A Cellulosic Ethanol Milestone

by Robert Rapier (Forbes) Last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that during the first quarter of 2016, just over 1 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol were produced. In fact, production for the month of March jumped 64% from the previous month to 446,000 gallons produced, the highest levels of the modern era. Production this year is well ahead of the pace in 2015, when 2.2 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol were produced for the entire year.

The technology hurdle for green diesel is higher than for biodiesel, and as a result there are fewer players. The global leader is Finland’s Neste Oil, although there are a handful of other players. The single biggest feedstock to date for this process has been palm oil, but this feedstock has also been highly criticized for environmental reasons. (There is another category of green diesel that involves gasification of biomass followed by the Fischer Tropsch reaction to produce hydrocarbons, but there are no commercial plants in operation).

The second category of advanced biofuel is the one presently of greatest interest in the U.S., and that is cellulosic ethanol.

The process of breaking down cellulose into sugars was discovered in France in the 1800′s, and cellulosic ethanol production was first commercialized in Germany in 1898. Commercialization in the U.S. followed in 1910, but the process was ultimately abandoned for economic reasons.

Advanced biofuels are attempting to compete with petroleum, but the reality is that with petroleum, nobody had to plant or harvest the biomass, and nobody had to apply the heat and pressure to convert it into an energy-dense liquid fuel. With biofuels, you have inputs of energy and manpower at every step — and the cost of those inputs adds up. That’s why petroleum made from ancient algae can be produced for a couple of dollars per gallon, but renewable petroleum produced from algae can be more than 10 times that cost. That’s why you don’t see any large-scale algal biofuel operations.

It would appear that most of the current cellulosic ethanol production is coming from POET and DuPont. I suspect that the jump in production in March was DuPont working out some of the kinks in their process. Still, if one assumes that the production is all coming from those two companies, March’s record production only amounts to about 10% of the combined nameplate capacity of the plants. READ MORE and MORE (Energy Trends)