7/09/2010 |
(en una verdadera perspectiva global)
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A number of recent news releases, notices and articles indicate the increasing interest in developing biomass as a source of fuels and energy. Fortunately, Wisconsin has been able to garner some of the federal funding that will power this work. On November 24, it was announced that three Wisconsin companies had been awarded a total of $4.78 million in federal research dollars to support development of biofuels. On the same day plans were unveiled for a large ethanol from corn plant in Sharon, Wisconsin.
CleanTech Partners, Incorporated of Middleton, Wisconsin received a $1.5 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to support a project to extract sugars from wood chips prior to pulping. The sugar extracts would then be fermented to produce ethanol and acetic acid. The expectation is that the process will actually improve the overall efficiency of the pulp production while generating valuable biofuels and chemicals.
The research will have two main areas of development. One is the development of the extraction process for removing the hemicelluloses. Various processes involving enzymatic and or chemical methods for extraction of the hemicellulose sugars will be investigated. The intent is to maximize the extraction while maintaining the papermaking properties of the fiber resulting from subsequent pulping.
A second area of development is the high yield conversion of the extracted sugars into ethanol and other biofuels and chemicals. Although the conversion of glucose to ethanol is a well established process, the sugars extracted from wood chips in the initial pre-hydrolysis stage are a complex mixture of sugars that can include five carbon sugars as well as six carbon sugars. Obtaining efficient conversion to ethanol and other useful products will be a challenge. If successful, this new process would reduce the energy demands of the pulping process and provide additional revenue to the mill from the production of ethanol and other chemicals.
Although the DOE grant is for $1.5 million, the overall project cost is nearly $2.7 million with the additional support coming from a consortium that includes paper companies, enzyme companies, universities and the USDA Forest Products Laboratory. If successful, the new process should be broadly applicable to most pulping operations.
Two other companies to which CleanTech Partners has provided support were also recipients of Biofuel R&D grants. Virent Energy Systems of Madison was awarded $2 million to evaluate the application of their technology to the conversion of glycerol to propylene glycol. Glycerol is a by-product of the manufacture of bio-diesel. While glycerol has many industrial and commercial uses, conversion to propylene glycol would increase the overall utility of bio-diesel manufacture. Lucigen Corporation of Middleton received a $1.3 million to develop enzymes to convert soybean meal to ethanol. The total award of $4.78 million to these Wisconsin companies was more than 27% of the almost $17.5 million in biofuel research grants awarded nationwide this fall.
A 105 million gallon ethanol plant was proposed by Global Renewables LLC to be built in Sharon, Wisconsin. The $195 million plant is expected to operational by October of 2008 and will produce 105-120 million gallons of ethanol per year. The plant will convert locally grown corn to ethanol and also produce distillers dry grain that can be used as animal feed.
In the October issue of Wired magazine, Vinod Khosla provided his views on the interest and technology in developing ethanol as a transportation fuel. Khosla is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems as well as a general partner of the venture capital firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers. He believes that corn based ethanol may not be the ultimate solution to oil independence but it is a crucial initial step.
The article describes an interesting concept for improving the efficiency of converting corn to ethanol. While the actual corn to ethanol hydrolysis/fermentation is rather conventional, the process gains efficiency by utilizing methane from the anaerobic digestion of cow manure to power the ethanol plant. E3 Biofuels has designed a process to capture and process the cow manure from an adjacent cattle feedlot to provide the energy to run the ethanol plant. The by-product distillers grains are used in the feedlot and the residual from the manure digestion is converted to fertilizer and used on the corn fields to grow more corn.
According to the article, this closed loop system increases the energy output of the process so that 5 BTUs are obtained for every BTU that is used to fuel the plant. In a conventional corn to ethanol plant, only 1.3 to 1.8 BTUs are produced for every BTU of fossil fuel input. Since the manure is captured and collected for digestion, the system prevents groundwater pollution common to feedlots
The article also describes a gasifier system for cellulosics under development by Kergy. They call the process an anaerobic thermal conversion, and part of the concept is to make the system modular so that it can be located where the biomass is available as opposed to having one large central processing unit. According to the Kergy website (http://www.kergy.com/ ) the process should be able to handle everything from corn stover to hog manure to municipal garbage and virtually any other cellulose containing waste product/by-product. Kergy is getting ready to start up a 15,000 gallon per day demonstration unit.
With all of the interest in using biomass for fuel and chemicals, it is not surprising that there are a number of websites devoted to biomass utilization. Two of them are:
http://www.biobased.us/sitesofinterest.html and
http://www.biofuelreview.com/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/
There is a free electronic newsletter that captures much of the work going on in this area. To subscribe to the Biomass R&D Initiative Newsletter visit: http://bcsmain.com/mlists/?p=subscribe&id=2
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