Time seen as ripe for organic fuels
Posted on Sunday, January 8, 2006
CYPRESS BEND — Tom Belin believes the time has come to turn trees and cotton stalks into motor fuels.
Belin and others at Spokane, Wash.-based Potlatch Corp., want the company’s pulp and paperboard mill near McGehee to be the first site in the country for a new type of biorefinery.
Feasibility studies are under way for a demonstration plant that could prove the practicality of converting “biomass” — organic matter — into heat, power, fuels and chemicals.
Serious efforts to extract energy from biomass date to the late 1970 s, but many observers are more optimistic about the process now because of technological advances, the vastly higher price of oil and natural gas and an increased interest in reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.
“The technology is ready and the economics are there. Everything is finally beginning to come together,” said Belin, who is senior production engineer at the Potlatch mill, which is on the Cypress Bend of the Mississippi River.
The Potlatch demonstration plant would initially concentrate on a thermochemical method, one of two biorefining technologies.
The thermochemical method produces a synthetic gas, the bulk of which would be converted to a liquid. The resulting “syncrude” would be sold to a petroleum refinery for conversion into transportation fuels — including diesel, gasoline and ethanol — and other chemicals.
And Potlatch would capture the waste heat generated during gasification and use it directly in the pulping and paper-making processes or to generate electricity. A portion of the “syngas” could be used to fuel the biorefinery and the pulp and paper mill.
Jim McNutt, executive director of the Atlanta-based Center for Paper Business and Industry Studies, said, “I’m sure there will be some [financial ] bleeding, but the technology is refined enough and Potlatch is wise enough in the way they do business, so my educated guess is that this will be a very successful venture and they will be at the forefront of changing the direction for the U. S. paper industry.
“ Biorefineries are probably the most significant advancement to have an impact on forest resources and the forest-products industry in our lifetime,” McNutt said.
Potlatch’s motivation is the skyrocketing cost of natural gas, said Harry Seamans, vice president of the company’s pulp and paperboard division.
The average industrial price of natural gas in the United States rose from $ 3. 12 per thousand cubic feet in 1999 to $ 6. 43 in 2004, and peaked at $ 11. 87 in October, according to the Energy Information Administration. Potlatch estimates that the Cypress Bend mill could reduce its natural gas usage by roughly 1. 6 billion cubic feet per year, or about 80 percent, and reduce its purchased electricity by 80, 000 megawatt hours annually, or 60 percent. WINROCK PARTICIPATION
Biorefineries are being touted as a way to create jobs directly, at the biorefinery, and indirectly by the multiplier effect of those wages in the local economy.
Biorefineries also represent sources of renewable energy, which could help the United States reduce its dependence on imported oil and gas.
The potential spillover led Winrock International, an Arkansas-based nonprofit, to serve as the coordinator for Potlatch’s feasibility study, said Annett Pagan, managing director of U. S. programs for Winrock.
“The implications of this project could be just incredible in terms of job creation and net growth in the Delta,” she said. Jim Wimberly of Fayetteville, a consultant working on the feasibility study, believes eastern Arkansas could support up to 50 large-scale bioenergy production and processing facilities. The project is a perfect fit for Winrock, which has expertise in value-added agriculture, energy and the environment, alternative energy and the potential market for “energy crops,” Pagan said. A team of Winrock experts began working in December with the Arkansas Energy Office, the University of Arkansas at Monticello, several outside consultants and technical workers from Potlatch to prepare an economic and technical feasibility study of the proposed biorefinery, Pagan said. The study will cost an estimated $ 325, 000.
RISK AND FUNDING One major goal of the analysis is to determine the optimal size and configuration of such a facility for Potlatch’s existing pulp and paper mill. Until that is done, no one associated with the project is willing to estimate what the biorefinery might cost. But the project won’t be cheap, and it’s laden with risk. “Being a ‘first out of the block,’ it’s not something that we would want to take the full risk on, but it’s important enough to us that we would take some risk,” Seamans said.
“We’ve still got to meet with our board to be able to get approval to move forward with something like this,” he said. “It’s all going to depend on how much financial risk we’re taking.”
The U. S. Department of Energy, through a grant program that was authorized in August in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, calls for the department to solicit proposals within six months for “integrated biorefinery demonstration projects” and authorizes up to $ 100 million per project.
Pagan said a request for proposals is expected in late January and applicants will have 45 days to respond.
Money for the biorefinery grants program has not yet been appropriated, said Christina Kielich, a spokesman for the Department of Energy.
“There were no 2006 funds allocated for it, so we have to wait and see if the president recommends it in the 2007 budget,” she said.
U. S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., said she’s optimistic that an appropriation will be forthcoming.
“There should be a role that government can play in [Potlatch’s biorefinery project ],” she said. “It’s very exciting in terms of the opportunities, both for us as a state and from our national standpoint, in terms of diversifying our energy sources,” Lincoln said.
U. S. Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he’s confident that federal funding will be available.
“It’s just about priorities and it’s about making the kind of commitment that we need to make,” he said.
Pagan said other risk takers are possible.
“Depending on how the numbers come out... we don’t know exactly how many different sources of money we’re looking at trying to put together,” she said.
SITE ADVANTAGES The mill offers several advantages as a demonstration site, said Lori Perine, executive director of a Washington-based forest-products industry technology alliance called Agenda 2020. Most importantly, it’s located in an area rich with biomass — waste products from forests and farms — and it’s near several small petroleum refineries that could refine the synthetic crude, or “syncrude,” that the biorefinery would produce, converting it into transportation fuels and other chemicals.
Also, the mill uses a chemical pulping process that is predominant in the country and thus would serve as a good model for the United States, Perine said.
Biorefineries could help the U. S. pulp and paper industry remain competitive, said David Bransby, an agronomy and soils professor at Auburn University in Alabama and a nationally recognized authority on biofuels.
“Quite honestly, our forestry industry in the Southeast has got its back to the wall because the pulp and paper industry is moving offshore,” to places like Brazil, where labor, raw materials and energy are cheaper, he said.
“Here in Alabama, we’ve just had three very large pulp mills close down in the Mobile area in the last four years or so,” Bransby said.
According to the American Forest and Paper Association, 460 pulp, paper and paperboard mills now operate in the United States, down from 514 in 1998. Arkansas has six pulp and paper mills. JA Cypress Bend biorefinery should bring more and better paying jobs to the Arkansas Delta, said John Kadyszewski, Winrock’s coordinator for
ecosystem services. “If you look at the counties that have pulp and paper facilities, the average wages are a lot higher than they are in counties that have just agriculture or just forestry,” he said. Matthew Pelkki, a forest resource economist at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, found in a recent study that in Arkansas counties with pulp and paper mills the average forest-industry compensation exceeds the overall average county employee compensation by $ 362 to $ 894 per week. In Desha County, for example, the positive differential is $ 416 per week, compared with $ 10 per week in neighboring Drew County. Bioref ining potentially could be used at any manufacturing site with access to biomass and a use for waste heat. Biomass fuel production also would offer forest landowners a new market for products that now have no value, such as logging debris, small-tree thinnings, dead wood and salvage material from catastrophic events. Because these materials often are a source of insect and disease outbreaks in forests, a biorefinery would give forest managers a cost-effective tool for improving forest health in the region, according to Pelkki.
Farmers could sell plant products to the biorefinery that now go to waste — cotton stalks, cotton gin trash, rice straw, wheat straw, poultry litter and corn stovers, the dried stalks and leaves of the plant.
Additional biorefinery materials could come from municipalities, manufacturers and ethanol plants, as well as “energy crops” such as switchgrass, which could be grown on marginal cropland.
In April, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimated that forestland and agricultural land, the two largest potential biomass sources, could produce 1. 3 billion dry tons of material per year, enough to produce biofuels to meet more than one-third of the current demand for transportation fuels. Such an amount, which would represent a sixfold increase in biomass production, could be achieved with only relatively modest changes in land use and agricultural and forestry practices, according to the study.
Ron Bell of Batesville, chairman of the Ozark Foothills Resource Conservation and Development Council, said the state association of resource conservation and development councils thinks Arkansas “could easily support perhaps five to seven” integrated biorefineries around the state.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
