A New Industry Has Been Launched: The Cellulosic Biofuels Ship (Finally) Sails

I have devoted much of my professional life toward a goal shared by many others: helping to establish a sustainable, large-scale cellulosic biofuels industry. This year, the cellulosic biofuel ship finally sailed. In 2014, four new cellulosic ethanol plants in North America either opened or will open soon. These new plants joined existing plants in Italy and Florida, USA, to give us six operating plants with a total capacity of over 430 million litres of ethanol per year. Other large scale plants are likely to open in the next few years, and there are already cellulosic ethanol demonstration plants of various sizes in China, Japan, Russia, Thailand, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland and the US. Finally, the industry is real, global and is beginning to grow. Some will say that the existing plants, based mostly on crop residues, are neither sustainable, nor large-scale. There is some truth to these statements. However, it is now clear that if crop residues are properly managed and harvested, they are indeed sustainable. Crop residues are also an essential first step in the right direction. The success of an initial industry based on residues will enable a much larger industry based on perennial grasses and forest products, both of which can significantly enhance the environmental performance of cellulosic biofuels. As for scale, every industry started small and comparatively primitive. Once begun, the industry could then grow and improve. Photographs of early oil refineries present a scene that would not have encouraged anyone about their future. Early refineries often used open kettles of hydrocarbons heated by direct flames. Early oil refineries blew up a lot. Early oil refineries had to improve. They did. Biorefineries based on cellulosic biomass will also improve. Nonetheless, the scale issue is real, critically important and must be solved if the cellulosic biofuels industry is to grow as it must. More about that below. We are probably not going to blow up very many cellulosic biorefineries. Unfortunately, we may accidentally burn up a lot of cellulosic biomass before we learn how to properly manage the biomass logistics and supply system. Unprocessed cellulosic biomass is unstable and combustible. Again, more about that issue below since it is closely connected with the scale issue. Thanks in large part to the success of the petrochemical industry, we are launching this new biofuels industry on a much firmer technical basis than the oil industry began with. We simply understand a lot more about how to economically process raw materials to liquid fuels than we did in the late 1800s. We also have the tools of modern biotechnology, a better understanding of the biological sciences to help us grow and process biological raw materials, and an increasing understanding of ecological principles to help us produce and process biomass sustainably. Thus the new cellulosic biofuels industry has a lot going for it, including a gradually-dawning realization that the days of oil are limited. We passed the peak of cheap (conventional) oil extraction in 2005. The marginal, “new”, barrel of oil is increasingly extracted from remote, often environmentally-sensitive locations, deep waters, tar sands (“heavy oil”), or hydraulic fracturing of tight shale formations. All of these sources of petroleum are costly and more environmentally destructive than conventional oil. There are simply are no large conventional oil fields left to find in cheap, easy to drill locations. We found, developed and pumped those oil fields long ago. As the biofuels industry gains experience and scale, its costs will come down and its environmental performance will improve. At the same time, the environmental and economic costs of petroleum extraction and use will increase. Thus, the trajectory of the petroleum-based fuels industry is inevitably downward, while that of the cellulosic biofuels industry is upward. Cellulosic biofuels will increasingly replace (and be seen as replacing) oil that is much more expensive and very environmentally damaging. So, will we have all smooth sailing ahead for our cellulosic biofuels ship? Certainly not. The choice of conversion technologies (the technology “winners”) is not yet clear. In fact, different conversion technologies may be different for different biomass feedstocks, making it more difficult for investors to decide where to put their funds. In the immediate future, uncertainty surrounding the Renewable Fuels Standard clouds the progress of cellulosic biofuels in the US and restrains critically needed investment in the industry. Worldwide, currently declining oil prices also undermine the economics and progress of cellulosic biofuels. But oil prices will certainly rise again, perhaps sharply. Humankind's need for liquid fuels is so great that we will probably use every bit of increasingly expensive, increasingly polluting oil we can extract, unless large-scale, sustainable and economical alternatives are available. The scale issue is a particularly important and daunting one. We are justifiably happy to have reached almost half a billion liters per year of cellulosic ethanol capacity. But worldwide motor gasoline consumption is well over a trillion litres per year. Diesel fuel use is also in the trillion litre per year range. Thus these six plants have replaced the first 0.03% or so of total petroleum-derived fuels. Electric vehicles and batteries, at best, may be able to replace half of the demand for liquid fuels. (We expect to publish an article in BioFPR demonstrating this fact later in 2015. Keep reading this journal. Likewise I am privileged to participate in a research group that has reached a similar conclusion by another means and has just submitted that paper for review.) Thus even with maximum penetration of batteries and electric vehicles, the existing cellulosic biofuels industry still represents only about 0.1% of the scale it will need to eventually achieve. Lack of scale hurts the cellulosic biofuels industry in two ways: 1) without very large scale biorefineries (~30,000 tons per day of biomass), we will not get the processing economies of scale we need to compete more effectively with oil refineries, which operate at about that scale, 2) without a large-scale industry we will not achieve the learning at scale that always drives down cost with the classic logarithmic decline in cost versus accumulated total production. Right now, we have neither of these scale advantages. To achieve a large scale biofuels industry, we must have a correspondingly large scale biomass supply industry. Indeed, a world-scale cellulosic biofuels industry cannot and will not exist at scale without a companion industry to supply the biomass feedstock at scale, several billions of tons of biomass per year. What we actually require is two new industries: a biomass refining industry and a biomass supply industry. We have largely overlooked or ignored this fact until now, but we cannot do so any longer. If the nascent biomass processing industry is to produce abundant, sustainable, low cost fuels and other products, it must be able to rely on another industry that can supply abundant, sustainable, low cost feedstocks. The availability of these biomass feedstocks, particularly for agricultural materials, is often taken as a given by many. Unfortunately, availability of cellulosic biomass is not a given. Key questions about very large scale biomass supply have really not been addressed adequately, including: 1) where will the required biomass come from, 2) who will supply it at the desired quantities, 3) how will it be processed, stored and handled in a safe and stable way and 4) what are the desired properties of the biomass feedstock? These issues must be resolved before we can get to truly large scale, sustainable biofuels industry. Anecdotal evidence abounds that the emerging cellulosic biofuels industry has already encountered significant feedstock supply problems. For example, storage facilities filled with biomass supplying the new cellulosic ethanol plants have repeatedly caught fire and burned. But thus far we do not have many systematic, thorough studies of the problems of and solutions for processing, handling and storage of cellulosic biomass for large-scale biofuels. Thus BioFPR will increasingly welcome articles and editorials dealing with these crucial issues of harvesting, transport, processing and storage of cellulosic biomass. Speaking of editorials, this one is long enough. Thank you for reading. And again, my deepest congratulations to the many pioneers who are building the cellulosic biofuels industry. We have the first 0.1% of desired capacity; only another 99.9% to go. Author info: Professor Bruce E. Dale, Michigan State University, Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, Editor in Chief of Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining. Contact: [email protected]