A greener future? Soy biodiesel in action.
Logic demands that European science policy should put its money on second-generation biofuels that use waste biomass, rather than pesticide-intensive and food-oriented agricultural crops.
But with the Common Agricultural Policy consuming around half of the EU budget, the choice will be mired in political treacle.
Perversely – for a body that is not immune to the siren call of big business – this appears to be particularly because large corporations are supporting second-generation biofuel technologies, discreetly developed in some of Europe’s pre-eminent research centres.
These technologies promise biofuels that are cheap and fully compatible with the existing transport infrastructure. But – critically – they offer only a tiny (some would say no) added value for farmers.Ethanol, today’s biofuel of choice, is considered competitive with oil prices at $70 per barrel in Europe, and $50 in the US.
But this assumption is based on the current low prices of agricultural feedstocks. What happen if the prices of maize, soya or wheat start skyrocketing with energy-driven demand? After all, world sugar prices have climbed 40 per cent this year as Brazil increases the amount of sugarcane output that goes into ethanol.
Not only that, some question the sustainability and the environmental cost of devoting more land to biofuel crops. According to Sofiproteol, a French agri-business that is currently preparing to produce diesel from canola, it would take the entire record harvest of 1994 to reach the EU target of 5.75 per cent of transport fuel coming from biofuel for France alone.
Are biofuels the saviour?
It is not the first time that an economy has been confronted the sudden disappearance of oil. After losing in El Alamein and Stalingrad during the 1939 – 1945 war, Germany found itself in this situation. The Allies anticipated was that the hundreds of Panzers and Messerschmitts of the Wehrmacht would be immobilised after the oil pipelines from the Middle East and the Caspian were disrupted. But it took more than two years to beat the German army. The reason? The Fischer-Tröpsch process.
Named after the two chemists who discovered it during the 1920s, the Fischer-Tröpsch process transforms any gasified carbon into diesel, or kerosene or even petrol. In 1944, Germany had built 25 refineries to turn its coal reserves into transport fuels. As soon as the allies discovered this they bombed those installations.
End of the story? Not exactly. The Nazi-era technology is staging a comeback.
In 1995 Bodo Wolff, a scientist at the Institute of Power Stations in Freiberg, in former East Germany, had the curious thought that if it works with coal or methane, the Fischer-Tröpsch synthesis should be able to use any source of purified carbon.
So why not a renewable source? Why not biomass? “At that time, people were laughing at him,” recalls Matthias Rudloff, an engineer at Choren, the start-up company spun-out from the institute. They are not laughing now.
Wollf and his colleagues developed a thermochemical process to pretreat any type of biomass in order to gasify it prior the Fischer-Tröpsch synthesis. The problem was to break the complex cellulose molecules - that give plants their rigidity - into carbon, hydrogen, and so on. They came up with a carbonisation process that uses partial oxidation – or low-temperature (500 oC) pyrolysis – to prepare the biomass for gasification, and linked it to a Fischer-Tröpsch reactor.
Apparently, this was convincing enough for Shell and Volkswagen to take equity shares in Choren, and to build a pilot facility of 15,000 tonnes this year.
Beyond that, Shell has big plans to extend Choren’s capacity, with five biorefineries in Germany producing a million tons per annum by 2012.
Serious business
Listening to the pitch of Commerzbank investment banker, Mario Messerchmidt, who is currently raising half a billion euros for this project, it is clear Choren means serious business.
However, the Choren technology is far from perfect. Clotting of the biomass prior to gasification remains an unsolved problem.
More critically perhaps, according to Rudloff, the yield of the end-to-end process is around 50 per cent. In other word, the plant consumes roughly half of its energy output in its own operation, mostly during the heat pretreatment of the biomass.
This raises a logistical problem. To be economic, the pretreated biomass should be processed in situ, which means generally not near existing fuel infrastructures.
Choren’s pioneering work has triggered of wave of interest in the field. At ECN (Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands), Bram van der Drift and colleagues are working on a thermochemical process known as torrefaction. In this case, biomass is roasted at 250/300 centigrade. The resulting powder is not only ready to be gasified, but also hydrophobic, easy to turn into pellets for transporting, and has properties uncannily close to those of coal.
“It can be used in the coal gasifier of existing Fischer-Tröpsch facilities like those in South Africa, or planned installations in the United States or China,” explains van der Drift.
Meanwhile, in Forschungzentrum Karlsruhe, west Germany, Edmund Henrich and his colleagues are developing another biomass pretreatment process in which the material is liquefied to form a slurry. According to Henrich, “The density of the slurry is ten times that of straw and you can pump it into the gasifier.” The pyrolysis-based process, developed in collaboration with the engineering company Lurgi, produces slurry that is compatible with the new gasification process of an other industrial partner, Future Energy GmbH.
And once again showing the interest large companies are taking in biomass to diesel technologies, Future Energy was acquired a week ago by Siemens.
Enormous interest
Large corporations are not trumpeting it, but their interest in developing renewable feedstocks that can drive the Fischer-Tröpsch process is enormous.
Shell, Exxon and the South African oil company Sasol favor it, not only because they control part of the licensing of Fischer-Tröpsch synthesis, but because ersatz diesel is so close to the real thing it can replace it like-for-like. Instead of a blend of 5 per cent for ethanol, or around 30 per cent for first generation biodiesels, Fischer-Tröpsch diesel can be blended at 100 per cent in the distribution chain and can also be cracked for petrochemical purposes.
But this influential support does not mean the European Union will rally behind second-generation biofuels obtained with Fischer-Tröpsch synthesis.
Enzyme and seed producers are engaged in biotechnology research to break cellulose, meaning all plants, not just crop plants, could be used to produce ethanol. Some countries – notably France – which are under pressure over farming subsidies may be happy to see agricultural feedstock prices rising because of competition between food and energy uses. Last December higher sugar prices enabled the European Union to dismantle its protective sugar regime without incurring the wrath of sugar beet producers.
Seen in this light, 8 June in Brussels looks set to be the start of a furious Battle of the Biofuels.
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