Is it time? POET wants to bring cellulosic ethanol plant to Iowa
The Mascoma Corporation has already announced that it wants to be the first to have a cellulosic ethanol plant up and running, with three projects announced in Tennessee, New York state and Michigan. The ethanol company POET (formerly Broin) is not going to let Mascoma get there without a challenge, and announced this week an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy for the first phase of a commercial cellulosic ethanol project.
The cellulosic ethanol facility is expected to open in 2011 in Emmetsburg, Iowa. It's a follow-up to POET's February agreement with the DOE that could be worth up to $80 million, but that money can't exceed 40 percent of the facility's total cost. Here's how it'll play out:
Project Liberty, POET's cellulosic project, will convert an existing 50 million gallon per year (mgpy) dry-mill ethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa into an integrated corn-to-ethanol and cellulose-to-ethanol biorefinery. Once complete, the facility will produce 125 mgpy, 25 percent of which will be from corn fiber and corn cobs. By adding cellulosic production to an existing grain ethanol plant, POET will be able to produce 11 percent more ethanol from a bushel of corn, 27 percent more from an acre of corn, while almost completely eliminating fossil fuel consumption and decreasing water usage by 24 percent.
I know some of our readers figure that any project that requires government funding is not worth doing, but those numbers sound pretty good. It's still ethanol from corn, but at least it's moving away from that biomass, slowly but surely.
[Source: POET]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mark Bruns 1:41PM (11/18/2007)
I am thinking about a farm 30 miles from South Dakota, 6 miles from Minnesota
How would you farm it? Would you farm it in a more or less conventional way ...all corn, crank on the N go for max [biomass] yield. To max out the ethanol per acre, your next step would be working to find, build or invest in a whole-plant cellulosic ethanol refinery to sell the entire crop to?
OR would it? Is the push to cellulosic ethanol plant badly misguided?
Consider this: Take a look at the NCGA 2006 Corn Yield Contest Yield Guide. If you look at the data in that guide, you will notice that the average yield of winners was just over 287 bushels; the non-winning entrants came in at just over 216 ... almost 1/3 again as much yield. If you start looking at what is significantly different you will see that 3 of the 27 yield contest winning fields were on corn following alfalfa -- significant because only 38 of the 3127 entrants that did not win actually grew corn on ground that had been in alfalfa. 11 of the 27 winning fields [or 40.7%] used manure -- while only 244 of the 3127 non-winning entrants or 7.8% used manure. In other words, the NCGA CYC data would support the argument that we need to think about residual carbon and carbon sequestration in order to obtain maximum yields. Decaying organic material plays a vital role in soil tilth -- we cannot produce 300 bushel corn without it.
The yield gains for the winning entrants suggest that we could afford to produce hay / forage or graze 1/4 of our acres and still obtain the same total yield. Perhaps we should be using alfalfa and grazing (in combination with distiller's grains and lower quality forages) to produce meat and milk and also sequester carbon and build soil tilth in order to maximize total yield.
I would highly recommend reading a recent paper by S. A. Khan, R. L. Mulvaney, T. R. Ellsworth and C. W. Boast published in the October, 2007 in volume 36, Issue 6 of the Journal of Environmental Quality which is published by the American Society of Agronomy.
This paper presents an analysis of the famous Morrow Plots under continuous corn production (established more than a century ago). A must read for anyone interested in the effects of nitrogen fertilization on the global carbon cycle (and hence the greenhouse effect) ... from the conclusions:
A half century of synthetic N fertilization has played a crucial role in expanding worldwide grain production, but there has been a hidden cost to the soil resource: a net loss of native SOC and the residue C inputs. This cost has been exacerbated by the widespread use of yield-based systems for fertilizer N management, which are advocated for the sake of short-term economic gain rather than long-term sustainability. Fertilization beyond crop N requirements could be reduced substantially by a shift from yield- to soil-based N management, ideally implemented on a site-specific basis. This strategy may be of value for reversing the ongoing organic matter decline of arable soils, but several decades will likely be necessary before any such benefit can realistically be expected to emerge. In the meantime, caution is warranted in avoiding excessive N fertilization, and especially with the current trend toward the use of crop residues for bioenergy production.
This conclusion, along with concerns about nitrous oxide emissions AND the distinct possibility that 'peak nitrogen' will be roughly coincident with 'peak oil' is a wake-up call for anyone planning a sustainable biofuels-based economy.
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