 |
The 2011 harvest has been completed and saw farrmers around Emmetsburg, Iowa collect 61,000 bone-dry tons of corn cobs and high cut material. POET Regional Biomass Coordinator Adam Wirt was in Fort Dodge, Iowa yesterday for the Farm News Ag Show to update local farmers on our progress.
As you can see from this harvest photo taken near Emmetsburg, there is still plenty of cover on the field after the crop residue is baled. The amount of stover in those fields ensures that the harvest of crop residue can be sustainable.
Once BCAP is straightened out, these bales will be delivered to the stack yard in Emmetsburg and many will end up in South Dakota where they will be converted to cellulosic ethanol in our pilot plant or power for POET Biorefining - Chancellor. Another harvest brings us that much closer to our goal of producing cellulosic ethanol at the commercial scale.
During Trade Talk at the annual convention of the National Association of Farm Broadcasters (NAFB), POET Founder & CEO Jeff Broin talked with several farm broadcasters. He's pictured here in one of those many interviews. 
One of those interviews was with Jody Heemstra of KWAT Radio in Watertown, S.D. Domestic Fuel got a copy of the seven minute interview and posted it on their blog.
Broin talked about the recently completed corn corn crop residue harvest said that POET has made "tremendous strides" developing commercial cellulosic ethanol. He also talked about how POET will integrate cellulosic ethanol production with its existing corn ethanol plants and the benefits that will bring to both processes.
When it comes to biofuels, there are three things in which I believe: First, biomass for biofuels has enormous potential as a primary piece of our nation’s energy program. Second, corn crop residue is one of the best types of biomass for biofuel production—it’s available in large quantities. And thirdly, corn crop residue can be—and must be—harvested in environmentally sustainable ways.
So, I was gratified to learn that officials in the State of Wisconsin share my beliefs. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the University of Wisconsin, and their partners recently published the Wisconsin Sustainable Planting and Harvesting Guidelines for Nonforest Biomass.
The report, which details voluntary guidelines for sustainable biomass planting and harvesting, states that corn stover makes up more than half of all crop residues in the US and is considered the most available for bioenergy purposes.
Based on current scientific knowledge vetted through scientific review and public comments, the report says, “without specific field-based assessment (e.g. a conservation plan), remove only 25% of stover to maintain soil organic carbon levels and structural stability.” Depending on soil type, even more corn crop reside can be removed while maintaining good soil conditions.
This is great news! Farmers participating in POET Project LIBERTY are right in step, harvesting about 1 bone dry ton of corn crop residue per acre, which is about 25% of the available stover per acre in the Emmetsburg, Iowa area.
POET encourages participating farmers to practice good conservation planning and follow the guidelines of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Again, Wisconsin is in alignment. Its report says that site-specific stubble height, residual cover and stover removal rates should be determined using soil conservation planning tools available from the USDA NRCS.
POET’s biomass harvest guidelines have been supported by multiple years of research conducted by Iowa State University. We now welcome Wisconsin’s support! My beliefs are solid.
The 2011 biomass harvest is underway around Emmetsburg, Iowa.
Farmers there baled 56,000 tons of corn cobs, leaves, husk and some stalk last season, and this year they’ll bring even more into POET’s 22-acre stack yard at the site of Project LIBERTY. I thought I’d share some pictures from the harvest. Check them all out on our Flickr page.
 
Yesterday’s report from the National Research Council on cellulosic ethanol production devotes about 100 pages to the environmental effects of cellulosic ethanol.
 To sum up the findings: There are right and wrong ways to produce cellulosic ethanol, and the environmental benefits depend on which path you choose.
This is not a revelation. POET has always endorsed a cautious approach to commercialization. It’s amusing that we get questions one day asking “Are you moving too quickly to understand the environmental effects?” and the next “Why is cellulosic ethanol taking so long to commercialize?”
POET’s Project LIBERTY will use corn cobs, leaves, husk, and stalk to produce cellulosic ethanol, so I paid more attention to those sections dealing with POET’s process. One such section asserts:
“Corn stover, cereal straw, and other crop residues draw on existing crops so that their use as a bioenergy feedstock under best management practices might not contribute much additional GHG emissions. However, overharvesting of crop residues could result in additional need for agrichemical inputs and the loss of soil organic matter, which is critical for maintaining soil structure and water retention capacity and for improving nutrient cycling and other soil processes.”
POET agrees completely. This material is not “crop waste,” as some would assert. Stover plays a valuable role in soil health, and that’s something that POET is carefully monitoring through work with USDA-ARS and Iowa State University. This fall marks the fourth year of an ongoing study into effects of stover harvesting on soil in the Emmetsburg, Iowa area. This is information we share with the public. Download the latest results here.
POET contracts with farmers for no more than 20-25 percent of the above-ground biomass, which is on the low end of what that data shows is available for use. There are a few ways to ensure this limit is followed:
- Farmers want to protect their livelihood, the grain harvest, so they don’t want to take too much.
- POET representatives visit the fields of participating farmers during the harvest to make sure things are going as planned.
- To take more biomass, the harvest equipment is set lower to the ground, picking up extra dirt, rocks, and other debris. This additional material would cause the biomass to be outside of POET’s quality standards.
The pace moving from lab scale to pilot scale to commercial construction has been steady, with many checkpoints along the way. No one’s rushing into this without assessing the impacts.
A couple other points I want to address from the study:
1. Economics: There’s been a big to-do about the study’s conclusion that there’s a significant “price gap” between what companies will pay for biomass and what farmers will accept in order to harvest it.
We don’t go into specifics on our arrangements with farmers, because the biomass market is still developing. I will say this: Their assumptions are not consistent with the actual first-hand experience of POET signing contracts and working with farmers.
2. The report asserts that corn stover will be an early feedstock and that if done properly, it is positive for the environment. It then notes that the entire 16 billion gallons in the Renewable Fuel Standard can’t be met with stover alone.
Maybe I missed it, but it seems to me that the report doesn’t make clear just how much of that 16 billion gallons could come from crop residue. I think that’s an important point to note.
POET’s model has a cellulosic ethanol plant sited next to a grain-based ethanol plant. The cellulosic ethanol plant is half the size of the adjacent facility.
That means POET’s model, if applied across the industry could do roughly 6 or 7 billion gallons of the 16 billion gallons. That’s pretty significant, and from some of the reports I’ve seen, that number is on the low end of the potential.
You’ve likely heard rebuttals to today’s National Research Council report questioning the viability of large-scale cellulosic ethanol production, the most prevalent being that it relies on an enormous number of assumptions. The text itself asserts “… with all the expertise available to us, our clearest conclusion is that there is  very high uncertainty in the impacts we were trying to estimate.”
However, there are points with which most in the cellulosic ethanol industry agree. These issues outline a path toward creating a viable and sustainable cellulosic ethanol industry.
I haven’t gotten through all 650 pages of the report yet, but a couple points stand out so far:
1. Inconsistent public policy is a barrier to the cellulosic ethanol industry.
This is a point that the ethanol industry has long maintained, and the report confirmed it, noting the 2008 request by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to waive the Renewable Fuel Standard.
“EPA denied that request, but economic dislocation
waivers are still possible. Undoubtedly, uncertainty of enforcement of the [Renewable Fuel Standard] is an impediment for private-sector investment.”
It goes on to point out the cellulosic ethanol tax credit is set to expire in 2012 and the Biomass Crop Assistance Program’s future is uncertain.
Producers and investors must know the lay of the land before they can move forward in this effort. If policies keep changing, there’s no confidence that what’s true today will be true tomorrow. The same is true for farmers looking to invest in the machinery to harvest biomass.
POET CEO Jeff Broin made this same point to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry at a March 30 hearing.
"Investors look at the long-term prospects of a project before getting involved, and uncertainty from Washington adds an element of risk to those projects," he said.
2. Lack of fueling infrastructure limits ethanol’s ability to enter the fuel supply at higher blend levels.
This has been an ethanol industry point for years: We have hit the “blend wall,” the point at which we’re blending all the ethanol at E10 that can legally be used in today’s vehicles. E15 buys the industry time to build out infrastructure, but as the report asserts:
“… even with a blend limit of 15 percent, the blend wall will be reached again around 2014. Thus, the blend wall is a major barrier for increasing ethanol production beyond about 19 billion gallons even if the blend limit is 15 percent.”
To proceed, we need a large effort to produce more Flex Fuel Vehicles and more Flex Pumps, which can dispense different ethanol blends such as E10, E30, E50, or E85. If the consumer can choose any blend, the oil industry will lose its strangle-hold on the economy.
“It would require large and rapid investments in fuel dispensers for E85 plus millions of flex-fuel vehicles produced and sold each year.”
There are about 8 million Flex Fuel vehicles on the road today, and both GM and Ford have committed to making half the new cars they sell in 2012 Flex Fuel. These efforts as well as efforts to get more Flex Pumps in stations across the U.S. must increase. The longer we wait, the longer it will take to break our reliance on oil.
These points and others are not a reason to stop cellulosic ethanol commercialization efforts. Rather, they clarify work that still needs to get done and stress the importance of work that is getting done to address these needs.
I’m working on another post addressing POET’s process for cellulosic ethanol in the context of this report. Look for that tomorrow and maybe more depending on how much of this I can get through.
If you've been reading this blog, you know that we've collected a lot corn crop residue around Emmetsburg, Iowa over the past couple of years. Some of it has been going to our pilot plant in Scotland, S.D.
However, the pilot plant has a capacity to process one ton per day and last fall we collected 56,000 tons. Do the math and you'll discover that it would take more than 150 years for the pilot plant to process all of that corn crop residue.
That's why much of the residue has been making it's way to our waste-powered ethanol plant in Chancellor, S.D. At POET Biorefining - Chancellor, we have a solid fuel boiler that produces steam for the plant by burning biomass in a 22' x 16' x 65' combustion chamber.
But before it comes to Chancellor, the bales have to be ground up and that's where a new partnership with the Sioux Falls landfill comes into play. It was in the long-term plans for the landfill to purchase a grinder and the revenue from grinding our corn crop residue bales allowed them to speed up the purchase. It was the subject of a story by KELO-TV, the local CBS affiliate:
You can see pictures of the grinder on our Flickr Page or watch video of it in action on POET TV.
I’m listening right now to the free webcast of the Department of Energy’s Biomass 2011: Replace the Whole Barrel, Supply the Whole Market, which is taking place in Washington, D.C. Leaders from every part of the industry are on-hand, as are many of the people in government who influence the industry most. It’s a two-day conference, and tomorrow morning POET Project LIBERTY Director Jim Sturdevant will take part in the Opening Plenary, “Industry Perspectives on Bioenergy.” He’ll go through what Project LIBERTY is, what has been accomplished, what remains to be done, and some of the benefits (environmental, economic, etc.). His session starts at 8:30 a.m. EST. If you’d like to hear it live, sign up for Biomass 2011 here.
How POET is Making Sustainable Cellulosic Ethanol
I was part of the Bioenergy Symposium, a full afternoon of talks and a panel discussion on the environmental aspects of bioenergy projects and policies. I highlighted Project LIBERTY’s integration with a POET corn-based ethanol plant, its anticipated greenhouse gas emissions relative to those from gasoline production, the conservative approach to biomass harvesting, the soil study by Iowa State University, and work by northwest Iowa farmers using BCAP to develop conservation plans with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
The audience was engaged: I fielded about 20 questions. Many comments were related to biomass harvesting and the soil study, and nearly all were supportive. One commenter said POET should be clear the soil research results are valid only for the soil type studied. He also said a three-year study is too short to draw conclusions about impacts of stover removal on soil carbon.
I agree! I explained to the audience that ISU’s research in the Emmetsburg, Iowa area is consistent with research done in other part of the country. ISU’s soils research will continue.
Other presenters in this session were Paul Argyropoulos, EPA (he gave an overview of RFS2); John Heissenbuttel, Co-chair of the Council on Sustainable Biomass Production (a new group trying to get a foothold with biomass stakeholders); Don Tyler, University of Tennessee (he spoke about switchgrass harvesting); and Brian Baldwin, Mississippi State University (he gave a broad overview of energy crops in the southeast U.S.) Many presenters after me said they liked what they heard about POET’s efforts. One said, “It is clear that POET is deeply concerned about the sustainability of their cellulosic ethanol process.”
Later I served on a panel with a subset of these presenters, and we fielded questions about the potential of biomass-based bioenergy.
Last week, I attended a public tour of the EcoSun Prairie Farm near Colman, S.D. The farm was established in 2008 to demonstrate the potential economic and ecological benefits of establishing grass-based farms in the former tall grass prairie region of central North America. 
During the public tour, which was shortened by rain earlier in the day and the heat that followed, we heard from several members of the EcoSun Board who talked about the revenue streams they've established from grass-finished beef and prairie grass seed. They also talked about potential future revenue sources for the working grass farm, like carbon credits and selling biomass for cellulosic ethanol.
It's this potential to use native prairie grasses for biofuels production that has drawn POET's interest. As was mentioned in today's front page story in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, we've talked to EcoSun about the potential for a partnership.
For the most part, our research lab is through the early phase of research and developing corn crop residues for cellulosic ethanol (although the research will never really end) and is now beginning to look at what the next sources of biomass will be for cellulosic ethanol. We see a lot of promise and potential in the native prairie grasses like they grow at the EcoSun Farm. Pictured here is a stand of Sunburst Switchgrass. To see more photos, visit our Flickr page.
We'll have more to say about this at the upcoming America's Grasslands Conference that is being held in Sioux Falls, S.D. in August. You can learn more about the EcoSun Prairie Farm (and support their work) by watching Grass Roots: The Prairie Farm Story.
|
 |
