USDA Advances On-Farm Biofuel Production

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August 4, 2016

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by Philip Gruber (Lancaster Farming) USDA researchers demonstrated a mobile biofuel processing unit on a Montgomery County farm last week, moving the technology a step closer to commercial reality.

“The idea is to go to the source of the biomass,” said Akwasi Boateng, the principal investigator for the Agricultural Research Service project.

Switchgrass, the feedstock of focus for the project, is bulky and expensive to ship to a processing plant, Boateng said.

It may be more cost-effective to do the first steps of the processing on the farm and then ship out the fuel that is produced, Boateng said.

One mobile unit could serve several farms within, say, a 30-mile radius, Boateng said.

Boateng’s team has been working on the mobile unit for four years at the Eastern Regional Research Center in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania.

The patented, trailer-mounted reactor heats the switchgrass without the presence of oxygen, Boateng said.

The technique, called pyrolysis, breaks down the material without combusting it.

Pyrolysis converts 60-70 percent of the biomass into bio-oil.

The liquid can be burned as is — potentially for home heating — or refined so that it mixes with petroleum fuels, Boateng said.

The fuel’s energy content is about half of diesel’s, he said.

About 20 percent of the biomass becomes charcoal, which can be spread on farm fields as a soil amendment.

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He also wants to test wood and horse manure as feedstocks for the reaction.

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The Canadian company Agri-Therm, for example, is developing a similar reactor that has a somewhat larger capacity.

McDonnell is working with private chemists John J. Savarese and Simon Golec to develop a fuel oil and plastics from switchgrass. READ MORE

Advanced BioFuels USA