Cellulosic demonstration plant
Verenium Corp. has a pilot plant making 50,000 gallons a year of the motor fuel additive in Jennings, La., in Jefferson Davis Parish, which is about a couple of hours’ drive from Beaumont.
Verenium, based in Cambridge, Mass., is building a demonstration plant capable of converting biomass – the general name for plant material that can become ethanol – into 1.5 million gallons a year.
That demonstration plant is a necessary step toward developing a commercial-scale plant capable of producing 30 million gallons a year.
Last week, about 30 Southeast Texans – farmers, economic developers, members of the region’s BioFuels Alliance, and others went to Jennings to see the operation and learn more about it from Verenium officials.
Verenium already has an option to buy several hundred acres of land between Nome and Winnie to build a commercial-scale plant. The company also is looking at other areas along the Gulf Coast such as in Florida and Louisiana. The company plans to build several distilleries to produce ethanol.
However, the demonstration plant is an intermediate step, much the same as creating a kind of beer from the biomass is an intermediate step in distilling the pure alcohol, said Charlie Butler, human relations manager for Verenium.
“We have a master brewer on staff from Anheuser Busch,” Butler said.
That’s to control and to ensure the quality of the fermentation of the biomass early in the process.
Butler compared the start of the process with that of a pulp mill.
The biomass is fed into a chopper and is ground down to small bits. The mass comes in at about 50 percent moisture, so it contains a good deal of water anyway.
The mass is given the steam treatment and it becomes a slurry. From there, it is mixed with the company’s proprietary enzymes and bacteria, which help to create that beer of which Butler spoke.
From the beer vessel, the liquid then goes into distillation, which is where boilers come into play.
Solids drop out of the mix and are drawn off to become part of the fuel that heats the boilers.
The water that is drawn off during distillation is fed back to the steam vessels.
The pure alcohol – which might test out at 190 proof – becomes the fuel-grade ethanol.
Chuck Davis, head of commercial development for Verenium, said the demonstration plant will exist only to prove the concept.
That’s what will attract the financing to help make the commercialization possible, he said.
The demonstration plant, which will cost about $35 million to build, is about 50 percent completed and should be ready for operations by spring 2008, he said.
He said Verenium wants to be in a position to begin building a commercial plant by the end of 2008.
Construction would take 18 months to two years, he said.
The farmers were invited along because it is they who must decide whether to support such a plant with appropriate crops that they would grow expressly for Verenium’s ethanol plant.
No one at Verenium has yet put a price to the kind of crop that farmers would grow – and that’s something that farmers need to know before agreeing to a contract.
However, Verenium does need about 325,000 tons per year of biomass to produce its 30 million gallons of ethanol.
Davis said the company figures on production of 20 tons per acre of land, which would require about 16,000 to 18,000 acres of land.
Ted Wilson, director of the Texas A&M Agriculture Research and Extension Center west of Beaumont, said he thinks the 20 tons per acre is too aggressive a figure.
Wilson said he doesn’t think farmers in Southeast Texas could consistently raise that amount from each acre.
And the data for ethanol specific crops like energy cane – a more fibrous and less sucrose-heavy variant of sugar cane – or sorghum doesn’t yet exist for this area, Wilson said.
Davis was unworried.
“As we evolve, I expect costs to go down and yields to go up,” he said.
Davis said the kind of plant Verenium is pursuing is based on fibrous plants and not grain such as corn, which is now the main ethanol raw material.
The capital cost to build a distillery for the fibrous plants is higher than that for corn, Davis said. But the operating costs are lower, he said.
Richard Schroeder, a biomass consultant for Verenium, said farmers and the ethanol producer have to agree on prices or the project won’t work.
“We don’t expect anyone to grow a crop and lose money,” he said. “And we don’t expect anyone to switch crops so they can make more money. This is not ‘get-rich-quick.’
“One answer to your (Beaumont rice farmer Chuck Kiker’s) question is ‘how cheap can you grow it?’
“We want to build where we can get the cheapest crop,” Schroeder said.
He said Verenium is making a massive investment and commits to an area for “the long haul.” The service span of an ethanol plant should be 20 years, he said.
“On a per-ton basis, this is not worth what a food crop is,” Schroeder said. “But on a per-acre basis, it is feasible.”
Verenium’s kind of ethanol – called cellulosic – would yield between 1,400 and 1,800 gallons per acre. That compares with corn’s usual 400 gallons per acre, Schroeder said.
Twenty tons of biomass per acre would yield about 80 gallons per ton of biomass, he said.
Plenty of other unanswered questions remain for farmers, such as who harvests and who transports?
Also, Verenium was unable to offer specifics on a contractual minimum for a crop.
Rice farmer Alan Gaulding, who works land between Hamshire and Fannett, said Verenium’s operations were interesting to see.
“They still have a lot of work to do with the farmers,” he said.
For many on the trip, the most important thing they saw is Verenium’s intent is serious.
“They’re earnest,” said Lee Tarpley, a plant physiologist from the A&M research center.
“The importance of (the trip) is that Verenium is for real.”
