Gallon For Gallon

Steven P. Long, deputy director of the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of Illinois, examines progress on a crop of miscanthus, a fast-growing plant at the center of the emerging American grass gas industry.

Researchers, Industrialists Aim For Huge Clean Fuels Market

URBANA, Ill. – The Illinois prairie, some of the richest Midwest farmland that has long fed the nation, is likely soon to fuel the nation too.

Across the Heartland, researchers at land grant universities are racing to develop the right recipe of enzymes and digesters to break down cellulose contained in grass, wood, and any other plant so they can ferment the sugars inside to produce ethanol. Meanwhile plant breeders, soil scientists, agricultural engineers, and process chemists are at work developing new varieties of grass and woody species, and the planting patterns that yield the strongest harvests.

The goal is to replace – gallon for gallon – fuel made from oil with fuel made from home-grown plants that is produced in a network of regional bio-refineries scattered across the rural Midwest. Such plants could support American farmers and employ thousands of industrial workers earning family-supporting wages.

To be sure, there are important questions about the benefits and risks of generating fuel from plants. Environmental specialists say they are not convinced that producing grass as a cash crop and converting it to ethanol is as risk free as agronomists here contend.

How Much? How Long?
Financiers, meanwhile, wonder about the timeframe for scaling up the industry. Researchers say they are four or five years away from perfecting techniques to remove cellulose from wood and grass. And cellulosic ethanol plants — which now depend on government grants and private investment — don’t expect to turn a profit until well into the next decade.

Lastly, lingering questions surround the auto and truck industry’s eagerness to develop a national vehicle fleet capable of using the fuel, though General Motors is touting its investment in a Michigan cellulosic ethanol plant under development in the state’s Upper Peninsula. On Tuesday, in front of more than 20,000 people at the Democratic National Convention, Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm talked at length about the Upper Peninsula plant, developed by the Mascoma Corporation, and said it would employ 700 people.

“The technology I think is by and large there. But it’s going to require some real rapid advancements to make it commercially viable,” said Brad Redlin of the Izaak Walton League, an environmental organization. “We’re certainly supportive of that whole idea.”

Nevertheless, farm scientists and industrialists say they are convinced that the middle part of the country is on the brink of a remarkable economic revival based on turning soil, sun, water, and plants into the nation’s primary source of clean, renewable transportation fuels.

Here at the University of Illinois, researchers have planted a 340-acre Energy Farm to grow switchgrass and miscanthus, two hearty perennials that can be converted to liquid ethanol. Both are easier to grow than corn, currently the source of most ethanol, and both can thrive on millions of acres of marginal lands unsuited for food production.

Midwest As New Clean Fuel Center
Researchers also are interested in producing ethanol from other plants, especially wood. Entrepreneurs are building ethanol plants in the North Woods of Michigan and Wisconsin, where they’ll turn downed limbs and chips left over from logging and from paper-making into clean-burning energy. The South is getting into the act, too, with a plant in Georgia that will steam and press wood chips into fuel.

“The area east of the Mississippi has really got the best opportunity, because you have higher summer rainfall,” said Steven P. Long, deputy director of the Energy Biosciences Institute, a joint venture between the University of Illinois and the University of California and funded by a $50 million annual grant from oil giant British Petroleum.

Long is developing a process to extract energy from trees and grass by using micro-organisms to break down cell walls. It happens in nature — enzymes in a termite’s gut break down wood — so it can happen in the lab, too. Long believes they can produce ethanol that will sell for $2.50 a gallon – the equivalent of $3.20 gasoline, since ethanol contains less energy than petroleum.

But cellulosic ethanol offers energy savings in other areas. Scientists call the amount of energy a fuel contains, versus the amount required to produce it, the “life-cycle energy balance.” Gasoline has a balance of .8 — you get less energy out of a gallon of gas than you put in. Cellulosic ethanol’s balance has been estimated at 2.62, nearly three times as much energy produced as put into making it, according to studies by the energy and agriculture departments here. That’s twice as much as corn ethanol, since corn requires more water and fertilizer than biomass. Ethanol also produces 85 percent less greenhouse gases than gasoline, according to the federal Department of Energy.

“In the long term, if we can get our breakdown process cheap enough, it wouldn’t make sense to use corn,” Long said.

Long has been researching biofuels for more than 20 years, starting as a professor at the University of Essex, in England. His original motivation: Find fuel that wouldn’t contribute to global warming. That’s still the best argument for ethanol, Long says.

But he realizes that economic and political factors are driving the public’s demand for an alternative to oil. No one wants to pay $4 a gallon for fuel – especially when so much money – almost $60 billion a month now – is draining America’s wealth and ending up in the bank accounts of Middle Eastern despots. “At the end of the 1970s, during the first oil crisis, governments got interested,” Long said. “Then it kind of fell away. But I was able to get enough funding from the European Union to keep my lab going.”

Now, instead of government indifference, Long has to face the objections of conservationists who hoped that unused farmland would revert to prairie or forest, and that planting it in grasses will release more carbon than leaving it in its natural state. To deal with those concerns, he is measuring carbon output at the Energy Farm.

Tall Grass To Gas
Cellulosic ethanol, though, ought to placate several other groups. Ethanol made from grass and wood is likely to allay the concerns of consumers who chafe at using a corn for fuel, and driving up food prices. Another group is the beef industry, which has complained that ethanol, which consumes about a quarter of U.S. corn production, is driving up feed prices.

Agricultural economists respond that converting corn to ethanol has had only a small influence in rising food prices. The cost of fuel, fertilizer, and equipment is a more important factor, they say.

Eric Rund, a corn farmer in nearby Pesotum, Ill., decided to bypass the argument altogether. He contacted Long about growing miscanthus. He sees biomass, which is coming to be called “grass gas,” as the next source of commercial scale ethanol. An acre of miscanthus can generate 1,500 gallons of ethanol – three times as much as corn.

“From the numbers I’ve done, it’s more profitable in the long run,” Rund said. “I’m thinking that we’re eventually going to be making our liquid fuels from biomass. We can’t go with corn. If we used all of our corn crop in the U.S., it wouldn’t replace our fuel, and we wouldn’t have anything to eat.”

As a farmer, Rund prefers miscanthus because it requires little fertilizer, and, as a perennial, regenerates itself each year. It can also be grown on stream banks, which are unsuited for corn. And, miscanthus is best harvested in the winter, after the food crops are in.

On the other hand, miscanthus takes three years to reach its full height. Farmers would need government incentives to start cultivating the plant. Rund is encouraged by an Illinois mandate that 25 percent of the state’s electricity must come from renewable sources by 2025. Biomass could replace coal, providing farmers with a market for miscanthus.

A Government Role For Gas From Wood
Cellulosic ethanol won’t be commercially viable for several years, so the industry is depending on government help to get started. Mascoma, a Massachusetts ethanol producer, received a $26 million Department of Energy grant to build a plant in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula near Sault Ste, Marie. The state of Michigan is chipping in $15 million to make Mascoma’s facility its first Center of Energy Excellence.

Mascoma has also found a partner in General Motors, which wants to increase its fleet of flex-fuel vehicles. The upfront money is necessary because Mascoma’s plant won’t be running until 2012. Eventually, say company executives, it will produce 40 million gallons of ethanol a year. Most of that will fuel cars.

The Upper Peninsula has been economically depressed ever since its mines were tapped out and its virgin timber logged off. The region’s thin, sandy soils have never been well-suited for farming. But ethanol is a new market for the hardwood forests covering the peninsula. Mascoma plans to use wood chips discarded in the paper-making process, said Jay Niles, the company’s vice president of business development.

“Hardwood is superior to softwood for our process,” Niles said. “There’s a lot of hardwood forest in Maine, Michigan, the northern part of the West Coast.”

In the north woods of Wisconsin, Flambeau River Papers is planning to make biodiesel out of tree tops, which are now burned or left on the forest floor after loggers have carted away the more valuable trunks. Not only will the company produce 6 million gallons a year of diesel fuel, the steam from the process will power its paper mill, making Flambeau River independent of fossil fuels, said B.A. Thorp, a consultant on the project.

Flambeau’s plant will employ up to two dozen workers, at wages between $18 and $26 an hour, said company president Bob Byrne. The mill is unionized.

But the nation’s first cellulosic ethanol plant will be located in Soperton, Georgia, where Colorado-based Range Fuels plans to open a facility by the end of 2009. Georgia once had a thriving paper industry, but most of the mills moved to Asia. The timber is still there, awaiting a buyer.

“There’s a huge amount of wood products,” said Mitch Mandich, the chief executive of Range Fuels, which will employ 100 workers. “We can use limbs, pinecones, pine needles bark.”

Range plans to produce ethanol using a thermal chemical process that Mandich said would be cheaper than converting corn to ethanol, and the enzymes that Long and other scientists are researching. Using steam, heat, and pressure the Soperton plant will convert wood chips to synthetic gas, which will be mixed with a catalyst to make ethanol. To get it going, Range has a $76 million Department of Energy grant, and $158 million in investments.

The cost of corn ethanol depends on the price of corn, which tripled between 2004 and 2008. The enzymatic process requires microbes. Mandich won’t reveal how much it will cost Range to make a gallon of ethanol, but the company’s promotional literature says the end result will be competitive with gasoline, down to $50 a barrel, or less than half the current price of oil.

In its first year, Range will produce between 10 million and 20 million gallons and expects to find an immediate marketplace. Last year’s federal energy bill required the production of 16 billion tons of cellulosic ethanol by 2022. “There’s enough biomass in this country to put a serious dent in gasoline,” Mandich said.

Whether America can use that much depends on the popularity of flex fuel vehicles. Mandich already drives one – a Jeep Cherokee SUV. General Motors has committed making half its fleet flex-fuel by 2012. A bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate would require the same target for all vehicles sold in the nation.

Ted McClelland writes from Chicago, where he lives and works. This is his first article for the Apollo News Service. Reach him at tedsgarage@yahoo.com.

For More Information

Steven P. Long
Deputy Director
Energy Biosciences Institute
Web site

Jay Niles
Vice President for Business Development
Mascoma Corporation
Web site

Bob Byrne
President
Flambeau River Papers
Web site

Mitch Mandich
CEO
Range Fuels
Web site