Commercial Time: Aemetis Embarks on $158 Million Cellulosic Ethanol Project in California

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... I’d start with the news from Aemetis that they are embarking now on a $158 million cellulosic ethanol plant — to be built in Riverbank, California, in partnership with LanzaTech.

Cellulosic ethanol is selling for such a high price in California right now — the value jumps north of $4.00 per gallon at times — that any producer of conventional ethanol is going to see the market opportunity. The current market price of cellulosic ethanol sold in California is estimated to be $3.00 more per gallon than conventional ethanol.

The key is getting it done and making it happen. And something very special to that end is underway in central California right now.

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 a 20-year feedstock supply agreement and a 55-year lease already signed, the 12 million gallon per year Riverbank plant is expected to begin operations in 2019.

For the demonstration unit, Aemetis used waste orchard wood and nut shells from almond and walnut trees as feedstock, gasified the biomass using a high temperature plasma gasification system to produce synthesis gas (“syngas”), cooled and cleaned the syngas, and supplied the syngas to a patented gas fermentation bioreactor to produce an ethanol broth. The broth was subsequently distilled to produce commercial grade ethanol.

The feedstock to be supplied comes from the more than 1.6 million tons of waste orchard wood and nutshells that are generated each year from approximately 1 million acres of almond, walnut, and pistachio orchards in the Central Valley. Aemetis’ price of the feedstock is approximately $20 per ton delivered for the first ten years. READ MORE

Excerpt from Modesto Bee: Sometime next year, a first-of-its-kind biofuel plant three miles north of Modesto will begin turning old almond and walnut trees into transportation fuel.

The intriguing process should keep growers from burning millions of tons of orchard waste, spewing unhealthy smoke into Valley air. That wood instead would be transformed into cellulosic ethanol, a superclean liquid that's mixed with gasoline and goes into our vehicle gas tanks.

Aemetis Inc., the Cupertino-based company willing to take a chance on Riverbank, and on new technology.

Experts calculate benefits with complex formulas taking into account everything needed to grow and harvest whatever is used to make transportation fuel. The so-called carbon intensity score for gasoline, 95, drops to 70 for corn ethanol. But the score for wood ethanol is less than zero; that's how beneficial it is to reuse a product that otherwise would belch smoke when burned in the open.

Aemetis already has a 20-year deal with a tree waste broker who will capitalize on the almond explosion in these parts, with trees covering 1.5 million acres in recent years. The average life of an almond tree is 20 to 25 years, and the Valley produces about 1.6 million tons of tree waste each year.

Aemetis also has a 55-year lease on land at the former ammo plant, at Claus and Claribel roads. The company will renovate some old buildings and erect others for the new wood ethanol plant, which could produce 12 million gallons per year.

Byproducts include fish meal to be sold to big salmon farms, and others will be announced in time, Foster said.

... wood is superheated at 3,000 degrees, about the same needed to melt glass, turning wood into a gas before it's cleaned and fed to microbes in a fermentation chamber. A resulting broth is distilled into cellulosic ethanol, or wood ethanol.

Aemetis apparently is sold enough on Riverbank to compete for the job of taking over the entire 105-acre Riverbank Industrial Complex.

Started in 1943, the ammo plant produced shell, grenade and mortar cartridges as a major area employer until 2009. After nearly 30 years of cleaning contaminants from the land and water underneath, the U.S. Army last year conveyed some of the property to an entity overseen by Riverbank City Hall, and is expected to give the rest this summer. READ MORE