the complex raw wood molecules into smaller and simpler bits — the end product being single sugar molecules. The method can also be used on other second generation ethanol feedstocks such as grass straw. Once you’ve made the sugar, the rest of the process of making ethanol is as simple as making beer — literally.

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In the report, “Will the Plunge in Grain Prices Mean Lower Food Prices at the Supermarket?,” the RFA points out that, while prices for agricultural staple commodities such as corn, wheat, and soybeans have all plummeted by about 50% in the last half year, food prices at the grocery store have remained highly elevated. At the same time, ethanol production has dramatically increased.

When the above factors are taken together, the link between grocery store food prices and corn ethanol production becomes dubious. Not only that, and also somewhat unintuitively, it seems that the diversion of relatively large portions of the US corn crop to ethanol production has very little effect on even the market price of corn.

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In an upcoming review paper, professor Michael Scharf details how termites — which cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to houses in the US alone each year — might actually prove useful for something that most people could never have envisioned.

Through millions of years of evolution, termites have filled a niche in the animal world that takes precise chemical coordination between the digestive enzymes and microbes in their guts to turn the wood that they eat into sugars which can then be used to “fuel” the termite.

It is this seemingly easy transformation of wood into sugar in the termite guts that holds the promise for future ethanol production, because, once you have the sugar, it’s easy to make ethanol through fermentation.

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While food-based biofuels are taking the heat for rising food prices, other solutions - like algae - are gaining a more serious following. For example, the UK’s Carbon Trust has announced plans for a project to make algae bio-fuels a commercial reality by the year 2020

But the situation is much more than some “food vs fuel” finger pointing. The fact that transport accounts for one-quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions is major driving factor - pun intended: it’s also the fastest growing cause of carbon emissions in the UK. If the government’s target to reduce overall emissions by 80% by 2050 is to be met, then initiatives like this are crucial.

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The Challenge: Find biofuel crops that are “pro-poor.”

One Answer: Crops that can be grown with limited resources by small-scale farmers, can be converted to biofuel with existing cheap technology, and can simultaneously provide food, fuel, and livestock feed.

In my last post I discussed how agriculture could regain its rightful place as the keystone of civilization due to the rise of biofuels over the next 30 years or so. But, in what seems a ridiculously colossal conundrum, hundreds of millions of impoverished people worldwide could face starvation due to competition of fuel land with food land.

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In a wide-ranging session on Tuesday dealing with global biofuel, food security and poverty issues, there was plenty for the presenters to disagree about — but the one thing they could all concur on was that the biofuel genie is out of the bottle and he’s here to stay.

Several times during the session the presenters highlighted the fact that biofuels have finally brought an inherent value to agriculture that was previously missing. This, more than anything else, is why biofuels are not going to go away. Up to now, the lack of agricultural value has caused a deep deficiency in the level of funding and investment that governments worldwide have provided for their agricultural security and infrastructure.

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Step forward camelina, an oilseed crop whose supporters claim is already well on its way to being a viable low cost, high yield alternative to soy and corn as a source of biodiesel, without any of the downsides.

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The issue stems from activist and Green Party candidate for Washington governor Duff Badgley’s attempts to drive customers away from a new biofuel station in northwest Seattle. Allegedly Badgley and his group, One Earth, have been harassing customers by taking pictures of their license plates and passing out leaflets that proclaim biofuels as a “scourge on humankind.”

Biofuels certainly have a hard row to hoe in terms of reaching sustainability, and the activists have some valid concerns, but a “scourge on humanity”? Really? It’s almost laughable.

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And now they want your input on what those sustainable practices and standards should be — they’ve released the first draft of their “Principles and Baseline Practices for Sustainability” (PDF) to the public under a 45-day comment and review period.

So, if you’ve ever questioned the wisdom of growing our own fuel, or you’ve wondered how biofuels can be considered sustainable at all given other seemingly cleaner options like solar, wind and geothermal, now’s your time to speak up.

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