‘Beeting’ a Path to Advanced Biofuels
by Anna Austin (Ethanol Producer Magazine) In roughly one month’s time, North Dakota growers harvest close to 5 million tons of sugar beets. North Dakota and Minnesota combined produce about 55 percent of the nation’s sugar beets every year. With the exception of a few northern counties, beets are grown throughout the Red River Valley and along the Minnesota River in west central Minnesota. Researchers at North Dakota State University in Fargo are aiming to change that as part of a much larger project—one that they hope will result in a statewide sugar beet-to-biofuel industry.
NDSU has teamed up with Green Vision Group Inc., a Fargo-based company that has been studying sugar-based fuel production in North Dakota since 2008, and Muscatine, Iowa-based Heartland Renewable Energy LLC, which has developed a process to recycle waste materials from ethanol production to produce heat and power at the plant site.
Having spent 2009 doing initial economic feasibility studies and laboratory testing, lead researcher Cole Gustafson, a biofuels economist at NDSU, says the long-term goal of the project is to build ethanol plants across North Dakota, facilitating sugar beet production in new areas and helping to meet the advanced biofuel portion of the second stage of the renewable fuel standard (RFS2).
…The advantages to using sugar beets are abundant, (Green Vision’s President Maynard) Helgaas points out. Transportation, storage and processing costs of sugar beets in the region will be low, due to close proximity to the resource, the cool climate and pre-existing sugar beet processing infrastructure. Sugar beets possess very high sugar content, and can therefore double ethanol production per acre compared to corn. They’re also low in nitrogen, a large contributor to greenhouse gases, he adds.
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