Can Biofuels Save SubSaharan Africa?

800 million people live in Sub-Saharan Africa and a third of them don’t have enough food. By 2050, an estimated 1.95 billion people will be trying to live off the land in that region. Even if everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa were only to be fed as inadequately as they are today, the region would need to more than triple its food production over the next 40 years. For everyone on the continent to have enough to eat, food production would have to more than quadruple. _NYT

SubSaharan Africa is desperately in need of industries which will provide both work for the people, and crucial international trade for hard currency. Africa's oil and minerals industries tend to be run by outsiders, with most of the profits going overseas, and settling in the Swiss accounts of top government officials and cronies.

According to many scientists, Africa is custom-made for the coming biofuels revolution.

Dr. Lynd and Dr. Woods suggest that a growing bioenergy economy can be the key to driving this agricultural boom. Land is relatively plentiful in Africa, they write, and land for crops and land for fuel will not necessarily be in direct competition.

On marginal lands that cannot support agriculture in any case, they see great potential for biofuel crops, which require less water and nutrients. Africa’s vast land resources could also make the continent a competitive exporter of biofuels, which could bring in money for the basic infrastructure needed to transport and process food, they argued. It could also provide an economic incentive for rehabilitating degraded lands, the thinking goes.

...In an interview, Dr. Woods pointed out that it’s “always easier to think of problems than it is to think of solutions.

“It’s thanks to the demonization of bioenergy,” he said, “that companies are afraid to potentially tarnish their public image by exploring the potential that bioenergy offers Africa.” _NYT

Most people who demonise biofuels have not bothered to keep up with research and development in the rapidly changing field. They tend to look at ten-year-old data on corn ethanol production, and base their calculations and projections upon obsolete technological systems. Such approaches typify the mediocrity rampant in modern academia, thanks to a politically correct dumbing down of academic standards, and a destructive tendency to abort healthy debates prematurely -- declaring winners on the basis of ideological criteria.

The fertile land and abundant workforce of Africa are already in place. There is a need for modern agricultural, business, and land management expertise. But the greatest need now, if African biofuels are to prosper, is to find a way around the massive infrastructure-of-corruption which rules in virtually every SS African state.

One danger is that corrupt leaders -- for a price -- will allow foreign companies to set up huge plantations which will strip the land, with no provision for future fertility and long-term production. Another danger is that farmers with government or NGO grants -- but without guidance or skills -- will try to grow crops which are not appropriate for their soil and climate.

The biofuels potential for SS Africa is large, and promising well into the future. If managed properly, the land of SS Africa can feed even larger numbers than at present, and provide them with a decent income at the same time.

Algae are Optimistic about the Future

More: A study from the Pacific Northwest National Lab outlines how the US could replace 17% of its petroleum imports with homegrown algal fuels.
Abstract from study

NewScientist
While human academics and analysts are all too quick to write off algae as serious contenders in the energy race, the algae themselves are completely optimistic about their own futures. Perhaps the algae know something that we do not know? Well, for one thing, algae is already a big business. For another, algae has a lot of potential for productive yield -- and is just getting started.

ALGAE are being put to work performing a unique double duty: cleaning up sewage waste while simultaneously producing biofuel.

All algae feast on phosphates and nitrogen-containing compounds, converting them to lipids. Some of these oils can be converted to biofuel, but only a few algal species produce lipids of the right type and quantity to be easily converted to fuel. In theory, though, algae are a perfect renewable fuel source. The main obstacle is that brewing the right nutrient mix can be prohibitively expensive.

Now, in work for a master's thesis, Eric Lannan, a mechanical engineer at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York and colleagues have identified three types of microalgae - Scenedesmus, Chlorella and Chlamydomonas - that efficiently convert nutrients to fuel on a diet of municipal waste water, while happily living in its harsh, salty environment. In a lab test, it took just three days for the algae to gobble up 99 per cent of the ammonia, 88 per cent of the nitrate and 99 per cent of the phosphates in a broth resembling that from a domestic sewage treatment plant, turning themselves into rich sources of fuel even as they purified the water.

"People had looked at algae to clean waste water, others to make biodiesel," Lannan says. "We're putting those ideas together." _NewScientist

The idea to use waste feedstocks for boosting algal production is not especially new, but it still needs to be demonstrated on a large scale. And the demonstration must show that the resulting algae can be used to produce valuable products to make the entire process self-sustaining and profitable.

Besides using wastewater, the use of high CO2 effluent from power plants and cement factories etc. would provide the carbon boost for rapid growth, which algae crave.

Algae do not need too much sunlight -- in fact too much sunlight can reduce yields for valuable algal products. Solazyme, for example, grows its algae in the dark by feeding them sugars from biomass for fuel. They claim an 80% lipid yield, which is quite high.

Artificially inflated prices for crude oil are driving a multitude of approaches to the production of alternative liquid fuels. Fuel from algae is but one of many alternative approaches to liquid fuels, and algal researchers are taking dozens of divergent approaches to create algal fuels. Other microbial fuels approaches appear equally promising at this time.

A lot of money is going into the effort to create microbial fuels and fuels from biomass. But the key discoveries will not necessarily come from the best-financed research labs. Time will tell.

Those who think "biofuel" means only maize ethanol, are going to be very surprised when they discover what is really happening.

Some Product Claims Go Beyond Whimsical

GreenTechMedia
Some of algal biofuels company BARD's claims are too whimsical to put in a headline or title. But in an atmosphere of mainstream doubt regarding the short to intermediate-term viability of algal fuels, these claims are too cute to ignore. Keep in mind these claims are for yields, not for profitability:

"Biofuel Advance Research and Development, LLC (BARD) has entered into an agreement with The Green Institute Inc. to construct and operate a commercial scale algae system pilot facility located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The planned facility will produce algae biomass to be used to produce biodiesel, and other commercial products. The pilot facility is estimated to produce 20,000,000 gallons of algae oil / biodiesel per acre per annum (!) [emphasis added]. Initially, the pilot facility will produce 43,070 gallons of algae oil / biodiesel per annum using 6 modules of photo-bioreactors covering 84 square feet." _Greentechmedia

Got that? The claim is for roughly 43,000 gallons of oil from 84 square feet over one year. Since there are roughly 43,000 square feet in an acre, they claim that they would have produced over 20,000,000 gallons of oil per year had they expanded their lab facility to 1 acre size.

Here is what an algae guru from NASA and other algae experts say about the claims:

According to John Benemann [an algae expert], with 'normal' systems we can expect at the very most 5,000 gal/acre/yr from open ponds. This either means that BARD is doing something very revolutionary or they are not telling us that their yield of 9+ million gal/acre will take them 1,886 years to produce! We have a real problem with light unless of course we use artificial light and then we have an energy problem or a photonic materials cost problem... These guys may have discovered a miracle organism, but I suspect they are selling snake oil rather than making algae oil.

...According to Bob Walsh, the CEO of Aurora Biofuels: "While it is hard to comment on another company's technology when you are not under the hood, I can say we believe the absolute theoretical maximum is 10,000 gal/acre/year. The white paper GreenFuel Technologies: A Case Study for Industrial Photosynthetic Energy Capture by Dr. Krassen Dimitrov, PhD, March 2007 goes through the calculations.

"We also believe engineering systems [photo bioreactors and their ilk] will not deliver huge increases in productivity. Engineering has to drive out the typical costs of algae production but cannot double production. Our most recent scientific progress, which decreased photo inhibition increased our capability from the 2,000 gal/acre/year level to consistently producing above 4,000 gal/acre/year. Our scientific team believes 6,000 gal/acre/year is an achievable target." _GTM

Clearly BARD is doing a great deal of extrapolation, and is likely supplementing its module's sunlight with artificial light, in addition to feeding its algae some very expensive algal food. Yield is irrelevant if the process is not economically viable.

But there are ways to fudge the yield. Imagine a tall rotating cylindrical building, with a 120 ft radius and a height of 4,000 feet. The algae are grown on panels (or bags, etc) on the cylinder's outer surface. Given an oil yield of 5,000 gal / acre / year on the cylinder's surface -- but with the building's footprint occupying roughly 1 acre of land -- an algal facility could theoretically produce about 20,000,000 gallons of oil per "acre" per year, using only sunlight for photons.

Perhaps this is what BARD has in mind? They will have to find a cheap way of rotating the building to provide uniform sunlight for all the pannels. Of course their are other ways of sharing the sunlight -- rotate only the outer surface, or slide the panels around in any number of elaborate patterns . . . Or if BARD locates the building on a hill surrounded with mirrors that bathed the panels with sunlight, they might get away with a smaller building. You can probably think of a novel approach yourself if you give it some thought. But keep it between yourself and your investors, for now.

It all depends upon what BARD's investors or government sponsors are willing to go for. The numbers provided are certainly impressive -- large enough to throw your blog host into a whimsical mood at the very least. So whimsical that I hesitate to pour that scotch and water, savouring the natural whimsy instead.

From an earlier Al Fin Energy article

Why Johnny Can't Predict the Future

All Images: BP Energy Outlook_via_BitToothEnergy
Although the human brain is thought to be a prediction engine, there are limits to the predictive precision and accuracy of even the best human brains and brain products, eg computer models. If the brain or model uses faulty assumptions and data, the output prediction will fail.

BP recently released its annual Energy Outlook report, which projects the world energy future to the year 2030. The report was parsed most helpfully by the Bit Tooth Energy blog, with several images extracted from pdf to html format.

A number of things about the imaged predictions tend to jump off the page:

• The extremely slow predicted growth for nuclear energy
• The rate of growth of energy utilisation for undeveloped countries
• The rate of expansion predicted for "biofuels"

...and a few other things best kept for future examination.

Notice the flat rate of growth for nuclear in the plot above. The best way to understand that prediction is to understand how much of a threat clean, cheap, and abundant nuclear energy poses to the petroleum industry overall. The rapid development of small modular reactors and molten salt reactors in particular, promise to make available huge quantities (trillions of barrels of oil equivalent) of bitumens and kerogens at a much lower cost than are presently feasible. Nuclear energy would also allow oil producing countries to export more oil which would otherwise be spent on cooling, desalination, and other electric power uses.

Notice the apparently rapid rise in biofuels supplies in the graph above. This prediction came as something of a surprise to many readers of the report, although Al Fin energy analysts believe that the prediction is a self-serving underestimate -- although not as blatant an underestimate as BP's nuclear power growth estimate.

Petroleum companies feel that they can live with ethanol as a fuel additive, and ethanol supply is mainly what is being predicted to rise in the graph above. Unfortunately for BP, by 2030 ethanol will be among the least of the biofuels. Ethanol is far inferior to butanol as a fermented biofuel. By 2020, methods for mass production of bio-butanol are very likely to begin to push bio-ethanol aside. In the same fashion, advanced hydro-treating of lipids along with Fischer-Tropsch fuels will produce far more valuable commercially available fuels than ethanol by 2020. Finally, microbial hydrocarbons should be ready to begin scaling up to industrial levels by 2020, with significant market impact by 2030.

So while BP predicts that biofuels as a whole will provide about 10% of liquid fuels by 2030, Al Fin analysts predict that (non-alcohol) microbial fuels alone will provide at least 10% of liquids by that date. Advanced hydrotreated biodiesels, F-T fuels, other advanced catalytic biofuels from bio-syngas and pyrolytis products, plus bio-alcohols will add at least another 10 to 20% of total liquids by 2030.

If you can imagine the impact that replacing 20% of petro-fuels by advanced renewable bio-fuels would have on world markets, you will have a small idea of how the established and highly centralised markets will be shaken by this simple trend alone. If you add to that the impacts from expanding nuclear, expanding shale oil & gas resources, and increasing use of coal to liquids and gas to liquids, and expansion of Canada's oil sands and Venzuela's heavy oils (after Chavez is ejected) -- your image will be closer to the truth, although still a likely underestimate of what is possible.

The US President is very strongly influenced by members of his administration with roots in the environmental movement. The environmental movement has been predicting catastrophic resource depletion, with associated economic ruin and mass human dieoff, for several decades now. Far wiser persons who have pointed out the fatal flaws in the environmentalist's predictive process have been largely ignored and scoffed at. And so we see US national energy and environmental policies being set and enforced by persons enmeshed in a system of thought that has invariably led to failed predictions of doom. The same is true for most European and Anglospheric nations.

If the developed world becomes hog-tied by regulations spurred by visions of doom and resource scarcity, we will fall into a self-fulfilling prophecy of energy starvation -- political peak oil. Political peak oil combined with the demographic contraction of Europeans, Koreans, Japanese, and other advanced cultures of high achievement -- the groups who have largely spurred technological improvement and the environmental improvements of the world from the mid 1900s onward -- the world will indeed be plunged into a serious state of turmoil.

Those optimistic predictions BP made regarding the rapid energy use growth in the undeveloped world, will surely fail in an environment of political peak oil, falling demographic global "smart fraction", and increased autocratic controls over most economic aspects of every person's life. The current president of the US is setting policies which lead unerringly toward that destination, and he is joined by most of the political leadership of the developed world.

Al Fin futurologists do not expect things to work out the way that the US revolutionary-in-chief intends. That is a good thing. Because there are actually revolutions which can lead the planet in a good direction. Revolutions which Mr. Obama will never be capable of comprehending.

It is not important that BP or any other institution or conglomerate be able to predict the future accurately, as a whole. It is only important that enough persons understand the mechanisms which drive innovation and human economic activity. Even if the masses continue to tend toward an Idiocracy, the competent cores of individuals with the better ideas will find ways to network and interact with each other.

Corn Cob Gasoline @ $1 / Gallon? GE Energy Wants In

GCC
GE Energy, a GE subsidiary, has jumped into the advanced biofuels race by throwing in $8 million with the startup CoolPlanetBiofuels. The startup claims to be able to produce a bio-gasoline from rough biomass for about $1 a gallon. Here is more from GreenCarCongress:

$8-million funding round for CoolPlanetBioFuels, a start-up company developing a technology that converts low-grade biomass into high-grade fuels, including gasoline, and carbon that can be sequestered. This venture capital investment was led by North Bridge Venture Partners, which had also led CoolPlanet’s financing round last year. Additional financial details were not disclosed. CoolPlanet’s research and development facilities are located in Camarillo, CA.

CoolPlanetBioFuels is developing modular thermal/mechanical processors which directly input raw biomass such as woodchips, crop residue, and algae and produces multiple distinct gas streams for catalytic upgrading to conventional fuel components.

In support of the biomass fractionator, the company is also developing a range of one-step catalytic conversion processes which mate with the fractionator’s output gas streams to produce products such as eBTX (high octane gasoline), synthetic diesel and proprietary ultra-high crop yield “super” fuels.

At the GoingGreen Silicon Valley 2010 conference in October, Mike Rocke, CoolPlanetBiofuels VP Business Development, said that the startup could produce carbon-neutral gasoline from biomass for less than $1.00/gallon US.

Biomass throughput time in the biomass fractionator is minutes, Rocke said earlier at a conference at Stanford. Two fractionators in a module can produce one million gallons of gasoline per year, with capex of $0.50/gallon to install—i.e., $0.10/gallon over a five year life. _GCC

The image above shows a comparison of product between conventional Shell 87 octane gasoline and the Cool Planet BioFuels drop-in product from biomass, by gas chromatograph.

Whether the information provided to investors is accurate or not, if the company is able to produce high quality drop-in bio-gasoline from biomass technology already developed, increasing efficiencies and yields, and decreasing costs, may make the product competitive within a matter of 5 or 10 years.

The problem with biomass is its low energy density, and its diffuse nature. It takes a lot of energy to gather biomass together, densify it for transport, and to transport large amounts to a central processing facility such as CoolPlanetBioFuels'. It is clear that those energy costs were not figured into the amounts quoted to investors.

Thermochemical production of biofuels via pyrolysis and gasification have a natural head start on microbial fuels -- due to prior work done on other feedstocks. But if the thermochemical approach is to achieve a foothold -- and critical scale-up -- it cannot dally about while people such as Craig Venter are working feverishly to genetically engineer microbes to achieve the same thing at far lower energy cost.

Cross-posted at Al Fin Energy

Scientists: Expect Massive Growth in Smart Biofuels Production

More than 80% of total agricultural production in the United States is used to feed animals, not human beings directly;

Our analysis shows that the US can produce very large amounts of biofuels, maintain domestic food supplies, continue our contribution to international food supplies, increase soil fertility, and significantly reduce GHGs. If so, then integrating biofuel production with animal feed production may also be a pathway available to many other countries. Resolving the apparent “food versus fuel” conflict seems to be more a matter of making the right choices rather than hard resource and technical constraints. If we so choose, we can quite readily adapt our agricultural system to produce food, animal feed, and sustainable biofuels.
—Dale et al

_gcc

GCC
Up until now, most people analysing US biofuels potential have failed to look at a realistic and integrated system of fuels and food. In real life -- unlike a typical computer model with excessively simplified and misleading assumptions -- new economies grow up to utilise by-products of new and existing processes and industries. When these new markets and economies are neglected by forecasters and modelers, their results become completely erroneous.

In their study, they analyzed only the 114 million ha of cropland used now to produce animal feed, corn ethanol, and exports. Cropland used for direct human consumption, forests, grassland pasture, and rangeland are not considered. Thus, they note, the analysis provides an example of what is technically feasible, not an upper limit on US biofuel production.

For the study, they considered two land-efficient animal feed technologies: ammonia fiber expansion (AFEX) pretreatment to produce highly digestible (by ruminants) cellulosic biomass and leaf protein concentrate (LPC) production.

During AFEX, concentrated ammonia is contacted with cellulosic biomass at moderate temperatures, resulting in greatly increased production of fermentable sugars by enzymatic hydrolysis. AFEX increases the digestibility of cellulosic biomass for ruminant animals while increasing protein production in the animal rumen due to the addition of ammonia-based byproducts.

Although extensive feed testing and commercial applications have not yet been introduced, AFEX-treated rice straw has been successfully included in dairy cattle diets, and tests with switchgrass and corn stover have shown increased cell wall digestibility when exposed to rumen microorganisms.

High-protein LPC products are generally produced by first pulping and then mechanically pressing fresh green plant matter. The resulting protein-rich juice is then coagulated and dried. The remaining fibrous material is depleted in protein, but is still suitable for animal feed or biofuel production.

Animal feeding operations can be adapted to these new feeds, thereby freeing land for biofuel production, according to the authors. They also considered aggressive double-cropping, thereby increasing the total biomass produced per ha. _GCC

Even the CO2 that is produced in fermentation reactions can be filtered and used in high-value operations -- such as oil well recovery, algae growth, food production, and a wide range of chemical processes.

Instead of seeing the CO2 as a net positive, third-rate scientists and analysts tend to foolishly and short-sightedly look at CO2 as a "dangerous pollutant" and a complete liability. This faulty perspective is most likely to be seen where politics unduely influences scientific funding and publishing.

Cross posted to Al Fin Energy