The Comment that Silenced the Crowd: Heard on the Floor at ABLC 2022

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... Topsoe’s Mikala Grubb stepped in. “What we have is a solids to liquids conversion problem.”

The room went quiet, quiet like a church. “750 delegates negotiating in a small hotel but you can hear a watch ticking,” that silence.

What she was describing was the problem that the available and affordable billion tons of biomass is in solid form, and technology is struggling to affordably and reliably liquefy it.

So, the bioeconomy chases the feedstocks that are already in liquid or near-liquid form — for instance, plant oils, and waste fats and greases — and a bioeconomy and nation that wasn’t supposed to run out of affordable feedstock until something like 70 billion gallons of fuels had been manufactured is running short before a billion gallons of the new advanced fuels are being made each year.

Lot of expertise in grinding corn — so, there’s much to build on. Forest Concept’s Crumbler technology. Gasification tech that takes biomass beyond the problems of liquids and into the gas phase where F-T and gas fermentation technologies rule.

Is this, indeed, THE problem?

We went around the room. I asked John Plaza, CEO of SkyNRG Americas — is that the problem as you see it? He nodded. I asked several more, all agreed. And everyone looked hopefully towards the DOE leaders in the room. Here was something to work on, something at which DOE excels.

They’ve been on it, for some time. The Feedstock Conversion Interface Consortium, based out of the Idaho National Laboratory, looks at this as a critical part of their mission. A consortium that needs a revolutionary infusion of attention and support, it seems. Here are some researchers that might welcome the investment:

Ed Wolfrum, the principal investigator of FCIC.. Beau Hoffman and Mark Elless, the DOE Technology managers. Amie Sluiter, the FCIC Project Manager. Jun Qu at Oak Ridge, Yidong XIe and Vicki Thompson at Idaho National Lab, Mark Elless and Beau Hoffman at BETO, Phil Laible at Argonne, Danny Carpenter and Bryan Donahue at NREL, Jim Collett and Steve Phillips at PNNL.

We were reasonably shocked, given the huge turnout at ABLC and the urgency of the crisis, that no one from FCIC made it to Washington. It was like having a Rally for Youth and no youth on hand. Let’s hope to see all of them at ABLC when it reconvenes in San Francisco in October. It sounds like this crew will have much influence on the question of wherefrom and whenfrom the next surge of manufacturing capacity will appear.

So, what did we hear on the floor? Mikala Grubb nailed it, and silenced ABLC or, rather, galvanized it to action. Solid to liquid conversion, and until then we may mot have the sustainable, available, reliable, affordable feedstock— in acronym form, SARA — in the volume required. READ MORE