Biofuel Grassoline – Gasoline From Grass
Gioietta Kuo
Augusr 8 2009
Senior Fellow, American Center for International Policy Studies amcips.org
It present 25% of world energy is consumed by transport using mostly oil. As oil is on the wane, new echnologies are appearing both in the kind of motor car we drive and the fuel we use.
It is true to say that most technologies are market driven, which in turn is determined by demand. However, there are pitfalls in rushing headlong into production with a certain technology without some cool headed long term analysis of the viability and basic contradictions that might exist in the route taken by the market. For example the market may change or new technology may become available, so that the production just initiated becomes short lived with the result that the capital put into production cannot be recovered.
A good example of just this phenomenon is the rush into first generation biofuel over the last several years. In other words the world’s rush into production of ethanol from corn and soya beans in the US and sugarcane in Brazil. In many respects this has been regrettable, not to say a mistake for it has done the world some harm. It is understandable how it all came about. Given the sharp rise in oil prices, producing ethanol may provide a cheaper transport fuel. It was also driven by the Bush Administration’s wish to be independent of foreign oil, thus farmers were given huge government subsidies to produce ethanol from corn. Already there are 180 refineries processing corn into ethanol using around 30 % of US corn production in the US. However, even if all the corn produced by US is processed into ethanol, it would satisfy only 20% of US transport needs,
What is a grave mistake is that food stuff : corn and soya bean in the US and sugarcane in Brazil are processed for ethanol for transport and thereby the world’s energy market became tied to the food market. As a consequence, grain prices on the world market shot up by 50% or more in 2007, causing hardship and hunger for the poor in countries which import US corn like Mexico, China, India and parts of Africa. It may be laudable that Brazil has become independent of foreign oil by using sugar produced ethanol. However it has come about at the expense of cutting down Amazon forests to produce arable land to grow sugarcane. Environmentally this is very undesirable.
It is obvious that we cannot go on using food to produce oil since the world’s demand for food is insatiable as the world’s population soars. It is logical to decouple food from energy which means discard first generation biofuel. Instead we should use second generation cellulosic biofuel, which is liquid fuels made from dozens of sources. Basically this consists of inedible parts of plants: agricultural leftovers like wood, sawdust corn stalk, wheat straw, Then there are specially grown ‘energy crops’ – fast growing grasses like switchgrass. Basically the oil derived from this cellulosic material is what we call ‘grassoline’.
The advantages of this second generation biofuel are that the feedstocks are cheap : about $10 -$40 per barrel of oil energy equivalent, abundant and independent of foreign sources. Most important of all, it does not interfere with food production. Most of these cellulosic material can be salvaged from plant wastes. Energy crops can be grown on marginal lands which would not otherwise be used as farmland.
Annually 1.3 billion dry tons of cellulosic biomass can be harvested in the US without interfering with the food chain. Globally, there is enough cellulosic biomass with an energy content equivalent to between 34 to 160 billion barrels of oil a year, exceeding the world’s consumption of 30 billion barrels of oil.
Now for the difficult part. While fermenting corn kernels is relatively easy, breaking down tough stalks of cellulose is hard. Nature has made cellulose the backbone of plants to support the plant’s vertical growth. It is rigid and very difficult to decompose. Cellulose is made up of thousands of glucose molecules strung together. To release the chemical energy inside these sugars, one must untangle the molecular knot that make the cellulose beams.
There are numerous ways scientists are developing the technology to break down the interlocking molecules. Basically they consist of deconstructing the solid biomass into smaller molecules by heat, acids or bases, choosing a method that will most likely be commercially competitive with petroleum.
One method (AFEX) cooks cellulose at 100 degree C with concentrated ammonia under pressure. Enzymes then convert the cellulose into sugar which then turns to ethanol. AFEX has the potential to be very cheap : approximately $1 per gallon of equivalent gasoline energy content, could be selling for $2 at the pump.
Technology is progressing at a furious pace. A stimulus bill from US government signed this year provides $800 million funding for the Biomass program as well as $6 billion loan guarantees for ‘leading edge biofuel projects’. So a number of demonstration plants are already on line and first commercial biorefinery projects will commence construction by Oct 2011. But the technology will take 5 to 15 years to be on the market.