Cellulosic myths busted

It's a myth that cellulosic ethanol has a lower energy balance than conventional ethanol.

That was just one of the misconceptions about cellulosic fuels challenged by two cellulosic ethanol makers, who took to a virtual stage yesterday to share the cellulosic state-of-the-art and answer questions from potential investors and others.

Speaking on an the Cleantech Group webinar What's real and what's not in cellulosic biofuels, representatives from Celunol and BlueFire Ethanol maintained that cellulosic ethanol is no less efficient than that made from corn.

"Ethanol is ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is chemically identical to grain ethanol. When burned in today's automotive engines, it does have 30 percent lower BTU content than gasoline. So if you put it in a low compression engine, you do get a mileage penalty. But if you put it in a higher compression engine, you can get as much as 90 percent of the mileage of gasoline," noted John Howe, Celunol VP of public affairs.

It seemed there were no shortage of misconceptions to dispel.

Moderator Dallas Kachan of the Cleantech Group shared results of a recent poll to date on the Cleantech Group. Some 18 percent of respondents thought cellulosic ethanol was already being generated in commercial quantities, while 8 percent of those surveyed seemed to think cellulosic ethanol would never work.

"Add those two camps together, the 18 percent at the top, and the 8 percent at the bottom, and, to us at the Cleantech Group, that suggests that 1 in 4 people in the cleantech industry have what we think are some pretty big misunderstandings about where cellulosic fuels are currently at," said Kachan.

While experts in the session illustrated that cellulosic fuel technology is indeed real, they also confirmed it is not yet producing commercial quantities of fuel anywhere.

Why not? Presenters pointed out that the new technology was still evolving, particularly in the emerging use of enzymes and bacteria, where companies like Celunol faced technical issues with transporting enzymes ("their tails break off") and growing them cost effectively enough.

They also identified non-traditional project financing and venture capital barriers as roadblocks. Cellulosic investments require financing that doesn’t always fit conventional venture capital or project finance models, speakers said. Traditional project finance companies don’t like risk—and VCs don’t like these sorts of deals, because they don’t sense returns in the multiples they’re used to.

Finally, government was identified as a barrier, given the lack of focus of various government agencies to promote biomass technologies and renewable fuels in the face of competing interests for public R&D funds.

Critics are fond of suggesting cellulosic ethanol isn't likely to enter production anytime soon, but both Celunol and BlueFire say they're in the process of moving from pilot plants into production.

Two pilot plants, one in Jennings, Louisiana and one in Osaka, Japan, are helping Celunol prove its enzyme-based approach. Celunol is in the process of constructing a demo plant at its Jennings facility, with a capacity of 1.4 million gallons/year. Feedstocks are to include sugarcane bagasse and specially-bred energy cane.

Commercial plants are to be approximately twenty times the size of the demonstration facility, according to Howe.

BlueFire's Arkenol process has spent the last four years in pilots, and is to soon enter commercial production at a landfill site in Southern California, in a partnership between BlueFire and waste giant Waste Management.

BlueFire intends to convert municipal solid waste into ethanol at the plant, for a capacity of approximately 18.6 million gallons a year. Partially fueled by a $40 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, the plant is scheduled to be built in Q2 next year, coming online the year after.

Many attendees had questions about the environmental impact of cellulosic ethanol production. Celunol's Howe and BlueFire CEO Arnold Klann defended their processes as sustainable.

"Most of the reagents we're using to break down cellulosic structures are for the most part benign or ubiquitous. In our concentrated acid hydrolysis, we use sulfuric acid, probably the most widely used chemical behind water. We reuse and recycle it as much as we can to be as efficient as possible," said Klann, adding that the California Energy Commission—"the toughest licensing agency in the world"—found the company's process had no significant impact to the environment.

"Our waste water treatment facilities are essentially identical to standard waste water treatment facilities," said Howe. "In terms of emissions, on balance, overall emissions will be much less toxic than what we would see with petroleum refining."

Listen to a replay of the entire one hour event here.