Prioritizing Preprocessing: New Energy Blue

by Lisa Gibson (Ethanol Producer Magazine) New Energy Blue has its sights set on a 20 MMGy biomass refinery in Mason City, Iowa, using corn stover as a feedstock and pumping out cellulosic ethanol and lignin by early 2027.

Drawing on decades of experience with partners in Scandinavia in handling and processing agricultural waste, New Energy Blue is confident that it can overcome the obstacles faced by previous corn stover ethanol producers, namely preprocessing for optimized physical properties and quality control.

Through a $2 million U.S. Department of Energy Collaborative Research and Development Agreement, New Energy Blue, Idaho National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Finland-based Valmet and West Salem Machinery of Oregon will work to integrate processing and hydrothermal pretreatment of corn stover to produce biochemicals and fuels.

“It’s important to consider quality of feedstock coming into the plant,” says Kelly Davis, vice president of New Energy Blue. Previous attempts at corn stover cellulosic ethanol production did not take the time to develop proper systems to ensure the feedstock works efficiently through the entire process, says Tom Corle, founding partner, chairman and CEO of New Energy Blue. “So we have spent a decade working on that and, in the past two years, we’ve invested well over $1 million around equipment and aggregation practices to be able to accomplish what we’re looking to do at our facility.”

“INL’s role is going to be separation, fractionation, during the processing of the corn stover to generate blends that have the right physical properties, and we will then test the flowability of these properties—how they perform during some pretreatment processes,” says John Aston, staff engineer in INL’s Biological and Chemical Processing Department. “The purpose of the process is to tailor feedstock into specific physical properties that can perform better during pretreatment or during handling and feeding of the material to the pretreatment.”

New Energy Blue, specifically, is using a feeding system centered around a compression screw feeder, Aston explains.

About 200 million tons of corn stover are available annually that could be used sustainably to make fuel, he says.

The INL team started evaluating air classification more than 10 years ago, initially on logging and forestry feedstock materials, as a means of removing dirt and ash. Passing that material through an air classifier screened out the lighter, dry soil and dust.

“We are all looking to optimize that feedstock area to the most efficiency, like the movement of the bales and cleaning of bales. For instance any rot, foreign matter, rubber tires, anything else that might be buried into a bale, that all gets removed,” Corle (Tom Corle, founding partner, chairman and CEO of New Energy Blue) says.

New Energy Blue is working with equipment developers to design a specialized corn row header for cutting and chopping in the field. “All that creates less dust, less dirt and less energy use at the facility.”

The New Energy Farmers program will employ equipment and staff of about 60 balers who will cut, bale and stack the stover at the field’s edge, then transport it to strategically located storage barns. The refinery will house 3.5 to four days’ supply of bales on-site.

“All of the logistics are essential but the farmer buy-in and ownership of New Energy Farmers is also essential, simply because they need that revenue,” Corle says.

New Energy Blue’s front-end process for its Mason City plant was designed in Denmark and will be fully automated, utilizing cranes to unload stover bales from trucks, with a speed of about six minutes per truck, Corle says.

After hydrolysis comes fermentation, dehydration and evaporation, all similar to that of a first-generation ethanol plant except with a longer fermentation retention time.

New Energy Blue’s corn stover biorefinery will pump out 150,000 tons of lignin annually, and almost half of its cellulosic ethanol will be used to produce bioethylene for biobased plastics.

New Energy Blue has many years of research experience in the lignin-for-asphalt space in Europe.

To provide for bioethylene production, New Energy Blue will construct a cellulosic ethanol-to-bioethylene conversion facility on its Port Lavaca, Texas, property. The bioethylene produced there will go to a partner, Dow, via pipeline.

But policy remains a hurdle, both Davis and Corle say. “Renewable chemicals don’t have any incentives,” Davis says. “All the incentives are going toward the fuel world. So we need to work with Washington a little better, with this next administration, to make it possible for us to start making renewable chemicals to replace fossil fuels.” READ MORE