Almond Joy: CEC Poised to Award $10 Million to Advance Aemetis, West Coast Nut Waste-to-Fuels Commercial Projects

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) In California, the California Energy Commission has issued a Notice of Proposed Award (NOPA) for a $5 million grant to the Aemetis Riverbank cellulosic ethanol biorefinery, and $5 million for West Coast Waste Co., to assist in the development of its innovative commercial-scale, low-carbon biorefinery, known as Madera Renewable Energy One (MADRE I) project.

The West Coast Waste project

MADRE I is aimed at producing 45 million gallons per year of cellulosic ethanol from agricultural biomass that is currently subject to open field burning, land application, or disposal. The facility will be located at WCW’s existing 80-acre biomass processing facility at 9537 Road 29 ½ in Madera County and will bring 59 permanent, living-wage jobs to this rural, disadvantaged community. The WCW Team anticipates that the project will receive CEQA-approval during the first quarter of 2019.

MADRE I will utilize advanced versions of Enerkem’s Edmonton gasification processing line to produce 45 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol, an unprecedented scale in the U.S. and three times the amount that will be produced nationwide in 2018. Its cellulosic ethanol will annually displace roughly 352,000 MTCO2E of gasoline and is expected to achieve a carbon intensity (CI) score of 6 or less.

The plant will process 330,000 tons per year of almond wood as well as almond shells and pistachio hulls (1,000 “as received” tons per day for a 330-day operating year), dramatically reducing the need for this material to be burned in the field.

Enerkem has a modular plant design and standardized manufacturing infrastructure in place to enable large scale roll-out. Its waste-to-cellulosic ethanol system has been 90% modularized. Each of its future bioethanol lines will be comprised of 105 prefabricated modules, enabling 80-90% of its related fabrication costs to be de-risked and bid under not-to-exceed contracts prior to the construction phase.

MADRE’s secret sauce?

We haven’t seen details yet, but there’s a potential technology trigger point in this project. MADRE I is said to be preparing introduce a proprietary technology that will double the cellulosic ethanol output of Enerkem’s technology from 90 to 180 gallons per ton of feedstock. This project will be the first implementation of this innovative addition to the Enerkem process and will also be Enerkem’s first commercial facility to be fueled exclusively by biomass.

Just some speculation along those lines — it feels like there’s something else going into the biomass feed, such as hydrogen. 180 gallons a ton in our back of the envelope calculation, that’s around 1990 pounds of alcohol out of a ton of biomass, or a 59 percent yield. Now, wood waste is around 49 percent carbon, 43 percent oxygen and around 6 percent hydrogen. By mass, ethanol is around 52 percent carbon, around 13 percent hydrogen and about 35 percent oxygen, so adding a little hydrogen in there, the outputs and inputs match up reasonably well. But if you don’t have extra hydrogen, the yields could fall catastrophically, as you might start to see CO2 forming instead of an alcohol. Chemist alter! We’re journalists, not chemists, so we raise this as a flag for discussion, not as a barrier to innovation.

The Aemetis project

... The CEC grant will support the state’s goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and chronic air pollution in California’s Central Valley through Aemetis’ conversion of waste orchard wood, which could otherwise be burned and released into the air, into low carbon biofuel at the planned Aemetis Riverbank plant.

It was big news almost a year ago that Aemetis completed its operation of an integrated demonstration unit for more than 120 days of continuous operations with 94% uptime, meeting the requirements for a federal USDA 9003 Biorefinery Assistance Program guaranteed loan.

In partnership with its key technology providers InEnTec and LanzaTech, Aemetis successfully optimized the integration of an advanced arc furnace and gas fermentation technologies to convert waste biomass into low carbon, renewable cellulosic ethanol and fish meal. The unit was built at the InEnTec Technology Center in Richland, Washington and demonstrated the fully integrated system, including biomass handling, gasification, gas clean up, waste treatment and distillation systems.

“With 1.5 million acres of almonds and walnuts in the Central Valley generating about 1.6 million tons of waste wood and nutshells each year, about 160 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol needs to be produced to eliminate the air pollution from burning or decomposition of this material (as well as Construction & Demolition, vineyard, dairy and collected food waste).

Aemetis plans to construct multiple phases of cellulosic ethanol production and add more than 40 million gallons per year of cellulosic ethanol capacity at the Riverbank, California site.

The smog has a lot of people worried, and burning orchard waste isn’t helping that one little bit. Converting to higher value products, instead of combusting by fire — that’s a good idea and will help with the soot and particulates, mightily. And, create a new value stream in California with all that home-grown energy made from those home-grown nut tree wastes. READ MORE