Key Words from ABLC

March 27, 2023

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by Joanne Ivancic (Advanced Biofuels USA) Every ABLC, held each Spring in Washington, DC, reveals the zeitgeist of the renewable sustainable fuels world and bits of the bioeconomy it intesects. This year was no exception with the following Key Words providing a way to summarize the thoughts and ideas of people trying to mitigate climate change through renewable, sustainable fuels and related products.

This year from the first day, one key word was Carbon Intensity or CI.

CI answers the question of how to compare apples to oranges, or, more appropriately, corn to corn stover to woody biomass to rice straw in India to wheat straw in Romania to used cooking oil in Singapore to tall oil in Finland to captured carbon and electrolyzed hydrogen in Germany to camelina in Alberta to canola in the EU…… and all of these and more, to fossil fuels.

In other words, the key common denominator, the primary point of comparison among fuels has become how much carbon emission is created or avoided during the life cycle (from seed to wheel; from well to wheel) of each fuel.

It became clear that no research in this area is conducted; no financing provided, no policy developed without consideration of CI. And, although the GREET (Greenhouse Gases Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation) model developed by Argonne National Laboratory years ago and updated annually, is considered by many the gold standard and the foundtion for many systems for calculating a CI score, it is also clear that there is no common international definition of CI, not even consistent national definitions or calculations. Expect that issue to be a topic of international discussions, with CI a key word not only in the ABLC, but in every conference on this topic around the world.

This brings us to another set of key words: Unity, Cooperation, Collaboration. Over and over we heard calls urging cooperation, slides that touted the importance of team work and speakers expounding on the urgency of collaboration if new “low CI” fuels will be enabled to help save the world from the ravages of climate change.

There is clear Unity in this audience that the purpose of the work being done by everyone in the room at this Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference and probably those who participated online, is to mitigate the effects of climate change by researching, funding, developing, producing and deploying defossilized fuels and chemicals.

These calls for unity recognize this shared purpose, and also acknowledge that everyone doesn’t agree on how to achieve it. The conference nurtured and facilitated opportunities for communication and development of compatible paths to a non-fossil carbon future. As Omar Hamid of Advisioan said, “We need to work together to meet these obligations we have set for ourselves.”

It also enabled harsh and candid analysis of some proposed paths or technologies.

Which brings us to another key phrase, Carbon Capture. Whether carbon capture and storage/sequestration or carbon capture and utilization, just about every speaker (technology, policy, financing and more) talked about carbon capture as either a key component or a future option for reducing that CI score.

Most were vague about what this might look like in practice, so it was gratifying that conference organizer and publisher and editor of The Daily Digest, Jim Lane, had “the Due Diligence Wolfpack”, a group of eight gregarious experts in relevant science, engineering and finance, explore, in a free-wheeling animated discussion, a number of representative carbon capture projects. They exposed the significant weaknesses of most as “stupid” and worse, pointing out other less expensive, less energy intensive, more effective ways to pull carbon from the atmosphere and to avoid adding more carbon to the atmosphere in the process.

The ability of plants to do this with photosynthesis was repeatedly mentioned as a sort of benchmark. They compared the amount of carbon that proposed “Rube Goldberg” machines might extract from the air for burial in the ground to the amount of biomass or solid carbon from biomass that could be similarly buried in Yucca Mountain, for example, since it could be available as there is so much opposition to burying nuclear waste there.

Some projects such as the Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline project check a lot of positive boxes; but the panelists generally agreed that more research needs to be done about underground carbon storage and the public needs to get more verifiable information about CO2 transport and storage before they can support it 100%.

Another key word was Modular and a number of presentations mentioned this model of building facilities. It’s less expensive and builds to the relevant scale, depending on feedstock availability and other factors. You heard, “Skid built, not stick built” and “We cannot build the mega plants of yesteryear,” referencing the enormous oil refineries around the world. That said, there were also discussions about keeping the multi-product model of oil refineries while repurposing them if light duty vehicles transition to electric power lessens the need for petroleum fuel.

Similarly, a number of speakers also talked about using conventional equipment in a better way. From new applications of anaerobic digestion to using existing farming equipment to harvest new crops.

Ten or Twelve. About 15 years ago the US Department of Energy was hosting annual conferences of this magnitude with a series, Biomass 2008, Biomass 2009…… Around this time ABLC conferences began. It was an era of $140/barrel oil, BP rebranding as Beyond Petroleum and the institution of the Renewable Fuel Standard to force renewable fuels into the marketplace. Investors believed that they could get 20% return on investment in 2 years and President George W. Bush mentioned in a State of the Union speech, converting to fuels made from switchgrass. Researchers expected their innovative ideas would be produced at commercial scale in 5 years.

We’ve learned a lot since then. “Cellulosic biofuel,” the darling of policy initiatives, was much harder to make than anyone predicted. Not to mention related due diligence investigations for investors, permitting, engine design and infrastructure development. Algae was going to be the most sustainable alternative because it didn’t take up cropland. And drop-in fuels that had all the relevant characteristics of petroleum fuels would easily substitute for them. It wasn't that simple.

Ten. That was the number most presenters agreed was the minimum required to take new, never-been-done-before technologies to the market.

Many are taking longer. For example, Rebecca Boudreaux of Oberon noted that she has been with the company for 12 years. Her work didn't only include the science, technology and engineering of making renewable DME, a fuel on its own that can also serve as a hydrogen carrier and complement to fossil and renewable propane. When you are doing things that have never been done before for a problem (climate change) that has never been encountered in quite this way before, your job may also require getting laws, regulations and common practices updated and changed to accommodate new solutions to new challenges. And all that takes time, Ten years, Twelve years, and more.

All now know what they didn’t know before. And many others foundered along the way, revealing the limitations of those expectations. The positive take-away from this conference is that some of those people who started out 10-15 years ago are achieving their dreams. There were devastating ups and downs, but they found paths through those unknown lands. They persisted and appear to be on the road to success.

And, also presenting at this conference were those just starting this Journey, another key word heard over and over throughout the conference. This is not just a walk in the park. It is a Journey, a Grail Quest, with hazards to overcome, riddles to solve and blessings to savor along the way.

One type of riddle the seekers have to contend with is another key word, Feedstock.

Feedstock is whatever you convert to make that sustainable fuel, renewable chemical or other bioeconomy or recycled carbon product. Feedstock can be anything from the corn, sugarcane, soybeans, used cooking oil and other plant oils that are used today to make ethanol, biodiesel, renewable diesel, jetfuel, and gasoline. It can also include cassava, canola/rapeseed, camelina, energy cane, grasses, hemp, flue gas, industrial waste gases, municipal solid waste, captured carbon, hydrogen (and water as the feedstock for electrolysis to obtain hydrogen), other agricultural and forest wastes and residues, woody biomass and more that are also being used or developed as feedstock for the bio- and circular economies.

Everyone talked about feedstock, about the high levels of competition for FOG (fats, oils, grease) for HEFA (Hydro-processed esters and fatty acids) jetfuel, renewable diesel and biodiesel. And about the need to develop additional feedstocks like lignocellulosic materials, sugars and alcohols and economical conversion technologies to go with them.

Although e-fuels (electrofuels) might be a key word in the future; e-fuels were mostly mentioned in passing such as in discussions about EU policy aspirations and about possible future uses (among many competing ones) for hydrogen (preferably “green”) and captured carbon.

ABLC is always a great place to take the temperature of the world of sustainable, renewable fuels and products. Wide-ranging topics with presentations cover everything from feedstock and technology developments to policy issues, opportunities and challenges of public and private project financing and investment and more.

Being in-person again enables what Jim Lane calls “networking like crazy”, informal hallway conversations, and a chance to meet and talk with presenters, to introduce yourself and arrange for follow-up meetings, to ask questions and find answers.

And, to learn from those who are moving toward success and from the mistakes and pitfalls that sidelined or destroyed others. Watch this site for continuing coverage, presentations from the conference and more.