122 comments on Cutting Through the Coskata Cellulosic Ethanol Hype
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122 comments on Cutting Through the Coskata Cellulosic Ethanol Hype
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My sentiments exactly. I applaud Robert for his work. The main difference I have with him (and he may just be being polite to the people he is communicating with) is that I DON'T want cellulosic technology to work. It reminds me of "Ice-nine" from that Kurt Vonegut novel Cat's Cradle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine
"The author Vonnegut credits the invention of ice-nine to Irving Langmuir, who pioneered the study of thin films and interfaces. While working in the public relations office at General Electric, Vonnegut came across a story of how Langmuir, who won the 1932 Nobel Prize for his work at General Electric, was charged with the responsibility of entertaining the author H.G. Wells, who was visiting the company in the early 1930s. Langmuir is said to have come up with an idea about a form of solid water that was stable at room temperature in the hopes that Wells might be inspired to write a story about it. Apparently, Wells was not inspired and neither he nor Langmuir ever published anything about it. After Langmuir and Wells had died, Vonnegut decided to use the idea in his book Cat's Cradle.[1]"
In the book this lab technology gets out and all the oceans "freeze" effectively killing off most planetary life.
Cellulosic ethanol wouldn't be quite as dramatic, but the effects could be similar.
Robert, I have a couple of questions please:
1. Do you have any estimates for how many acres of Douglas Fir forests is represented by 900,000 mature trees every year? This shouldn't be given as a one-off estimate, as a single year's requirement needs to be multiplied by the number of years a forest needs to regrow to maturity for total area to sustain the plant over time.
2. Do you know if anybody has calculated the minerals contained in the biomass harvested, which represents nutrient loss from the soil, and made any suggestions for how to recoup that loss during plant processing and then reapplying those minerals to the areas harvested? This would be an essential step in any sustainable system and would impact the net energy of the system.
Thanks again. Like you, I like real numbers.
How about a "positive spin" on this. The NorthWest, and Canada have a Huge problem with pine-beetles. I've read where something like 2, or 3% of the pine up there are infected. It's too expensive to pay someone to go in and trim out the infected trees; but, it might be possible to get them excised if they can be made into bio-oil, or ethanol.
Just a thought.
Sure, if you can run all the road-building equipment, the chain saws, the skidders, the helicopters, the logging trucks and all the workers' transportation on your own ethanol, and still have enough left over to sell and make money.
Otherwise you're just wasting more oil to cut down trees and ship them far away in a wasteful fashion. They'd be better off rotting in place to help grow future trees.
As noted in my post below...
British Columbia already harvests the timber equivalent of 33,000,000 Douglas firs annually. This figure is less than 1% of the provincial resource base and a tiny fraction of the beetle-infested timber that surrounds the under-utilized infrastructure already in place.
The BC and Quebec governments are transitioning both the infrastructure and resource base away from traditional pulp-paper and construction industry support programs (i.e. US housing) to Bioenergy initiatives.
That said, Robert's Douglas fir analogy, albeit effective, is misleading.
Coskata Michigan is certainly not going to be harvesting Douglas fir but rather (in a perfect world) organically grown, nitrogenous fixing perennial Dedicated Energy Crops (DECs) such as hemp - a plant that maintains a higher biomass/btu ratio, higher biomass/acre ratio, not to mention an easier and more frequent harvesting profile.
That said, Robert's Douglas fir analogy, albeit effective, is misleading.
It is simply designed to give someone a feel for the amount of biomass required. If I said "a million hemp plants" that would have been completely meaningless to most people.
...a plant that maintains a higher biomass/btu ratio, higher biomass/acre ratio...
Numbers?
Fair enough.
My btu assertion is based on your ballpark usage of 12.5MMbtu/ton as opposed to the 15-17MMbtu/ton that a DEC would support.
And as for the latter assertion. You're looking at 10-30tons/acre for Douglas fir vs. 10-15tons/acre for a DEC.
But you and I both know that while the DEC acreage can be harvested annually, the same cannot be said for a stand of Douglas fir.
don't forget the beetles. They could be profitably converted into bio-diesel in a suitably engineered plant. Vinod Kholsa, are you listening?
My car runs on beetle juice.
As far as I am aware, hemp is neither a perennial nor nitrogen fixing.
Miscanthus rather, not hemp.
They'd be better off rotting in place to help grow future trees.
As someone who's had to deal with them, if you leave them as you are suggesting, they spread to other trees.
Thus the normal method is to remove the infested trees in the cold weather and 'process' the trees.
Do you have any estimates for how many acres of Douglas Fir forests is represented by 900,000 mature trees every year?
For a tree farm, 500 or so trees is a pretty good average. So, to run that plant would take an 1800 acre clear cut each year. If the maturity time for the tree is 20 years, you will clearcut an area of 36,000 acres around the plant. A section is 640 acres, which is 1 square mile. So you would need to remove the biomass from 56 square miles around the plant. This is one reason that I don't think the farmed biomass model will ever be viable for cellulosic ethanol.
If you have a source that is coming into a point source - such as biomass that is presently going to a landfill - then you might have a viable model. But it is going to be on a much smaller scale than a typical 50-100 million gallon per year ethanol plant. I just don't think there are those volumes of biomass coming into any point source.
Do you know if anybody has calculated the minerals contained in the biomass harvested, which represents nutrient loss from the soil, and made any suggestions for how to recoup that loss during plant processing and then reapplying those minerals to the areas harvested?
When I was in India back in March, they were returning the waste ash from burning bagasse back to the soil. Their model for sugarcane ethanol is pretty sustainable. But as I stated at ASPO when someone asked a similar question, some of those minerals may be in an oxidized, unusable state, and some trace minerals may be volatilized. So maybe it isn't sustainable long term, but what they are doing is far more sustainable than most biofuel schemes I have seen.
washington state, Oregon, Western Canada - What would you have there? 100,000 sq mi of forest? 200,000 sq mi? And, we're talking 56 sq mi? And, remember, you're not cutting 56 sq mi at a time. You're cutting about 3 sq mi. A decent-sized farm.
Anyhoo, it looks like you could do between 2,000, and 4,000 of these if it was "balls-to-the-walls, time. Of course, that's being silly; but, I could easily see a couple hundred. You could probably do that many if you were just taking out the diseased trees, and the three, or four trees immediately surrounding the dying one. Just a thought.
You're cutting about 3 sq mi. A decent-sized farm.
But the biofuel plant has to be smack dab in the middle of it. This gets into the biomass density and logistics problem. There is a lot of available biomass. It just isn't concentrated. Dead trees from the beetle kill are scattered over a large area. It won't be feasible to transport them very far to a plant before you eat your energy savings up.
I don't know. Would it? What can a log-hauling truck carry? 15 tons? (just guessing, haven't a clue.) If so, would that equate to a potential 1,000 gallons of ethanol? How much gasoline to get 20 miles? 6 gallons? 4 gallons for return trip? 10 gallons, Total? To carry 1,000. 1%? Double the distance, 2%? Throw in another 1% for chainsaws, mule, etc.
That probably wouldn't be the "showstopper." Labor? I don't know.
Pulling a few trees out here and there then moving on to a few more is time consuming. The felled timber can get hooked up in the standing trees. Extraction it is much harder too. Constantly resetting winches and clearing temporary roads for a few sticks is just not worth the bother in my opinion.
Douglas Fir to Ethanol per Rapier
1660 lbs dry matter per tree
500 trees per acre
830000 lbs dry matter per acre
20 years growing time
41500 lbs per year
20.75 tons dry per year
50 gallons per dry ton
1037.5 gallons per acre per year
$1.00 cost per gallon
$1,037.50 revenue per acre
50 million gallons per year
48193 acres per year
75.30 sq miles
7.64 miles radius
3.82 average miles trip
69.17 fresh tons
264.12 ton miles
0.30 cost per ton mile
79.24 cost per acre
8% hauling cost
"0.30 cost per ton mile"
How did you calculate that? A highway semi can carry 40 tons for $.50/mile, for about $.01/ton-mile. I realize trees are much less dense, but with lower weight wouldn't fuel consumption drop as well? Wouldn't a well organized farm optimize it's internal transport, with good roads, conveyors and electrification where appropriate, etc?
A truck doing 2 MPG with diesel at $3 would be already $1.50 per mile. So, not sure where you're getting your $0.50 per mile from.
But there are many other cost involved with hauling. You can use the model of Mississippi here:
http://fwrc.msstate.edu/ Look under "software" tab.
Sounds viable to me. One plant surrounded by 4 miles of biomass, providing 500 gallons of fuel per year for 200,000 people? So if we had about 1000 of these plants, we could totally eliminate our oil imports.
Oil imports cost more than half a trillion per year. In order for it to be viable in the business world, each plant would have to cost less than half a billion dollars. That again sounds feasible to me. But the cost of the plant would also have to include the cost of growing and harvesting the biomass, paying the workers, fueling the vehicles, etc. If total plant cost + 20 years of production and maintenance was kept below 500 million, then we could completely eliminate all foreign oil imports at no additional cost to us. With an added bonus of countless new jobs and a cost effective means of repatriating our offshored industry.
I just cant imagine how such a plant could cost more than 500 million. Maybe the first few might, but after it spreads out across the land, it should be very cheap to replicate the existing design.
1. It depends on what you mean by "mature." In old growth Pseudotsuga dominated mixed conifer forest there may only be about 10 to 20 mature (>80 cm dbh) Doug firs per hectare, and about the same number of equivalent sized trees of all other species combined. That along with maybe about 30 - 110 younger shade tolerant Doug firs per hectare. Of course, the numbers and sizes vary widely according to geographic location. Are you talking about the west slope of the Cascades or the southern Rockys? Such mature trees may be between 1 & 2 centuries old. Please remember that forest =/= tree farm.
2. Ash content of Doug fir may be as little as .2% in wood, or >3% in bark & needles. Half or more of this ash content may be inert silica, depending on edaphic conditions where grown. Do you really think that a commercial biofuels operation is going to return mineral ash to the ruined forest, after having clear cut it?
Good questions & good post Jason. Do you happen to know if the Langmuir thunderstorm research lab atop South Magdalena Peak in NM is named after the Irving Langmuir you mention?