Archive for April 2008
Nebraska Sweet Sorghum
It looks like split-pea soup and tastes like sugar water with a vague vegetative twist. But never mind.
Ishmail Dweikat and John Rajewski don’t have their collective eye on Gatorade as the primary competition for the juice from the 12-foot long, one inch-thick stalks of sweet sorghum they’re harvesting from a University of Nebraska test plot.
Dweikat, leader of sweet sorghum research at UNL, and Rajewski, field manager and plant breeder, are more interested in using these plants rustling in the East Campus breeze as the raw material for future ethanol production.
“If you want a reliable source for ethanol,” Dweikat said, “corn would not be the one.”
Sweet sorghum’s advantages over Nebraska corn are many, he said.
It doesn’t need to be irrigated and goes into dormancy during drought periods. The ratio of energy consumed to energy produced is much higher than corn, and an acre of sweet sorghum can produce as much as 800 gallons of ethanol.
Corn’s ethanol yield is closer to 250 gallons per acre.
Despite what the UNL researchers see as sweet sorghum’s considerable promise, corn growers serving the ethanol market don’t need to leap out of the way just yet.
It will take another year or two to develop the right hybrid, Dweikat said. Harvesting equipment that can crush the juice out of the stalks as it moves through the field is also a work in progress.
“Back in the 1900s, sweet sorghum was used as a source of molasses,” he said.
In a new century, possibilities for what can happen with a plant traceable mostly to Africa are headed in an energy direction.
Can the crop be a major source of renewable fuel?
“It’s very likely it will be if we can get the mechanics worked out for it,” said Rajewski.
Dweikat said Texas and Oklahoma, neither of which is a major producer of corn, are further along in building distilleries to boil the water out of sorghum juice and convert what’s left to motor fuel.
But tall stands of sweet sorghum, which carry seed clusters at the very top, can be grown anywhere corn and grain sorghum can be grown.
In Nebraska, home to gusty winds early and late in the growing season, an adaptation is in the works.
“We’re trying to breed for tall, big stalks without seed,” Dweikat said. “If there’s nothing heavy on the top, it has a much better chance of standing the wind.”
Signs of success at UNL are not exactly taking the ethanol industry by storm. Preliminary checks with the ethanol establishment in other states failed to turn up anybody gushing with enthusiasm.
Brian Jennings, based in Sioux Falls, S.D., with the American Coalition for Ethanol, is among the less than overwhelmed. He sees corn and cellulosic ethanol made from the rest of the corn plant as dominant factors.
“I think corn will remain the centerpiece for years to come,” Jennings said, “and then we will see corn stover and corn fiber and other things like that kick off very soon.”
If sweet sorghum is a better choice, “that would be news to me.”
James Covey, ethanol advocate and state legislator from Custer City, Okla., said his state is moving toward building its first ethanol plant, but will use the same grain supply to make the finished product as plants elsewhere.
Sweet sorghum, said Covey, is “a different breed of pup.”
Dweikat and Rajewski are undeterred and lay out a future in which Nebraska farmers distill their own juice and store it in rubber bladders until it can be picked up by cooperatives and hauled off to make ethanol.
“Of course, economics drives everything,” Rajewski said, “economics and water availability. So we’ll see how that goes.”
The sweet sorghum research is being conducted on dryland plots at UNL’s High Plains Ag Lab near Sidney and at other Nebraska locations. UNL is looking at some alternative ethanol-producing crops for farmers who rely on dryland or limited-irrigation production, according to Drew Lyon, extension dryland crops specialist at the Panhandle Center. Growing dryland corn is risky in the Nebraska Panhandle. Sweet sorghum may be a crop that dryland farmers can grow more consistently and profitably.
In 2007, field studies were conducted at Sidney, North Platte, and Clay Center to determine theoretical ethanol yield from sweet sorghum, corn, and grain sorghum. This work was done by Lyon, in cooperation with other UNL experts, Ismail Dweikat of Lincoln, Charles Wortmann, extension, from Lincoln, and Bob Klein, extension cropping systems specialist at the West Central REC in North Platte.
Preliminary findings indicate that, compared to corn and grain sorghum, sweet sorghum does not produce more ethanol yield per acre, but does produce greater net energy. This results in a net reduction in CO2 emission compared to corn or grain sorghum, and much more energy produced per energy invested. Approximately 250% more energy is produced than invested for sweet sorghum, compared to 50% more produced than invested for corn or grain sorghum. Sweet sorghum produces more net energy because it produces sugar, rather than starch. According to Lyon, less energy is needed to make ethanol from sugar than from starch. Sweet sorghum may require less nitrogen fertilizer input than corn, and may be more water-use efficient than corn.
Some potential problems with sweet sorghum include harvest challenges — for example, what to do with all the biomass and where and how to extract the sugar. The plants are very tall, and seed production is low. Questions also remain about how to feed sugar into a corn ethanol stream.
Sweet Sorgum
Oklahoma State University’s sorghum-related biofuels research is taking a localized approach, with the aim of making possible the effective production of ethanol in the farmer’s own field.
Sweet sorghum can be grown throughout temperate climate zones of the United States, including Oklahoma. It provides high biomass yield with low irrigation and fertilizer requirements. Corn ethanol, in contrast, requires significant amounts of water for growing and processing.
Best of all, producing ethanol from sweet sorghum is relatively easy, said Danielle Bellmer, biosystems engineer with the OSU Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources’ Robert M. Kerr Food and Agricultural Products Center.
“Just press the juice from the stalk, add yeast, allow fermentation to take place and you have ethanol,” Bellmer said. “Unfortunately, the simple sugars derived from sweet sorghum have to be fermented immediately.”
Throw in the expense of constructing and operating a central processing facility that would only operate the four to five months of the year when sorghum would be available in Oklahoma and the challenge multiplies.
The beginnings of a possible solution presented itself when entrepreneur Lee McClune, president of Sorganol Production Co. Inc., approached FAPC scientists seeking their assistance in testing his newly designed field harvester capable of pressing and collecting juice from sweet sorghum. His proposed Sorganol process involved using the harvester, large storage bladders for fermentation and a mobile distillation unit for ethanol purification.
OSU’s initial involvement in the project was to look at the feasibility of fermenting the juice in the field.
“We’re examining such things as juice extraction efficiency, whether or not pH (acidity) or nutrient adjustment of the juice is needed and various environmental factors,” Bellmer said.
The goal is to make production of ethanol from sweet sorghum economically viable by using an in-field processing system that minimizes transportation costs and capital investment.
Equipment such as the harvester and other technology could be owned individually or cooperatively with a number of producers sharing and possibly helping one another process ethanol from sweet sorghum.
In Oklahoma, the potential processing scenario might look like this: Plant sweet sorghum around mid-April, and then stagger plantings for two to three months. This would provide a harvest window of August through November.
“Ethanol yields in Oklahoma could range from 300 gallons to 600 gallons per acre, depending on biomass yield, sugar content and juice expression efficiency,” said Chad Godsey, biofuels team member and OSU Cooperative Extension cropping systems specialist with the department of plant and soil sciences.
Godsey said the team is working to determine the maximum possible harvest window for sweet sorghum in Oklahoma.
“Obviously, the longer the harvest window, the more ethanol state farmers will be able to produce,” he said.
OSU Biofuels Team researchers also are studying environmental parameters that may affect the feasibility of on-farm fermentation. A producer must be able to ferment the juice in the field during Oklahoma’s harvest season for sweet sorghum, which occurs in the fall when temperature extremes are highly possible.
“Temperature can speed up, slow down or derail the fermentation process,” Godsey said.
Weather data for Oklahoma indicate an average low temperature of about 44 degrees Fahrenheit and an average high temperature of approximately 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the August-through-October period over the past 10 years.
Six test plot sites are maintained at Oklahoma Agricultural Experiment Station facilities across the state, allowing OSU scientists to conduct research on sweet sorghum under local conditions.
“We would like to do with sweet sorghum what the Brazilians have done with sugar cane: In Brazil, sugar cane ethanol provides a large percentage of their fuel needs,” Bellmer said.
The idea of using sweet sorghum for commercial ethanol production is not new. The reason sweet sorghum is not as popular as corn in terms of being a source of ethanol in the United States has been the need to ferment its simple sugars immediately and the high costs associated with a central processing plant that is operated only seasonally.
“By determining a process by which agricultural producers can create ethanol in the field from sweet sorghum, that barrier is removed,” Bellmer said. “Producers will then have a much higher value product to sell.”
$180 a barrel Oil
By Jim Jubak
Yikes! Oil at $117 a barrel. It has to go down from here, right?
Wrong. In the short term — say, the next two years or so — we’re looking at bad news about global oil supply that could take the price of a barrel of crude to $180.
Needless to say, today’s $3.50-a-gallon gasoline would look cheap if oil prices hit $180 a barrel. At that price for a barrel of oil, gasoline would cost somewhere north of $5.50 a gallon.
The good news is that’s about the price, experts now say, that would send global consumption tumbling and oil prices into retreat, as drivers scrambled to find ways to conserve.
Of course, experts once thought $3-a-gallon gasoline would lead to a drop in consumption. The latest forecast from the International Energy Agency calls for global oil demand of 87.2 million barrels a day this year. That would be an increase in consumption of 1.3 million barrels a day from 2007 — despite a U.S. economic slowdown and soaring oil prices.
So why do I think oil prices will keep climbing for two more years at least?
A terrible coincidence of geology and geopolitics. Just when oil is getting more expensive to produce, the oil industries in three key countries — Mexico, Russia and Nigeria — find themselves short of cash. And without that cash, oil production in these countries, and global oil production in general, is headed into a decline.
The Russian oil industry, for example, announced that production had fallen 1% in the first quarter of 2008. According to the Russian energy ministry, oil production for the full year could be lower than in 2007.
Any decline would mark a huge turnaround. Russian production has grown steadily over the past 10 years, and in its supply-and-demand projections the International Energy Agency has been counting on growth in Russian production of 5% by 2012 to offset big declines in older fields in the North Sea and Mexico.
Wood Chips
With the passage of the Energy Bill, speculators are looking closely at the possible impact of increasing demand on biomass feedstock prices. We have seen the early impact on corn – what about wood?
In the current market the availability of woodchips, a residual from the manufacture of wood construction materials, is down because the housing construction is down. The price for woodchips has gone up because the supply is low.
What can we expect when wood begins to replace coal and natural gas in boilers or is used as the feedstock for conversion to biofuels? Supplies will increase to meet demand and the price will go down, right?
Not so, according to a press released just distributed by Business Wire that can be found at Forbes.com. Here is the story in its entirety…
Flexible Fuel Boiler
An EPI flexible fuel fluidized bed energy system provides an alternative to natural gas with
significant decreases in energy costs. So significant, in fact, that the capital costs incurred can be
repaid, in fuel savings alone, within one to three years depending on the alternative fuel available.
Escaping the natural gas trap is important, but it is equally important to not get stuck with the next
high cost fuel. Installing a boiler that can handle a variety of fuels in the same boiler system
provides long-term energy security at predictable costs. Most of the flexible fuel fluidized bed
systems installed by EPI are operating on a different fuel mix than what they were originally
designed to handle. The ability to change fuels as fuel prices and availability change is a critical
component in keeping a plant profitable in an ever-changing energy market.
Recently, natural gas has been the high cost fuel, so comparisons can be made between gas and other
available fuels. Installing and operating a flexible fuel fired energy system today results in
significant cost savings over natural gas only systems. With natural gas at $9.70 per million BTU
delivered, and agricultural wastes at $0.81 per million BTU delivered, the fuel cost savings alone
for a 150,000 lb/hr boiler operated for one year would more than offset the equipment costs of an
EPI flexible fuel energy system. According to figure 1 below, this size of boiler can realize fuel cost
savings of $12 million per year. Other potential fuels could include waste products that ordinarily
command a tipping fee for disposal. Tipping fee fuels provide for even higher energy savings and
associated profit boosts for the owner as other industrial or municipal entities pay for the privilege
of providing fuel for plant operations. Refuse derived fuel, (RDF), and tires are shown as a sample
of tipping fee fuels but others may be available in the local area.
Manure Power
Panda Ethanol is nearing completion of what’s expected to be the first-ever manure fired ethanol plant in the world in small-town Texas.
The world’s first manure fired ethanol plant is expected to go online in the next two months. Not only will it be environmentally friendly but it will also save Panda Ethanol about $30M a year.
USDA Corn Stover study
Determine the amount of crop residues (e.g., corn stover, cover crop) that must remain on the land to maintain soil organic carbon (SOC) and sustain production. Through a series of experiments with factors including tillage and residue removal conducted under several environments, measure biomass production, grain yield, and change in soil organic carbon, and from these measurements estimate the amount of residue needed to maintain soil organic carbon and productivity. Click here to read the study which runs through 2011
UT Corn Stover Study
The 1,000 MT/day facilities appear to be
economically feasible if the price of
ethanol at the plant gate equals
$1.25/gallon. Even at $1.15 per gallon
at the plant gate, the 1,000 MT/day facilities
are feasible in some states. If a
subsidy was available to producers using
corn stover to produce ethanol so that
producers were guaranteed $1.35/gallon,
an estimated 136 plants would be constructed,
4,134 million gallons of ethanol
would be produced, $963 million in
gross income to agricultural producers
would occur, and an estimated economic
impact of $11 billion in rural economies
of the ten state region would be realized.
Renewable Energy LLC
Ethanex Energy Inc. said Monday that it has signed a definitive agreement to buy Midwest Renewable Energy LLC‘s ethanol plant in Sutherland, Neb., for $220 million in cash and Ethanex stock.
Ethanex (OTCBB: EHTE), based in Basehor, Kan., said Nov. 28 that it had signed a letter of intent to buy the plant and had put a hold on its efforts to finance the building of plants in Illinois and Northeast Kansas.
In a release Monday, Ethanex said several of its wholly owned subsidiaries will buy substantially all of the plant’s assets and assume certain liabilities in a series of three transactions, the final one of which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2009.
Ethanex COO Bryan Sherbacow said that the company is in a quiet period mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and that he can’t comment beyond the release. The company will make an SEC filing by the end of business Wednesday with more details about the proposed transaction, he said.
In Monday’s release, Ethanex said it first will buy the existing plant for $50 million in cash. The plant has a production capacity of 26 million gallons a year (MGY) and is in the midst of a two-phase expansion, each of which will add 42.5 MGY of production capacity, for a total of 111 MGY.
At each of the three closings, Ethanex will receive $2 million of inventory as part of the purchase price.
Ethanex plans to build and add its integrated fractionation platform to the plant, developed with Buhler Inc. The fractionation platform will start operation when Ethanex buys the first expansion phase of the Sutherland plant, estimated to occur in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Ethanex estimated that the fractionation platform will enable total plant capacity to be about 132 MGY when the project is complete. The plant also will produce high-protein distiller’s grains, food-grade crude corn oil and corn gluten feed.
After the first closing, Midwest will be responsible for continuing and completing the two-phase plant expansion. Ethanex will buy each of the two expansion phases for $60 million in cash and $25 million in Ethanex common stock at each of the second and third closings.
Ethanex said its ability to complete the purchase is contingent on it getting bridge financing of at least $1.5 million to keep operating into the second quarter and an unspecified amount of additional financing if the first closing is delayed.
Either company can terminate the agreement if Ethanex can’t get interim financing by March 5.
Ethanex estimated that it will need about $263 million, including a $20 million working capital line, to finance the three transactions.
If Ethanex can’t get sufficient financing for either the second or the third closings, the companies will operate the plant through a joint venture, with Ethanex’s investment discounted by 10 percent for failing to get sufficient financing.
MRE, led by plant CEO Randy Kramer, rebuilt the Sutherland plant and restored operations after the 2003 foreclosure. Within a few months, the plant was producing at the rate of 15 million gallons a year, at or above its projected capacity.
The company also soon paid nearly $400,000 in overdue property taxes to Lincoln County, which the former owners had left unpaid.
The first Sutherland ethanol plant was built in 1990, but a series of owners failed to make it operational, until Midwest Renewable bought the plant and Kramer took over.
One of the owners of the plant in the 1990s, the Delta-T corporation, became a business associate of Ethanex.
Paoli Co-op
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