Archive for March, 2008
nvesteco announces investment in Next Generation Cellulosic Ethanol Technology
Investeco Private Equity Fund II, first institutional investor in Woodland Biofuels Inc.
TORONTO, March 26 /CNW/ – Investeco Capital Corporation (ICC), a leader
in environmental investing, today announced an investment in Woodland Biofuels
Inc. (Woodland) of Mississauga, Ontario.
Woodland has developed a patented and proprietary thermo-chemical process
for the conversion of cellulosic biomass into fuel ethanol. Forest, agricultural or other common sources of biomass are gasified and processed through a series of catalytic reactions to produce ethanol, distillation water and steam.
“Based on Investeco’s due diligence, we believe Woodland’s patented Catalyzed Pressure Reduction technology is extremely efficient in its conversion of biomass and is highly scaleable,” stated Andrew Heintzman, President, ICC. “Woodland’s process is significantly more efficient than traditional ethanol production and its cellulosic competitors,” he continued.
“While the energy conversion ratios and greenhouse gas mitigation for traditional corn based ethanol is marginal at best, the potential for Woodland’s process of producing ethanol from waste streams is significantly superior.”
“Demand for this “next generation” ethanol is expected to be enormous over coming years. For example, the United States has set an objective of 36 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels by 2022; most of that would come from cellulosic ethanol,” concluded Mr. Heintzman. “We are very pleased that Investeco is the first institutional investor to recognize the potential of our Catalyzed Pressure Reduction technology and is financing its further development and commercialization,” said Greg Nutall, President, Woodland. “Investeco’s recognized expertise in environmental
investing will assist us as we seek other investors and partners in the future.”
Woodland is also a recently announced recipient of $9.8 million in assistance from Sustainable Development Technology Canada towards the commercialization of its technology and development of a demonstration plant.
About Investeco Capital Corporation
Investeco Capital Corporation (ICC) is Canada’s first investment company to be exclusively focused on environmental sectors such as renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, water infrastructure, and clean technologies.
About Woodland Biofuels Inc.
Woodland Biofuels Inc. is a Canadian company that has made impressive breakthroughs in the areas of energy, environment, and waste disposal. The company develops and licenses plants utilizing its cutting edge, patented technologies which convert renewable waste materials into fuels and chemicals in a highly profitable and environmentally safe manner.
For further information: Andrew Heintzman, President, Investeco Capital Corporation, (416) 304-1750, ext. 398, aheintzman@investeco.com, www.investeco.com; Greg Nuttal, President & CEO, Woodland Biofuels Inc., (905) 670-5502 ext.404, gnuttall@woodlandbiofuels.com, www.woodlandbiofuels.com
Cornell to Launch New Biofuels Lab
Source: The Cornell Daily Sun
March 25, 2008 – 12:00am
By Wendy Wang
As corn becomes an increasingly popular ethanol source, the spotlight falls on the biofuels field as its researchers study how to convert crops like switchgrass and woody plants into energy. This is evident at Riley-Robb Hall, where the east wing is being converted into a new biofuels research laboratory. Prof. Larry Walker, biological and environmental engineering, is spearheading the large-scale project, slated for completion next January.
Walker received a $10 million grant from Empire State Development Corporation, with $6 million going towards the east wing renovation and the other $4 million to equip the new laboratory with incubators, fermentors and other machinery necessary to allow Cornell to convert cellulosic material, like switchgrass and other perennial grasses, into ethanol,from start to finish. Burst of energy: The former agricultural engineering, power and machinery lab is being turned into a new biofuels research laboratory.
“We can do what we call pretreatment of the materials to make this material more amenable to enzymatic biodegradation,” said Walker. “We have the capability of generating the enzymes needed to convert the biomass into fermentable sugars. We will then have the capability of taking the fermentable sugars to ethanol, butanol and other biofuels.”
Walker emphasized the importance of ethanol as one of the few renewable energy sources that can directly replace gasoline and the fact that by 2025, about 80 percent of ethanol production will come not from corn, but from cellulose materials, those primarily studied at the current biofuels lab on campus.
In fact, using corn as an ethanol source has come under scrutiny as it gains more media exposure. For example, Katherine McEachern ’09, president of KyotoNOW!, stated in an e-mail that the organization was “glad that this lab is focused on developing cellulosic ethanol and biofuel, not corn-based ethanol, which has many environmental and social problems.”
The new laboratory has also helped attract a new faculty member, Prof. Lars Angenent from Washington University in St. Louis, who will start at Cornell this fall. Walker and others in the department are also working on a master of engineering program in biofuels and bioenergy, in addition to continually seeking interested undergraduate and graduate students for the current research program.
“Certainly we’ve been trying to recruit new graduate students for the program. Graduate students are attracted by good facilities and good equipment, so that’s definitely a benefit for us,” said Prof. Beth Ahner, biological and environmental engineering, one of the faculty members moving into the new space. “The overall goal is renewable energy, and sustainable ways to use agricultural products to generate energy for human use.”
According to Walker, this lab will significantly advance Cornell’s biofuel laboratory infrastructure by consolidating all relevant labs, which are currently scattered; these labs range from those in biological and environmental engineering to plant sciences, applied and engineering physics, molecular biology and genetics and microbiology.
This multidisciplinary approach of the lab “plays to the strength that we have here at Cornell,” Walker said. “By and large, Cornell is very good at suppressing barriers between departments and getting faculties from different disciplines to work together on strategic research areas. This is a real strength of Cornell University.”
Earlier this month, Cornell received another $1 million to reinforce the multi-departmental biofuels research; the biomass research grant jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy supports work that links nanobiotechnology to biofuels in enzymatic conversion processes. Additional funding for biofuels research at Cornell also comes from the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation.
The increasing opportunities for funding reflect the public’s growing recognition of biofuels as potential solutions to current environmental and energy problems. Faculty members have also seen more interest from undergraduates.
“I’d gotten one request this week from someone who wanted to work in the biofuel lab,” said Ahner. “I teach a sophomore-level course [BEE 251: Engineering for a Sustainable Society] and we do talk about biofuels there, and students seem very excited about it.”
Upon hearing of the new lab, other students were also enthusiastic about its presence.
Carmen Iao ’09, president of the Cornell chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World, stated in an e-mail: “The tools that this lab will provide Cornell will definitely help it become more prominent in the field of biofuels research, an urgent and necessary area of renewable energy.”
Analysis: Can biotechnology save ethanol?
Monday, 24 March 2008
United Press International
Source: Truth About Trade & Technology
Some experts have questioned the feasibility of Congress’s new biofuels mandate, but emerging biotechnologies may boost the industry above and beyond expectations.
Traditional corn ethanol has received a bad rap in the popular press lately due to concerns increased production and conversion of corn into fuel may increase emissions and raise food prices.
Not everyone agrees with these assertions, but almost everyone does agree the fuel of the future will not rely on corn kernels, but on new feedstock options called cellulosic sources. These are often waste products, such as garbage and wood chips, or non-food crops, like switchgrass.
Cellulosic sources have the potential to fuel vehicles without taking land needed to raise food, as well as a host of other benefits. But converting these tough materials into ethanol is much more difficult than using corn.
As a result, some experts have expressed doubt over whether the biofuels industry will be able to meet the new Renewable Fuels Standard, which requires that 21 billion of the 36 billion gallons required by 2022 come from “advanced sources,” or non-traditional ethanol.
In early March, Guy Caruso, head of the Energy Information Administration, told senators cellulosic fuels will fall short of the mandate.
“While the situation is very uncertain at this early date, our current view is that available quantities of cellulosic biofuels prior to 2022 will be insufficient to meet the new RFS targets,” Caruso said at a Senate Energy Committee hearing.
Biotechnology companies disagree. The products they’re developing will unlock the industry, they say, and lead to commercialization within a couple of years.
The technology involves manipulating living organisms — usually crop plants — to produce desirable traits. In the mid 1990s, biotechnology began to revolutionize the agriculture sector, as biotech seed varieties with higher yields, increased drought resistance and other positive qualities emerged on the marketplace.
The same radical change will occur in the biofuels industry as biotechnology plays a larger role in fuel production, said Mike O’Brien, spokesperson for Gevo, a biotechnology company that focuses on biofuels development.
“I’ve already seen how biotechnology can transform things and the impact it can have on industry in the United States,” O’Brien told United Press International. “(Biofuels are in) an early stage, and biotechnology can speed up the delivery and adoption of new technologies.”
Biotechnology companies are working on developing a wide variety of products to address different aspects of the process, from field to fuel station.
The first step toward efficiency lies in more advanced plant varieties. Ceres, an energy crop company, identifies specific DNA sequences in plants that code for desirable traits, such as increased biomass and decreased demand for water and fertilizer, and then uses traditional breeding methods to produce better crops for fuel.
In addition to these new “dedicated energy crops,” many producers hope to convert waste products into fuel. The most likely candidates in the near future are agricultural leftovers, particularly corn leaves and stalks, called corn stover, and grain stalks, called cereal straw, said Brent Erickson, executive vice president of BIO, a biotechnology trade organization.
“Corn farmers could supply over 200 million dry tons annually within three to five years,” Erickson said, citing the findings of a recent report released by BIO on the topic. “Collection of 30 percent of current annual stover production would yield 5 billion gallons of ethanol.”
There are some problems with using these crop residues, however. Right now, most farmers leave the stover and straw on their fields, providing needed carbon for the soil, preserving soil quality and decreasing erosion. If too much is removed, the soil could be damaged, agricultural experts say.
And determining how much can be removed varies greatly from field to field, Erickson told UPI.
“You have to look at each individual field — the slope, type of soil, amount of rainfall, etc.,” he said.
Researchers at Colorado State University are developing software to make this easier for farmers to figure out, Erickson said. Farmers input information about their field, and the program computes the amount of residue needed to maintain soil quality. The rest could be converted into fuel.
“In some cases, it can be upwards of 80 percent (that’s removed),” Erickson said.
Once the biomass arrives at the fuel plant, a number of other biotechnology advances will make it increasingly easier to convert it to fuel, said Jack Huttner, vice president of biorefinery business development at Genencor, a biotechnology company.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded Genencor one of four grants, totaling $33.8 million, to further enzyme research. Enzymes, proteins that speed up chemical reactions, already play an important role in producing traditional corn ethanol, and more advanced varieties are key to getting cellulosic ethanol on the market, Huttner told UPI.
The first step in producing ethanol is breaking the feedstock down so that yeast can access the sugars contained in the plant and turn them into alcohol.
“But when you’re dealing with (cellulosic) biomass, it’s a very tough (substance),” Huttner said. “We’ve developed enzymes that break down the cellulose … into simple sugars so yeast can ferment it into alcohol.”
When breaking down cellulosic sources, a number of different enzymes are needed, making the process complex and expensive. However, two college professors at the University of Maryland have discovered a process, based on one particular organism, that they believe will enable more efficient, economical production.
The organism contains a variety of enzymes, which work together to break down all sorts of carbohydrates, including woody materials, algae and even crab shells, said Ron Weiner, who discovered the bacterium’s promising properties along with Steve Hutcheson.
“The organism contains more enzymes and different kinds of enzymes to break down more carbohydrates than any other known bacterium or organism,” Weiner told UPI. “That means we don’t have to use feedstock to produce fuel.”
As fuel producers turn toward these new technologies, though, they should focus on producing biobutanol from the feedstocks, instead of solely ethanol, said Gevo CEO Pat Gruber.
Biobutanol can be produced from corn or any other cellulosic source, just like ethanol, but has a number of advantages over the traditional product, Gruber told UPI.
“Butanols have a higher energy density than ethanol, so you can see an improvement in miles per gallon when you use it (over traditional ethanol),” he said.
Another important characteristic of butanol is its ability to be transported by pipeline. Ethanol cannot currently be delivered via pipeline because of its corrosive qualities and the possibility that water in the pipeline might damage the fuel. In addition, biobutanol can be produced from ethanol plants that have been retrofitted for the new fuel, requiring fewer up-front costs.
“Our vision is to work with every single ethanol producer and help them switch to butanol,” Gruber said.
AETE Announces One Dollar Ethanol
ENERGY TECH
AETE Announces One Dollar Ethanol
by Staff Writers
Houston TX (SPX) Mar 18, 2008
Source: Energy-daily.com
The Alternative Energy Technology Center ahs announced its plans to produce ethanol for the U.S. market at less than $1 per gallon. AETE will refine biomass into fuel products using its exclusive technology. Most new automobiles built in the U.S. by General Motors and other manufacturers are equipped to run on 85% ethanol.
To fuel these cars ethanol production must be expand significantly. With corn at over $5 per bushel, current plants spend nearly $2 to produce a gallon of ethanol that sells for $2.60. AETE’s process using common cellulosic biomass will produce ethanol for less than $1 per gallon.
“One dollar ethanol will allow us to operate profitably without government subsidies or incentives,” noted Brown Marks, AETE’s President. “We expect to produce over 100 gallons of fuel per ton of cellulosic biomass which costs about $65 in today’s market,” he stated. “We have designed our technology to use low cost feed stocks that are widely available at low cost. We use a low energy input design to increase efficiency and we can place our plants wherever there is abundant biomass available,” he concluded.
Cellulosic Ethanol Event in Southern California
The Solution To High Gas Prices Is Revealed By Top Purdue Scientist
The importance of biofuel has never been more important to the security and economic future of the United States than now. The Compound Annual Growth Rate of cellulosic industry from 2008 to 2022 estimates to reach 435.63% while Energy Independence and Security act mandates the supply of cellulosic ethanol must reach 16 billions gallon in 2022. To help farmers and company to produce cellulosic ethanol more efficiently, an award winning Purdue Scientist will be revealing the latest breakthrough in Cellulosic Ethanol Production, an alternative to conventional corn based ethanol.
Dr. Nancy W.Y. Ho, a molecular biologist and group leader from Purdue University will be illuminating the latest research she and her team have been working on, named “Ho-Purdue Yeast.” According to Dr. Ho, “It’s about weaning America from its self-destructive oil habit by tapping the energy in everything else that grows–and rots–all around us.”
Dr. Ho has spent the better part of a career at Purdue University figuring out how to convert the DNA of a simple form of brewer’s yeast by cloning a gene nobody else had thought to clone. Now, if you stir her creation into a beaker filled with the sugars derived from throwaway organic materials like wheat straw, switch grass, orange peels, or any agricultural waste, it will gradually convert most of them into high-octane auto fuel.
The U.S. Department of Energy has already successfully deployed Dr. Ho’s “yeast” research and has sponsored the creation of an ethanol demonstration plant. For those who are interested in participating in the growing cellulosic industry and intend to increase the revenue of their own farms, it is the seminar you should not miss.
Next Generation of Ethanol Production- An Introduction to the Ho-Purdue Yeast
Venue: Imperial County Farm Bureau
1000 Broadway El Centro, CA 92243
Date: March 20, 2008
Time: 2 to 5 p.m.
Speaker: Nancy W. Y. Ho
RSVP: Please register if you want to join the event FREE of charge.
Curriculum Vitae
Nancy W. Y. Ho
Research Molecular Biologist/Group Leader
Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering
Purdue University
Potter Engineering Center
500 Central Drive
West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2022
Phone: 765-494-7046; Fax: 765-494-7046
nwyho@purdue.edu
EDUCATION
• Ph. D. Molecular Biology, Purdue University, 1968
• M. A Organic Chemistry, Temple University, 1960
• B. S. Chemical Engineering, National Taiwan University, 1957
RESEARCH AND/OR PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
• Senior Research Scientist and Group Leader of Molecular Genetics Group, LORRE, July 1, 1980 to present.
• Graduate Faculty, Department of Foods & Nutrition, Purdue University, Sept.1, 1982 to present
HONORS, RECOGNITIONS, AND OTHER AWARDS
2004 Since April 2004 , Iogen, a Canadian company, has used the engineered yeast developed by Dr. Ho at Purdue University to produce ethanol from wheat straw in the world‘s first production plant of its kind. Purdue University issued a news release on June 28, 2004 entitled, Purdue yeast makes ethanol from agricultural waste more effectively, to mark this special event. Many newspapers and magazines have also reported upon this exciting development.
1999 The genetically engineered Saccharomyces yeasts developed by Dr. Ho were also honored by Discover Magazine as one of 27 of the most important technological innovations of 1999 selected from more than 4000 technological innovations worldwide. Dr. Ho was honored by Discover Magazine as one of the 27 finalists of the Discover Award for that year.
1998 R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine for her successful development of the genetically engineered Saccharomyces yeast that can effectively co-ferment both glucose and xylose from cellulosic biomass, which has made biomass-to-ethanol technology closer to commercialization. The Chicago Tribune has called this award “The Oscar of Invention.” Others have referred to the award as “the Nobel Prize of Applied Research.”
Range Fuels gets $100 million to build ethanol plant
Range Fuels, which says it can produce cellulosic ethanol out of wood scraps, has raised $100 million to build a 100-million-gallon-a-year plant in Georgia, according to VentureWire, which posted the news first. Investors in the round include Khosla Ventures (a previous investor) and an unnamed energy company.
Earlier, the company received grants from the U.S. Department of Energy worth up to $76 million, as well as other venture funds.
CEO Mitch Mandich, a former Apple guy, told us last year that the plant would cost around $150 million. Unlike Web 2.0 start-ups, energy companies require a lot of capital to get off the ground. The company is trying to get the plant running this year to the point where it can produce 20 million gallons a year.
Range Fuels uses thermochemical processes to convert forestry wastes into ethanol. The alcohol can be mixed into gas, or be turned into E85, which is 85 percent ethanol. There are only a few cars on the road that can run on E85 and only about 1,400 stations in the U.S. that sell it, but both numbers are expected to climb.
The process devised by the company is similar to the Fischer-Tropsch process for converting coal to liquids. First, the solid is turned into a synthetic gas, which then gets combined with other gases and converted to a liquid. Fischer-Tropsch, invented in 1920, can be somewhat expensive. Countries invested in coal-to-liquids when they couldn’t get fuel otherwise. The Third Reich was a fan, and so was the Apartheid regime of South Africa. (You can also call it the Hans and Franz process after Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch.)
But with oil prices climbing, synthetic liquid fuels are becoming more attractive. Many cellulosic companies say they can make fuel and sell it for $1 to $1.50 a gallon once it’s in mass production. Efficiency, however, is paramount in this market, and companies are racing to see who can get the most fuel out of a ton of scraps. ZeaChem, a rival, says it can get 160 gallons per ton. Others have claimed more than 100 gallons.
While most of the cellulosic companies are start-ups, an influx of cash and interest is coming in from traditional fuel vendors. Chevron and Weyerhauser, for instance, have created a biofuel company. Although big companies can threaten start-ups, partnerships are inevitable: building large-scale refineries takes more time, capital, and distribution heft than most start-ups can muster.
Range Fuels isn’t the only outfit getting money these days. Coskata, which wants to make cellulosic ethanol out of garbage, got $19.5 million. And in the solar world, rumors swirl that Nanosolar and Solyndra are trying to raise money for factories and telling investors they are worth $2 billion and $1 billion respectively. Neither company is in mass production.
Iogen, Canada evaluate cellulosic ethanol proposal
Source: Reuters.com
Corrects 10th and 11th paragraphs to show that the timetable for the Idaho project is still to be determined, while Iogen hopes to break ground on the Saskatchewan project later in 2008 or in 2009)
By Roberta Rampton
WINNIPEG, Manitoba, March 14 (Reuters) – The Canadian government said on Friday it is performing due diligence on a proposal to help fund a commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant planned by Iogen Corp for the province of Saskatchewan.
“It’s a huge step in the commercialization process,” said Jeff Passmore, an Iogen official, in an interview.
By 2011, the C$500 million ($505 million) plant would produce about 90 million liters (23.78 million U.S. gallons) of ethanol a year, along with enzymes and other byproducts, using straw left over from the wheat harvest in Canada’s breadbasket,
Canada has said it will spend C$500 million to help commercialize “next-generation biofuels” with repayable loans for up to 40 percent of project costs.
“They need to know that this is a sound investment,” Passmore said, adding that government officials began meeting with Iogen engineers and other company officers last month to study the project, with the due diligence process set to wrap up next month.
Traditionally made from corn and other food crops, ethanol is a fuel additive hailed as a way to extend the longevity of limited global oil supplies and reduce the climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions of vehicles.
But rising concerns about food inflation have pushed governments to invest in cellulosic ethanol, which currently costs about twice as much to produce as corn-based fuel, and is not yet produced on a commercial scale.
The United States will consume about 9 billion gallons of ethanol this year, but the recent U.S. energy bill calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022, including 16 billion gallons from nonfood stocks.
Privately held Iogen, backed by Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L: Quote, Profile, Research) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N: Quote, Profile, Research), is working a similar-size project in Idaho selected for U.S. federal funding last year.
“We’re proceeding with due diligence there as well,” Passmore said.
The timetable for the Idaho project is still to be determined, Passmore said. Iogen hopes to have financing in place to start building the Saskatchewan plant later in 2008 or early in 2009.
Iogen has run a demonstration plant in Ottawa for four years that can produce about 2.5 million liters of ethanol per year from straw.
“I’m not sure what stage our competitors are at, but we’re the only ones who have had four years of operating experience at a demo plant, and that’s taught us a lot about what works and what doesn’t,” Passmore said.
Iogen eventually hopes to build plants producing 200 million-250 million liters of ethanol to attain better economies of scale, he said.
($1=$0.99 Canadian) (Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Peter Galloway)
Early Move On Ethanol Pays Off For Distributor Of Farm Produce
March 12, 2008: 03:44 PM EST
Investor’s Business Daily delivered by Newstex
When the ethanol boom started two years ago, ethanol startups began sprouting almost as fast as dot-coms in the ’90s. But in the end, the old-timers seem to be winning.
One venerable player is 61-year-old The Andersons ANDE. The company was long established in storing and merchandising grain and had diversified into several other farm-related industries. Ethanol, then, seemed like a natural add-on.
Andersons opened its first plant in Albion, Mich., in August 2006. It opened another in Clymers, Ind., in April last year and a third in Maumee, Ohio, in February. Andersons built and owns the plants in partnership with Marathon Oil (NYSE:MRO) MRO, which needs ethanol to fulfill the new renewable-fuel laws.
Grain And Ethanol
All this helped the firm’s Grain & Ethanol Group — which includes both ethanol and grain storage — nearly double its revenue in 2007 and more than double its operating income. The group accounts for about 60% of Andersons’ business.
Analysts say the diversity of its business helps Andersons avoid the pitfalls of other ethanol producers. Pure-play producers have gotten killed by rising corn prices, which hit a record $5.615 a bushel at the beginning of March. But Andersons plays it both ways.
“Its grain storage business and fertilizer business benefit from higher corn prices,” said analyst Heather Jones of BB&T (NYSE:BBT) Capital. “The higher (prices) are, the more likely farmers are to plant acreage.”
It also helps that the firm has negotiated contracts covering 70% of its ethanol plants’ corn demands for this year, meaning corn is locked in at a lower price. And, adds analyst Charlie Rentschler of Wall Street Access, “If anybody knows how to hedge, it’s The Andersons.”
Jones says that Andersons’ joint-venture approach is shrewd. The company won’t take a position in an ethanol plant unless it also gets a contract to provide related services. That’s a high-margin business that generated $15 million in fees last year, Jones says.
The capacity of the three plants together is about 275 million gallons. It’s still pretty small compared with industry leader Archer Daniels Midland (NYSE:ADM) ADM, which cranks out about 1.1 billion gallons. But Rentschler says Andersons doesn’t go head-to-head with ADM because its plants are located farther east, away from the thickly populated Iowa market.
The increased demand for corn, thanks to ethanol and other factors, has also driven up Andersons’ Plant Nutrient Group. Sales in that segment jumped 75% last year to $466 million, while operating income multiplied eight times over to $27 million. This came about thanks to a 43% increase in volume and a 24% increase in price. Not only was there a rise in acreage last year, but corn requires more fertilizer than other crops, so farmers needed more nutrients per acre as they converted their land to corn fields.
Andersons’ three smaller segments didn’t have such a great year. The Retail Group runs six stores in Ohio with a Home Depot-like (NYSE:HD) format, and last year it opened a specialty food store called The Andersons Market, taking advantage of the burgeoning organic-food craze. Nonetheless, both same-store sales and margins shrank in 2007. The Turf & Specialty Group, which offers fertilizers for lawns and golf courses, also declined. Read more, please go to Ivestor’s Business Daily. Invest Smarter! Get 2 Bonus Weeks of Investor’s Business Daily!
Corn based Ethanol production fuels environmental problem, experts fear
Margaret Munro , CanWest News Service
Published: Monday, March 10, 2008
Ramping up corn production to make ethanol will make the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico even more lethal, according to a Canada-U.S. study that links biofuels to an environmental problem.
Run-off from corn fields is all but sure to increase the zone of oxygen-deprivation water in the Gulf that is toxic to fish, says geographer Simon Donner, of the University of British Columbia, and lead author of the report published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It is going make what was already a difficult problem pretty much impossible to solve,” says Donner, who has a long interest in agriculture’s impact on the environment.
The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which grows to cover close to 20,000 square kilometers in summer, is one of the more dramatic. Nutrients and fertilizers wash off Midwest farmland, down the Mississippi River and into the gulf, where it fuels a depletion of oxygen. The result is one the largest and most infamous of the 200 dead zones now found in coastal zones around the globe.
Donner and his colleague Christopher Kuckarik at the University of Wisconsin predict that if the U.S. meets its proposed ethanol goal, the amount of nitrogen from fertilizer flowing into the gulf will increase by as much as 19 per cent in coming years.
A U.S. task force has concluded nitrogen flowing into the gulf must be cut 30 per cent to bring the Gulf of Mexico dead zone back to life. Other studies have called for a 55 per cent reduction.
Donner says the downstream impacts on the gulf “doesn’t appear to have been on the agenda” of the U.S policy-makers who recently endorsed a plan to produce 36 billion gallons annually of ethanol by the year 2022, as much as 15 billion gallons of it from corn starch.
“The energy policy pretty clearly is going to contradict the Gulf of Mexico dead zone reduction effects,” says Donner, whose study assessed the amount of estimated land and fertilizer required to meet the ethanol goals. It concludes the dead zone will grow if there are not “radical shifts” in food and land management.
While the study focused on the gulf, Donner said in an interview he expects similar problems to crop up around the world as more and more land moves into biofuel production.
“There is only so much productive agricultural land on the planet and we’re already using most of it,” he said, stressing the importance of assessing the trade-offs and consequences in advance.
He says one way to reduce the problems is to use less land to grow corn for cattle, and reduce the global appetite for beef.
“If we didn’t eat beef we’d easily have enough land to feed the planet,” he says.
Several recent studies have raised questions about the environmental costs of biofuels, particularly ethanol made from corn, which requires a lot of energy and fertilizer to grow. “It (corn ethanol) doesn’t come out well on balance for the environment or the atmosphere,” says Donner, noting that some biofuels are better than others.
“Biofuels aren’t inherently a bad idea,” says Donner. “But they have to be done well, or the atmosphere and the waterways are going to be net loser.”
Bacterium Gets Wheels Turning on Ethanol Fuel
By Susan Kinzie and David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 10, 2008; Page B04
Source: Washingtonpost.com
A strain of bacteria accidentally found in the Chesapeake Bay more than 20 years ago — a bug that decomposes everything from algae to newspapers to crab shells — could help produce cheaper fuel, according to scientists at the University of Maryland.
Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) will tout the work of professors Steven Hutcheson and Ronald Weiner on campus today in announcing that Zymetis, a U-Md. spinoff company, will use the organism to generate ethanol.
The hope is that the bacterium can be used to produce ethanol more efficiently and inexpensively and in effect recycle junk into energy. The bacterium, which is very difficult to find in nature but easily reproduced in the lab, has turned bench scientists into entrepreneurs.
It’s a remarkable bug, Hutcheson said. “There’s nothing out there that compares to it.”
With environmental, economic and geopolitical reasons to find alternatives to gasoline, there’s a sense of urgency behind scientists’ drive to make cheap fuels out of such plants as grasses and wood. Other scientists said that the U-Md. research might mark a significant step in that struggle but that it was difficult to judge the discovery in detail without more information.
Ethanol is, essentially, fermented plant matter: Parts of the plants are broken down into sugar, which is converted into a kind of alcohol that is usable as fuel. For now, most U.S. ethanol is made from corn, but scientists want a source that isn’t also sought after for food.
They are now seeking to make fuel out of such things as wood chips, cornstalks and a prairie plant called switch grass. But the fuel in these plants is locked up chemically in such substances as cellulose, which nature has engineered not to break down, unlike the starches in grains.
“That’s the reason why you eat bread but you build houses out of wood,” said Philip Pienkos of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
That’s where this bug comes in. The bacterium Saccarophagus degradans, or sugar eater, can create a mix of enzymes that degrades plant matter. It has the largest known concentration of enzymes that eat carbohydrates, Hutcheson said.
“It basically is the ultimate bottom feeder,” said Jonathan Dinman, an associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at U-Md. “It eats what nobody else will eat — cornstalks, leftover chaff from hay or whatever — and can turn that into ethanol.”
Some researchers now use a pretreatment that softens the plants, then another treatment to turn cellulose into sugar, then a fermentation that turns the sugar into alcohol. Several scientists said that if the U-Md. research could make this process faster and more efficient, it could produce serious savings.
“If this guy’s got the answer to it, heck, yeah,” it would be the product of the year, said Mark E. Downing, of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
But Bruce E. Dale, a professor of chemical engineering at Michigan State University, said he wondered how much difference one bacterium could make. “There’s never been, to my knowledge, a microorganism that, without help [from scientists] . . . can break down cell walls completely and rapidly,” Dale said.
If such an organism existed, he said, plants would probably have found a way to defend themselves. “If there’s organisms out in the world doing that,” they would be “turning all the trees into puddles.”
The bacterium isn’t a parasite or a plant pathogen, Weiner said, adding that research has shown it attacks only dead organic matter. It was found in the mid-1980s by scientists at George Mason University looking for the organism killing wild grass.
In the lab, most people just call it 240 — not for the Maryland area code, but because it was the 40th sample isolated on a researcher’s second day in the salt marsh.
The bug interested a scientist at George Mason, and at a conference in the late 1980s, Weiner, who happened to sit next to him, was invited to collaborate.
The other scientist soon moved on, but Weiner was hooked. “It was unique. It was the first marine bacterium shown to degrade woody material. . . . How does CO2. . . go from a complex carbohydrate in the ocean to atmospheric CO2? . . . It was a whole missing link. This organism was absolutely the first and remains the paradigm for how that occurs.”
It was obvious, too, that it had tremendous ability to degrade all kinds of complex carbohydrates. “I started off fascinated with it,” Weiner said, “and the more we studied it, the more fascinated we got.”
In about 2000, Hutcheson joined the department and began working on 240. He drove to the salt marsh, a stretch of ecological preserve in Mathews County, Va., to try to isolate more samples of the bacterium.
In more than a dozen tries, the researchers haven’t been able to.
With the help of the Energy Department, they got its genome sequenced. Weiner worked almost straight through a few nights because he was so excited when the data came back. “That was a breakthrough,” said Larry Taylor, then a doctoral student in the lab and now at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
A few years ago, Weiner decided to step away from the theoretical and try an informal experiment: He snipped branches off a bunch of his wife’s houseplants and put the clusters of leaves into glass flasks with 240. In other flasks, he combined 240 with newspaper or magazine pages. Then he had a group of 10 control flasks with just the bacteria.
He came back to the lab after the holidays — a week, maybe 10 days later, and burst out, “Who the devil took our flasks?”
He looked again and counted. There were 20 there, but they all looked empty. “The plant matter had all disappeared,” he said. “I never anticipated the organism would be that efficient. That’s when we knew the organism not only did things in microculture but had the potential to be useful on a grander scale.”
They had always known the research could one day be helpful for making ethanol, but the more they found out, Hutcheson said, the more possible — and compelling — the practical applications began to seem. And when he watched President Bush talk about alternative fuels in the State of the Union speech a couple of years ago, he almost fell out of his seat, he recalled. He began to put together the company through the Technology Advancement Program at U-Md.
About a year ago, Dinman joined them to help bump up the fuel yields they get from sugars using genetically engineered yeast. “Yeast has been used to make ethanol since the first caveman got a buzz off of fermenting berries,” he said.
There are still a lot of hurdles, Dinman said. There is plenty of competition, too. Weiner said the big question is whether it can be cost-competitive; Hutcheson said they reduced production costs 20-fold in less than a year.
Hutcheson hopes to have the pilot plant running this summer. And when he gets a chance, he’ll go back to the marsh. He’s still looking for 240.
Enzymes Study: Elapsed Time
Editor’s Note: This video contains no audio
Right beaker, Zymetis’ enzymes breaking down newspaper into ethanol-ready sugars over a 36-hour time period; left beaker, a salt water control sample, also with newspaper. Zymetis’ commercial enzymes will break down cellulosic material at a significantly more rapid pace.
