The Haze: Clearing Southeast Asia’s Smoky Skies with Biofuels Technology

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) A technology developed for Europe finds it is in demand again, as technologists address the growing mountains of palm waste and its special opportunities and challenges.
...So, if we turn to foreign shores for bioenergy and opportunity — and we find ourselves looking to the vast estates of palm waste in Indonesia and Malaysia — once again there is just too much darn water in palm waste — as much as 60 percent, by weight — for technologies like pyrolysis to deal with.
Out with the old, in with the…old
And so we have waited for innovation, and waited. And then, along comes NextFuels, based on hydrothermal liquefaction – a/k/a/ hydrothermal upgrading.
Like so many innovations, it turns out that NextFuels is based on a very old idea that was cast aside and now is seen in a new and more positive light. ...
This hydrothermal liquefaction technology has much in common with pyrolysis in its outcomes — some residual biomass residue and a crude oil which can be burned in boilers to generate power, or upgraded into fuel.
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The primary difference is water tolerance. To make pyrolysis work there is an upper limit on water content — above which the technology works not at all, or not economically. By contrast, chemical liquefaction works with biomass with water content as high as 60 percent.
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With the developed world’s massive appetite for palm oil — there is so much left over biomass, combusted for power or simply burned in the fields — that you can hardly seen the Petronas Towers on a given day in Kuala Lumpur. Those monuments to modern engineering and the rise of the Asian Tiger economies are hiding now behind a smog so intense that you might think, for a moment, that you find yourself in the coal-smokes of China. The cure? It is a choice of finding a better use for palm waste, or investing heavily in technologies for low-cost gas masks.
So, we have mountains of palm biomass – 1,000 or more palm mills that are often miles away from conventional infrastructure — and these mills can process as much as 120 tons per hour of full fruit bunches. Result? Large amounts of effluent, often dumped in the past into open lagoons that emit methane — which has six times the greenhouse gas impact of CO2. Plus you have all those empty fruit bunches, that are supposed to be composted, but really are burned. Hence the Asian Haze.
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NextFuels is currently raising funds to rebuild an bio-liquefaction demonstration plant originally created by Shell in 2005. The system ran for over 1,000 hours and is capable of producing 5 to 8 barrels of oil a day. Enagra and others will finance the cost of reassembling it and demonstrating production over the next 18 months. Within two to three years, NextFuels anticipates it will start to build its first commercial scale modules capable of producing 250 barrels of oil equivalent a day. Four modules capable of producing 1,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day will be the typical size of a NextFuels plant. Commercial scale modules will initially cost approximately $20 million and decline in price over time.
NextFuels will partner with plantation owners and others on various projects. NextFuels estimates that transforming residue into fuel could raise the value of plantation real estate by 30 percent or more per hectacre. READ MORE and MORE and MORE and MORE and MORE (slide presentation) and MORE (Biomass Magazine)