7 Decision Points in the Race for Scale in Advanced Biofuels
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) …In the Race for Scale, the industry has excelled in driving down operating costs. Capital costs have proven more perplexing, and sticker shock has been a hold-back. Feedstock availability at affordable cost and appropriate scale has also bedeviled the scale-up effort.
1. RFS – Hold or Fold? …Coming under unprecedented attack from oil-patch and conservative lawmakers, the industry has largely adopted a unified, “don’t mess with the RFS” stance. But some of the more advanced technologies, whose rise was not contemplated in the framing of RFS2, have been lobbying for revisions to RFS2 to make it more fuel- and feedstock-agnostic. …
2. The $510 million Title 3 advanced biofuels program. …Recently, Republican lawmakers on the House Armed Services committee voted not to allow the Navy to transfer funds from other programs to the funding of the commitment.
3. Collaboration and co-opetition. When and how closed, vertically integrated systems work – when to partner and how, in matching “best of class” front-ends (e.g. pre-treatment, gasifiers, hydrolyzation) with “best of class” back-ends (e.g. advanced fermentation, catalytic conversion). …
4. Diversification and the integrated biorefinery. When and how to diversify the feedstock supply. When to go for the vast but low-margin market in fuels, when to go for the small-volume, high-margin markets in base and speciality chemicals, food, feed and personal care. …
5. Drop-in vs. novel molecules. In both chemicals and fuels, the ongoing debate over whether it is better to make a drop-in replacement for existing molecules, or to make the most cost-effective, high-performance molecule possible and incur the infrastructure and or time challenges in moving from one platform to another. …
6. Bolt-on, vs new facilities. The latest trend in reducing capital cost has been the built-in strategy, where companies add their core technology units to existing plants…
7. How many scale-up steps – and other risk vs reward decisions on the path to commercial scale? Pilot to commercial, or demonstrate the technology? It’s expensive and time-consuming to construct demonstrations of key technologies at scale. Is it better to head quickly for commercial-scale… READ MORE
