US - Mendota Bioenergy LLC will test the feasibility of converting sugar beets and agricultural waste, such as almond orchard prunings, into several kinds of transportation fuel and other sustainable products.
An Energy Commission grant will support the pre-development work for the design and construction of the Advanced Bioenergy Center in Mendota. This work includes exploring the project's technical feasibility, its economic viability and its life-cycle environmental impacts.
Mendota BioEnergy will analyze the sustainability of the plan, assess the properties of sugar beets and other feedstock materials, and then develop technology to convert the biomass into useful products.
If the project proves to be feasible, the centre could convert 840,000 tons of sugar beets and 80,000 tons of farm bio-waste each year into 33.5 million gallons of ethanol; 1.6 mm standard cubic feet of biomethane for making compressed natural gas; 6.3 megawatts of certified green electricity; and high-nutrient compost and liquid fertilizer. The project could provide a major industrial boost to this agricultural area, a designated Enterprise Zone.
The Advanced Bioenergy Centre will use four different technologies to produce its products, including advanced ethanol production, anaerobic digestion, biomass gasification, and water recycling and wastewater treatment. The project is expected to reclaim one million gallons of treated wastewater a day from the City of Mendota Wastewater Treatment Plant that will be used for biorefinery operations. It will also provide nearly 119 million additional gallons of water each year to be used for on-farm irrigation and landscaping purposes.
The main benefits of what this means for the area around Mendota are:
The ethanol and CNG produced would replace 23 million gallons of gasoline each year, cutting greenhouse gas emissions from petroleum by 45 percent for ethanol and 86 percent for CNG.
Cogeneration will be used to produce steam and green-energy that will be reintegrated as process energy into the bio-refinery process.
Additional benefits will include decreased air quality impacts associated with the burning of agricultural waste, and production of high-grade soil amendments that can replace fossil based fertilizers.
Other such projects in other states are also being developed around almost the same model as Mendota’s “Energy” Beet Biorefinery. One thing in common with all these projects is that they can make this Non-Food crop America’s answer to Brazil’s super successful sugarcane ethanol industry.
