GRAND FORKS, N.D. - The race to see who can have the first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant on line is heating up, with three strong contenders in the running, including one in North Dakota.
Delegates to the Biomass '10 conference in Grand Forks heard reports on all three cellulosic ethanol plant projects, which are in various stages of development. All have a projected start-up date in 2013 or 2014, and the race is on to see which will be the first to fire up.
Two of the plants will use wheat straw and the other will use corn cobs as a main feedstock in its operation, and each will use some form of the crop residue feedstock to help fire up the plant, thus reducing the carbon footprint of the facility.
Following is a brief outline of the three plants - the Abengoa Bioenergy Plant in Hugoton, Kan.; POET Energy's Project Liberty Plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa; and Great River Energy's plant, Dakota Spirit Ag Energy, in Spiritwood, N.D.
Sandra Broekema, manager of business development for Great River Energy presented an overview of the Spiritwood plant to the conference. The plant is currently in the planning phase, with construction slated to begin in 2012 resulting in the start of commercial operation in late 2014 or early 2015.
Total cost of the 20 million gallons per year cellulosic ethanol plant is expected to be in the range of $300 million, and that would include the cost of equipment for biomass collection out on the farm.
“Our plant will be a 20 million gallon per year plant,” Broekema said, “and that's because of the bulk of biomass compared to corn grain. Cellulosic ethanol plants are going to be smaller than the conventional dry-mill plants because you would need to draw biomass material from such a large area. The feedstock input for a 20 million gallon plant would be about 480,000 tons per year of wheat straw, which is a massive number.”
The cellulosic ethanol plant would produce three products - ethanol, C-5 molasses and purified lignin pellets that can be used to fire a boiler in a power plant. Engineers estimate that besides the 20 million gallons of ethanol, the Spiritwood cellulosic ethanol plant would produce 170,000 tons per year of the purified lignin pellets and 188,000 tons of 40 percent moisture feed grade C-5 molasses.
Once operational, the plant will provide an estimated 57 full time jobs at the biorefinery and 25 full time and seasonal jobs to harvest, collect, store and transport the crop residues.
This plant isn't starting from ground zero, but has partnered with Inbicon A/S, a Danish company that has done considerable work with the development of cellulosic biorefinery
equipment for the European market.
More detailed information on the Spiritwood plant can be found in an earlier issue of Farm & Ranch Guide.
Project Liberty
This plant will piggyback on an existing corn ethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa, and will use corn cobs as the basic feedstock to produce 25 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year, according to POET Energy's Adam Wirt.
“Our goal is to be the first (commercial) cellulosic plant in the world,” he said, “but we are all in the same general area. We want to apply what we have learned about corn ethanol in the past 20 years and progress that even further with cellulosic ethanol.
“We are looking at corn cobs as a feedstock and what better to go than where our corn is to capitalize on that opportunity?”
According to Wirt, next to the grain, the cobs have the most energy value of any part of the corn plant and contributes very little to the soil fertility when left to decompose in the soil, so the cobs are a logical choice to use in the cellulosic process.
For the past 18 months POET has been operating a small scale pilot cellulosic ethanol plant in Scotland, S.D., that's capable of using about a ton a day of biomass and they hope to replicate what has been learned at this pilot plant when they go to a commercial scale.
The current corn ethanol plant at Emmetsburg is a 50 million gallon per year (mgy) plant and once the cellulosic portion of the plant is up and running, the biomass from that plant will be used to heat the entire ethanol facility, thereby eliminating the need for the plant to use any natural gas.
The plant has passed all of the environmental impact studies and ground will be broken for the new facility in August 2010 with hopes that the plant will be operational by the end of 2012.
As a practice run for when the Project Liberty plant becomes operational, the Emmetsburg facility will work with 80 farmers in their trade area this year in collecting 55,000 tons of corn cobs. Even though they won't be using this material in the cellulosic plant this year, it will be used in other plants for heating purposes.
The company feels the trial run this year is essential to assure an adequate supply of biomass once the cellulosic part starts operation.
When fully operational, the plant will use approximately 300,000 tons of feedstock a year and will involve collection of corn cobs from about 1/3 of all the corn acreage within a 35-mile radius of the facility.
Abengoa's Hugoton plant
Multi-national company Abengoa has been ready to pull the trigger on starting a cellulosic ethanol facility for several years now, but for various reasons the hoped for start-up has continued to be pushed back.
Like POET, Abengoa has had a pilot plant running in York, Neb., since 2007, that's been producing 1.3 mgy. The plans now call for the start-up construction at the Hugoton, Kan., site will begin sometime in 2011 with the first ethanol coming out of the facility sometime in 2013.
The plant will be designed to use 2500 tons of biomass feedstock per day with 600 of that going to the production of ethanol and 1900 going to the generation of steam to power the plant. It will be designed to use a wide variety of material, ranging from crop residues that are gathered in a 60-mile radius of the plant, to grasses raised especially for the plant and scrap wood products, such as pallets.
“When considering the feedstock supply, we realize we need to have something that is profitable to the farmer as well as to us,” said Robert Wooley, director of process engineering for Abengoa Bioenergy. “So we figure at least $10 a ton for the residue laying on the ground and then you have the other costs of harvesting, storing and transporting that go on top of that. We are three years from start up and we have about 50 percent of the contracts signed for our biomass supply.”
Both POET and Abengoa, according to their spokesmen, have no plans to build any additional corn-ethanol plants, but will now focus on what they call the second generation fuel, or cellulosic ethanol.
“Cellulosic ethanol is our future,” Wooley told the group. “Biomass procurement should never be underestimated as one of the keys to the viability of a plant-we spend a lot of time with agriculture.”
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