Biofuels
White House rejects biomass as carbon neutral
By Robert Walton | July 2, 2015
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/white-house-rejects-biomass-as-carbon-neutral/401693/#.VaBBlDErH5c.facebook
Dive Brief:
The White House has issued a policy statement declaring its strong opposition to a House measure it believes would undermine President Obama’s ability to put environmental reforms in place, and specifically rejecting calls to declare biomass fuels as “carbon neutral.”
Several studies, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, have determined that biomass fuel does indeed contribute to greenhouse gases, though proponents say replenishing forests diminishes the impact.
HR 2822, an appropriations bill, would “drastically” underfund core Department of the Interior programs and the EPA’s operating budget, the White House said.
Dive Insight:
In a lengthy policy statement rejecting House Republican efforts at dismantling carbon reform, the White House has categorically rejected biomass fuels as carbon neutral, saying the idea flies in the face of sound science. HR 2822 would label biomass as a renewable source, at least in part because forests are being replaced quickly.
“The Administration objects to the bill’s representation of forest biomass as categorically ‘carbon-neutral,’” the White House said in the statement. “This language conflicts with existing EPA policies on biogenic CO2 and interferes with the position of States that do not apply the same policies to forest biomass as other renewable fuels like solar or wind.”
The Energy Collective has published analysis by Jonathan Lewis, an attorney and climate specialist with the Clean Air Task Force, who called the statement a wise decision.
Both the House bill, and a similar Senate measure, indicate burning trees in power plants does not boost CO2 levels in the atmosphere if growth rate of U.S. forests exceeds the rate at which they’re cut. “But scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that burning biomass does increase atmospheric CO2 concentrations,” Lewis writes.
“When a power plant burns woody biomass, it emits more CO2 per kilowatt generated than it would if it were burning coal instead,” he explained. “Biomass proponents argue that the CO2 is reabsorbed as the harvested forest regrows, but aside from being highly uncertain, the regrowth process takes many decades — during which time the additional CO2 emissions causes additional warming.”
Sierra BioFuels Plant
http://fulcrum-bioenergy.com/facilities/
Our first waste to fuels project, the Sierra BioFuels Plant, will consist of a Biorefinery where prepared MSW feedstock will be processed and converted into a low-carbon, renewable transportation fuel. Located in Storey County, Nevada, approximately 20 miles east of Reno where we have acquired and developed more than 19 acres of property at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, the Biorefinery has been designed to produce more than 10 million gallons per year of renewable FT syncrude from approximately 200,000 tons of prepared MSW feedstock that would otherwise be landfilled. This renewable FT syncrude will be upgraded and processed into a low-carbon jet fuel product.
Sierra will also include a Feedstock Processing Facility that will size, sort and process mixed MSW into a prepared MSW feedstock for use at the Biorefinery. Fulcrum has entered into 20-year MSW feedstock agreements with our waste service partners for the delivery of all of the MSW required for Sierra. The Feedstock Processing Facility will deploy a waste processing system that has been designed to extract high-value recyclable products and inorganic matter not suitable for processing from the raw MSW prior to preparing it for processing at the Biorefinery.
Fulcrum has completed front-end engineering and site preparation activities on Sierra and permits are in place to begin construction, which is expected to begin in late 2015. In May 2015, Fulcrum awarded a fixed-price engineering, procurement and construction contract to Abengoa. Abengoa will be responsible for constructing the Sierra Biorefinery under this ECP contract that guarantees the cost, schedule and performance of the Sierra Biorefinery. The Sierra BioFuels Plant is set to begin commercial operations in the third quarter of 2017.
United Airlines jet powered by farm waste, animal fats will be long-awaited milestone for biofuels
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/united-airlines-jet-powered-by-farm-waste-animal-fats-will-be-long-awaited-milestone-for-biofuels
United Airlines handout On Tuesday, United plans to announce a US$30-million investment in one of the largest producers of aviation biofuels, Fulcrum BioEnergy, the biggest investment so far by a domestic airline in the small but growing field of alternative fuels.
Sometime this summer, a United Airlines flight will take off from Los Angeles International Airport bound for San Francisco using fuel generated from farm waste and oils derived from animal fats.
For passengers, little will be different — the engines will still roar, the seats in economy will still be cramped — but for the airlines and the biofuels industry, the flight will represent a long-awaited milestone: The first time a domestic airline operates regular passenger flights using an alternative jet fuel.
For years, biofuels have been seen as an important part of the solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And airlines, with their concentration around airports and use of the same kind of fuel, have been seen as a promising customer in a biofuels industry that has struggled to gain traction.
Now that relationship is showing signs of taking off.
On Tuesday, United plans to announce a US$30-million investment in one of the largest producers of aviation biofuels, Fulcrum BioEnergy, the biggest investment so far by a domestic airline in the small but growing field of alternative fuels. (Cathay Pacific, based in Hong Kong, last year announced a smaller investment in Fulcrum.)
The quantities that United is planning to buy from Fulcrum constitute a small drop in its voluminous fuel consumption. Last year, United’s fleet consumed 3.9 billion gallons of fuel, at a cost of US$11.6-billion.
But airlines are increasingly under pressure to reduce carbon emissions. The Obama administration proposed this month that new limits on aviation emissions be developed, and the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, is expected to complete its own negotiations on limiting carbon pollution by February 2016.
“There is a significant role for biofuels within the aviation sector, specifically for reducing carbon emissions,” said Debbie Hammel, a senior resource specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who focuses on biofuel.
Airlines, in turn, say they have every reason to adapt, not only to reduce pollution but also to lower what is usually their biggest cost: jet fuel.
United Airlines handoutFulcrum said its technology can cut an airline’s carbon emissions by 80 percent compared with traditional jet fuel.
Fulcrum, a California-based company, has developed and certified a technology that turns municipal waste — household trash — into sustainable aviation fuel, a kind that can be blended in directly with traditional jet fuels. It is currently building a biofuel refinery in Nevada to open in 2017, and has plans for five more plants around the country.
Fulcrum said its technology can cut an airline’s carbon emissions by 80 percent compared with traditional jet fuel. “There is definitely a huge interest from airlines in this market,” said Angela Foster-Rice, United’s managing director for environmental affairs and sustainability.
United’s deal with Fulcrum is one of many that airlines have made in recent years.
Alaska Airlines aims to use biofuels at least at one of its airports by 2020. Southwest Airlines announced last year that it would purchase about 3 million gallons a year of jet fuel made from wood residues from Red Rock Biofuels. The first blend of this new fuel product, however, won’t be available until 2016.
Last year, British Airways joined with Solena Fuels to build a biofuel refinery near London’s Heathrow Airport, which will be completed by 2017.
United’s deal is the airline’s second major push toward alternative fuels. In 2013, the airline agreed to buy 15 million gallons of biofuels over three years with a California-based producer called AltAir Fuels, which makes biofuels out of nonedible natural oils and agricultural waste. It expects that the first 5 million gallons from AltAir will be delivered this summer at its Los Angeles International Airport hub to help power the flights to San Francisco.
For the first two weeks, four to five flights a day will carry a fuel mixture that is 30 percent biofuel and 70 percent traditional jet fuel; after that, the fuel will be blended into the overall supply, United said.
“The AltAir project serves as a catalyst intended to pave the way for the industry,” Foster-Rice said. By burning biofuel products like farm waste that have already absorbed carbon during their lifetime, jet engines avoid introducing into the atmosphere new carbon from a fossil fuel that has been locked away, underground, for millions of years.
And the airlines seem to have little choice. For example, airlines, unlike automakers, cannot turn to other options like electrification, said Hammel of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is why it is important, she added, that the fuels be sustainably produced. But despite the airlines’ interest, there are still substantial hurdles to the large-scale development of biofuels – most notably reasonable cost and reliable supplies.
“It remains quite difficult to get biofuels for aviation that is cost-effective, and to make sure the fuels will be available,” Foster-Rice said. The airline conducted its first test flight in 2009, with biofuels from algae.
Then there is the issue of where the biofuels companies get their raw material. E. James Macias, Fulcrum’s chief executive, said that the company had secured 20-year agreements from municipal waste management companies, including Waste Management, to provide stable supplies for the company’s projects.
He said Fulcrum could produce its biofuel for “a lot less than” US$1 a gallon. (United bought its jet fuel for US$2.11 a gallon, on average, in the first quarter, and said its deal with Fulcrum was competitive with the price of traditional jet fuel.)
“We are producing very large volumes at a very good price,” Macias said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, and neither company disclosed the size of United’s equity stake in Fulcrum.
Behind the deals is pressure on airlines to reduce carbon pollution. Although they account for about 2 percent of global carbon emissions, airlines are one of the fastest-growing sources of carbon pollution around the world.
Separately from the Obama administration’s recent push, commercial airlines have already voluntarily committed to limit the growth of their carbon emissions to 2 percent a year through 2020, then cap emission growth after that. By 2050, the industry hopes to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to half of their 2005 levels, according to the International Air Transport Association. But getting there will not be easy.
“That is why it is important to actually invest, and be willing to take on some of the risk,” Foster-Rice said, “and encourage the companies to really focus on jet fuel at a cost-competitive price.”
Singapore co-digests 40 tph food waste with sludge to yield more biogas
http://www.waste-management-world.com/articles/2015/06/singapore-co-digests-40-tph-food-waste-with-sludge-to-yield-more-biogas.html?cmpid=EnlWMW_WeeklyJune192015&eid=294835160&bid=1100875
Singapore water utility PUB has started the nation’s first project to produce biogas through co-digesting used water sludge and food waste.
In this project, used water sludge from the Ulu Pandan Water Reclamation Plant (WRP) will be mixed with food waste collected from the Clementi district and treated in a co-digestion demonstration facility.
Due to the “higher calorific value in food waste”, this new combined treatment of used water sludge and food waste has the potential to produce more biogas, PUB said in a statement.
The co-digestion plant can treat up to 40 tons of combined food waste and used water sludge. It will adopt the OmnivoreTM process patented by energy company Anaergia, which makes use of anaerobic digestion, a biological process that breaks down organic materials without requiring oxygen to produce biogas.
As part of the project, the National Environment Agency (NEA) will be conducting a district level pilot in Clementi for the collection of source-segregated food waste from various premises – such as educational institutions, hospitals and camps – for co-digestion at the demonstration plant. The demonstration plant is currently under construction and will be completed by September 2015.
If successful, the process could potentially be implemented at the future Tuas Water Reclamation Plant and NEA’s Integrated Waste Management Facility.
This collaboration is a result of an MOU signed during the Singapore International Water Week (SIWW) in 2014, in which both Anaergia and PUB agreed to explore potential research and technological collaboration, particularly in the domain of waste to energy.
Harry Seah, chief technology Officer, PUB, said: “This demonstration plant aims to validate the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of co-digestion implementation in Singapore. It will provide the opportunity for the water reclamation plants to generate more electricity for process usage. This could potentially allow the used water treatment plant to achieve energy self-sufficiency, which is using only as much energy as the treatment process itself generates.”
Andrew Benedek, Anaergia’s chairman and chief executive Officer, said: “There is no better place than Singapore nor a better utility than PUB to work together with to demonstrate Anaergia’s ground-breaking technologies designed to make water reclamation plants energy neutral.”
This project was supported with a co-funding grant from the Technology Pioneer Scheme, administered by the Singapore Economic Development Board on behalf of the Environment and Water Industry Programme Office.
Biogas solutions for methane abatement
AcidNews June 2015
Four Nordic projects for anaerobic digestion of manure show the potential for this methane abatement technique under varying conditions.
The Nordic Council of Ministers has published a report entitled “Nordic initiatives to abate methane emissions – A catalogue of best practices”. Five of the fourteen case studies are in the farming sector. Four of them are biogas projects.
Table: Comparison of the four projects.
Måbjerg Bioenergy plant in Denmark is one of the largest biogas facilities in the world. More than 140 suppliers provide the plant with manure slurry. Some of it is transported by pipeline, but most of the slurry gets there by road.
The biogas plant provides one heating plant and one central heating plant with gas that meets the heating needs of 5,000 homes and supplies 12,000–12,500 homes with electricity.
Lövsta is a medium-scale biogas plant run by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. It is fed with a manure mix from cattle, pig and poultry, as well as potatoes from a local farm and waste flour from a mill. The biogas it produces is used for electricity production and heating.
The cost of methane abatement is basically the same for Lövsta and Måbjerg, although the scale of production differs by a factor of ten.
The third plant, Brålanda, is actually a network of several plants connected to a network and a single refining facility. The capacity is quite similar to Lövsta. The refining of biogas allows it to be used as a vehicle fuel. The methane abatement cost is only slightly higher than for the previous two plants.
Most biogas plants that digest manure are designed for processing slurry (liquid manure). However in Sweden and in many other European countries, solid manure systems are still common in farming.
Sötåsen is a full-scale trial plant for digesting solid horse manure together with cattle slurry. The results showed that the plant was more efficient than when run on cattle slurry alone. Using straw as a bedding material gave a higher methane yield, but sawdust and granulated straw caused fewer technical problems in the system. The cost of methane abatement is about three times as high as for the other, larger, biogas projects in the report, but still less than half that of some similar-sized slurry only projects.
These four case studies show that there is potential for producing biogas from manure under varying conditions, when it comes to scale, substrate and topography.
Kajsa Lindqvist
Read about other methane abatement techniques in the full report: “Nordic initiatives to abate methane emissions – A catalogue of best practices”: http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:764201/FULLTEXT01.pdf
France: 100% renewables as cheap as 50% nuclear
AcidNews June 2015
The findings of a new report show that renewables can entirely cover French electricity needs by 2050 instead of a mix of nuclear, renewables and fossil fuels, which currently is the government plan.
A report by the French Environment and Energy Agency (Ademe), aided by the General Directorate for Energy and Climate, has concluded that supplying the nation’s electricity demand with renewables by 2050 would cost about the same as the plan currently favoured by the president and the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, which is to meet France’s power needs with 50 per cent nuclear, 40 per cent renewables and 10 per cent fossil fuels by 2050.
The potential for electricity generation from renewables in France by 2050 (1,268 TWh a year) is triple the nation’s projected electricity demand over that period (422 TWh). Reaching this goal would require demand management that lowers consumption by 14 per cent, despite a projected population increase of six million. A diversity of sources would be required to achieve a 100 per cent renewable electricity mix. The study projects a mix of 63 per cent offshore and onshore wind, 17 per cent solar, 13 per cent hydro, and 7 per cent thermal energy (including geothermal). The regions with the best renewable development potential are Aquitane, Brittany, MidiPyrénées, the Pays de la Loire, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, and Rhône-Alpes. The report assumes that pre-tax consumer electricity costs will rise about 30 per cent by mid-century.
Between 2019 and 2025, almost half of France’s 58 nuclear reactors will reach the 40-year lifespan for which they were designed. They will then need to apply for a licence extension, which requires upgrading to new technology, or will have to be decommissioned. Both options are costly.
Source: http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/080415/energie-le-rapport-cache-sur-une-france-100-renouvelable
http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2015/04/09/une-france-avec-100-d-electricite-renouvelable-pas-plus-couteux-que-le-nucleaire_4613278_3244.html
http://www.go100percent.org/cms/index.php?id=45&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=395&cHash=c49d899dffe50003b28e67bc8ffa6655
Gasification to turn 200,000 tpa municipal solid waste into jet fuel in Nevada
http://waste-management-world.com/a/gasification-to-turn-200-000-tpa-municipal-solid-waste-into-jet-fuel-in-nevada
Airline company Cathay Pacific could be one of the off-takers for the 10 million gallons of biofuel expected to be produced from the gasification of organic waste at a new project in Nevada between Abengoa and Fulcrum BioEnergy…
Spanish firm Abengoa has secured a $200 million contract from Fulcrum BioEnergy to build a biorefinery using gasification technology to convert 200,000 tons (181,437 tonnes) of municipal solid waste (MSW) into syncrude that will be upgraded into jet fuel.
To be located at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Centre, approximately 20 miles east of Reno, Nevada, the plant is expected to produce more than 10 million gallons (38 million litres) of biofuel per year.
Abengoa will deliver the plant using gasification technology from ThermoChem Recovery International, licensed to Fulcrum, as part of an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract.
The project is expected to start commercial operation in the third quarter of 2017.
Airline Cathay Pacific could be one of the fuel off-takers from the plant, following equity investment and a long-term fuel agreement with Fulcrum last year.
The process will begin with the gasification of organic material in the MSW feedstock to a synthesis gas (syngas) which consists primarily of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon dioxide. This syngas is purified and processed through the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process to produce a syncrude product which is then upgraded to jet fuel or diesel.
During the gasification process, the prepared MSW feedstock rapidly heats up upon entry into the steam-reforming gasifier and converts to syngas. A venturi scrubber captures and removes any entrained particulate and the syngas is further cooled in a packed gas cooler scrubber.
Cleaned syngas is them processed through an amine system to capture and remove sulfur and carbon dioxide. The syngas then enters the secondary gas clean-up section that contains compression to increase syngas to the pressure required by the FT process.
E. James Macias, president and chief executive officer at Fulcrum, said: “Abengoa has the skill and horsepower to take our design and technology development and successfully turn it into an operating commercial plant.”
In October last year Abengoa opened its second generation cellulosic ethanol plant in Hugoton, Kansas, which processes biomass feedstocks.