OT: Fuel Without the Fossil

[Guest guest]

November 9, 2007

The Energy Challenge

Fuel Without the Fossil

 

By MATTHEW L. WALD

 

DENVER — Mitch Mandich proudly showed off his baby, a 150-foot

contraption of tanks, valves, hoppers, augers and fans. It hissed. It

gurgled. An incongruous smell wafted through the air, the scent of

turpentine.

 

Mr. Mandich's machine devours pine chips from Georgia and turns them

into an energy-rich gas, a step toward making liquid fuels. His

company, Range Fuels, is near the front of the pack in a technology

race that could have an impact on the way America powers its

automotive fleet, and help ameliorate global warming.

 

" Somebody's going to hit a home run here, " Mr. Mandich said. " We want

to be first. "

 

For years, scientists have known that the building blocks in plant

matter — not just corn kernels, but also corn stalks, wood chips,

straw and even some household garbage — constituted an immense

potential resource that could, in theory, help fill the gasoline tanks

of America's cars and trucks.

 

Mostly, they have focused on biology as a way to do it, tinkering with

bacteria or fungi that could digest the plant material, known as

biomass, and extract sugar that could be fermented into ethanol. But

now, nipping at the heels of various companies using biological

methods, is a new group of entrepreneurs, including Mr. Mandich, who

favor chemistry.

 

They believe techniques borrowed from oil refining and other chemical

industries will allow them to crack open big biological molecules,

transforming them into ethanol or, even more interesting, into diesel

and gasoline. Those latter fuels could be transported in existing

pipelines and burned in existing engines without fuss. Advocates of

the chemical methods say they may be flexible enough to go beyond

traditional biomass, converting old tires or even human waste into

clean transport fuel.

 

In Madison, Wis., a company called Virent Energy Systems is turning

sugar into gasoline, diesel, kerosene and jet fuel, with the

long-range plan of obtaining the sugars from biomass. In Ontario,

Dynamotive Energy Systems is turning biomass into a form of oil, and

in Chicago, a Honeywell subsidiary called UOP is doing something

similar. In Irvine, Calif., BlueFire Ethanol is using acid to break

down organic material for conversion to fuel.

 

Possibilities like these are coming to the fore at a time when rising

oil prices have created an incentive to develop substitute fuels.

Making them from biomass would be environmentally friendly in that,

unlike standard gasoline or diesel, the fuels would not take

long-stored carbon from underground and dump it into the air as carbon

dioxide.

 

And unlike making ethanol from corn kernels, these techniques do not

require significant amounts of natural gas or coal. Carbon dioxide,

emitted in large volume when people burn fossil fuels, is the primary

culprit in global warming.

 

Lately, these factors have resulted in a flood of investment capital

into both biological and chemical techniques for using biomass.

Experts consider both approaches promising, and they say it is too

early to tell which will win.

 

" It's not obvious, and I don't think it will be obvious for a very

long time, " Andrew Karsner, the assistant secretary of energy for

energy efficiency and renewable energy, said in Washington. His

department is awarding grants to support both approaches.

 

Experts say it is possible that more than one type of plant will reach

commercial success, with the ideal technique for a given locale

depending on what material is available to convert to fuel.

 

Range Fuels favors pine chips and other waste from softwood logging

operations, largely because there is so much of it. Logging in

Georgia, for instance, leaves behind about a quarter of the tree.

" Bark, needles, cones, we use all of it, " said Mr. Mandich, chief

executive of Range.

 

Range is a privately held company whose chief scientist, Bud Klepper,

has been working on the two problems, creating gas from biomass and

then converting it to liquid fuel, since the 1980s. The company is

heavily backed by Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist

who has turned his focus to energy investments.

 

Range broke ground this week on the first full-scale biomass-to-fuel

plant in the United States, in Soperton, Ga. " Today marks the

beginning of a new phase of our effort to make America more energy

secure, " the secretary of energy, Samuel Bodman, said at the event.

The plant, its cost not publicly disclosed, is expected to produce 20

million gallons of ethanol a year, with more capacity to be added

later.

 

In Georgia alone, enough waste wood is available to make two billion

gallons of ethanol a year, Mr. Mandich said. If all that material

could be captured and converted to fuel, it could replace about 1

percent of the nation's gasoline consumption.

 

Biomass of various types is abundant in every state, some of it

gathered daily by garbage trucks. A study two years ago by the Oak

Ridge National Laboratory found that enough biomass is available in

the United States to replace more than a third of the nation's

gasoline consumption, assuming the economics can be made to work.

 

The Bush administration is counting on biofuels to help limit the

growth of petroleum demand, and environmentalists routinely include

such fuels in their forecasts as a way to reduce carbon dioxide

emissions. But to date, no one has shown that fuels from biomass can

be made profitably, even when competing with gasoline at $3 a gallon.

 

Daniel M. Kammen, director for the renewable and appropriate energy

laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, said, " I suspect

we will have a trickle " of fuels from biomass in the next few years.

But it will be only a trickle unless the government adopts quotas or

offers additional support, he said.

 

Companies like Range that are trying to convert biomass by chemical

methods follow one of two broad approaches. The first is to mix the

material with steam to produce a gas known as synthesis gas,

consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. With additional

processing, that gas can be converted to liquid fuels. The second

technique does not break the material down as far, creating a product

that resembles oil that can then be refined into liquid fuel.

 

Research papers and patents are flying these days as scientists

struggle to improve these methods. As with oil refineries, the final

stages typically produce a variety of chemicals, of varying value, and

the trick is to maximize production of the desirable chemicals.

" Everybody is dealing with a byproduct they don't want, " said Arnold

Klann, the chief executive of BlueFire.

 

Range Fuels is one of the companies that turn biomass into a gas

before converting it to liquid fuel. The company wants to make

ethanol, a form of alcohol, but its technique produces less valuable

varieties of alcohol as well. Company scientists are tweaking their

approach to maximize the ethanol yield.

 

The other day, laboratory technicians grabbed samples of a yellow

liquid emerging from the machinery and swirled it like a suspect

vintage of chenin blanc. An expensive chemical analyzer called a gas

chromatography machine stood in the corner. By using it, engineers can

calculate what changes in temperature, pressure and flow rates would

work best to produce ethanol in a full-scale commercial venture.

 

Overseeing the operation, Mr. Mandich radiated confidence. " You can't

have so many people at bat without hitting something, " he said.

 

As the nation seeks to develop new types of fuel, Congress has leaned

heavily toward ethanol made from corn kernels, and it is the only

alternative fuel available today in large volume. Ethanol benefits

from a tax break and a mandate that a significant amount of it be

blended into gasoline.

 

Turning biomass into gasoline would be simpler, requiring no changes

in the nation's cars or pipelines, but federal policy is tilting many

research programs toward ethanol.

 

Range, for instance, could make any of several types of fuel from its

pine chips. Asked whether the company chose ethanol for the

51-cent-a-gallon tax break, Mr. Klepper declared: " It's the American

way. "

 

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company