WASHINGTON — After months
of frustrating delays, a chemical company announced Wednesday that it had
produced commercial quantities of ethanol from wood waste and other nonfood
vegetative matter, a long-sought goal that, if it can be expanded economically,
has major implications for providing vehicle fuel and limiting greenhouse gas
emissions.
The company, INEOS Bio, a
subsidiary of the European oil and chemical company INEOS, said it had produced
the fuel at its $130 million Indian River Bio Energy Center in Vero Beach,
Fla., which it had hoped to open by the end of last year. The company said it
was the first commercial-scale production
of ethanol from cellulosic feedstock, but it did not say how much it
had produced. Shipments will begin in August, the company said.
The process begins with
wastes — wood and vegetative matter for now, municipal garbage later — and
cooks it into a gas of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Bacteria eat the gas and
excrete alcohol, which is then distilled. Successful production would eliminate
some of the “food versus fuel” debate in the manufacturing of ethanol, which
comes from corn.
“Biomass gasification has
not been done like this before, nor has the fermentation,” said Peter Williams,
chief executive of INEOS Bio.
The plant, which uses
methane gas from a nearby landfill, has faced a variety of problems. One was
getting the methane, which is a greenhouse gas if released unburned, to the
plant’s boilers. (The plan is to eventually run the plant on garbage that now
goes to landfills.) Another problem was its reliance on the electrical grid.
The plant usually
generates more power than it needs — selling the surplus to the local utility —
and is supposed to be able to operate independently. But when thunderstorms
knocked out the power grid, the plant unexpectedly shut down and it took weeks
to get it running again, said Mark Niederschulte, the chief operating officer
of INEOS Bio.
“We’ve had some painful
do/undo loops,” he said.
The plant has produced
“truckloads” of ethanol, said Mr. Williams, but still has work to do to improve
its yield. Mr. Niederschulte said, “Now we want to produce more ethanol from a
ton of wood, rather than just making ethanol from a ton of wood.”
The Department of Energy
hailed the development as the first of a kind, and said it was made possible by
research work the department had sponsored in recent years. The energy
secretary, Ernest Moniz, said in a statement, “Unlocking the potential for the
responsible development of all of America’s rich energy resources is a critical
part of our all-of-the-above energy strategy.”
The Environmental
Protection Agency, which grants valuable credits to companies that produce fuel
from wastes, confirmed that only a very small volume has been produced so far.
Another company, KiOR, has produced some diesel fuel from wood waste at a plant
in Columbus, Miss.
Congress laid out a quota
for production of biofuels from nonfood sources, but the agency has had to cut
it back every year because of lack of production.
INEOS has a goal of eight
million gallons a year.
If ethanol can be produced
at reasonable cost from abundant nonfood sources, like yard trimmings or
household trash, it could displace fuel made from oil, and that oil, and its
carbon, could stay in the ground, reducing the amount greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, experts say. Carbon from wood scraps or garbage would enter the
atmosphere via cellulosic ethanol, but cutting down a tree or trimming a garden
creates space for new growth, which absorbs carbon dioxide from the air.
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