The Idaho Team that Lopped $1 a Gallon off the Cost of Fuel, and How They Did It

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) In Idaho, researchers at Idaho National Laboratory have have cut the modeled cost of harvesting, storing, transporting, and preprocessing biomass from $149.58/dry ton to $82.86/dry ton.

As INL’s Kevin Kenney explained, “when applying least-cost formulation and blending strategies in an analysis of data from DOE’s 2016 Billion-Ton Report, INL researchers achieved a 46% reduction in grower payment, an 18% reduction in harvest and collection costs, and a 94% reduction in dockage costs—the penalties imposed when biomass doesn’t meet specifications.

The impact on alternative fuels

Using a benchmark conversion target of 70 gallons per ton for cellulosic biofuels, the feedstock cost cut would drop the fuel cost by roughly one dollar per gallon.

The DOE has been aiming at $84 as a “delivered cost”, and this set of breakthroughs shows it can be done.

A key takeaway here is that there is as much as 1.5 billion tons of biomass available based on these economics, which could supply as much as 105 billion gallons of sustainable alternative fuels per year in to the US energy supply. That’s a long-term, high yield scenario; in the near-term Oak Ridge says there is 217 million tons available in this price band, enough to produce around 13 billion gallons of sustainable alternative fuels.

Note here. This Oak Ridge analysis includes energy crops, forest feedstock, agricultural residues and waste (such as MSW). It does not include the food crop and oil-side waste feedstocks which are the current backbone of the US biofuels supply.

The projects investigated four areas of innovation: fractional milling, high-moisture pelleting, intelligent and adaptive controls, and least-cost formulation and blending.

The depot concept locates biomass preprocessing depots in high-yield areas where biomass costs less because of an abundance of supply. The depot grinds, blends, and densifies biomass into pellets or briquettes before the feedstock is sent to the biorefinery. In turn, the biorefinery is not as dependent upon having a source of biomass nearby and can instead be located near resources such as utilities, rail lines, and labor. Depots increase the radius and therefore the supply of available biomass, according to the analysis, which is the first of its kind to document the cost benefits of depots. READ MORE