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Thu 25 Sep, 2003 10:42 am
Fuel from foul
Using food and crop residues, a new breed of entrepreneur looks to cut waste and create energy
By Laurent Belsie and Mary Wiltenburg | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
ST. LOUIS AND BOSTON – Forget Iraq, OPEC, and that Alaskan wildlife refuge for the moment. Some of the clues to the world's energy future may lie on your dinner plate. The plants that grew the rice you're eating also produce rice straw, which is mostly burned today but could be turned into fuel. Corn already produces ethanol, but stalks left in the field have energy potential. And all the country's millions of pounds of leftover chicken and turkey bones could produce millions of barrels of crude oil. The turkey experiment is already under way.
.For decades, scientists have worked to turn trash into energy: wood into gasoline and municipal waste into industrial fuel. Some ventures worked; others proved too expensive or unwieldy. Now, a new generation of entrepreneurs is trying to turn the nation's muck into black gold. Armed with better technology and understanding, they're making promising starts.
These conversions, if done correctly, could not only bolster the United States' energy reserves, they could cut its leading sources of waste, starting with the nation's farms.
"We're held hostage by troubles in Venezuela, by uncertainty in Kuwait," says Brian Appel, CEO of Changing World Technologies (CWT), a New York environmental technology company. "Let's take advantage of all this waste and make a product we really need."
CWT has made perhaps the biggest splash by teaming up with food production giant ConAgra Foods Inc. Later this month CWT's $25 million turkey-to-oil processor will start turning wastes from ConAgra's Carthage, Mo., plant into light crude oil and other products.
Jeff Tester, a chemical engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, has visited a CWT pilot plant in Philadelphia and is intrigued by the technology's potential. "This is a good example of a win-win situation," he says. "It's not necessarily the holy grail, but it's an innovative idea."
Using a process called thermal depolymerization, which breaks down organic compounds with water and heat, CWT can make fuel from fowl - or corn waste or municipal sludge, for that matter. The Carthage plant, which will process about 200 tons of animal waste daily, is expected to pump out some 7.6 million gallons of bio-derived oil in its first year.
That's tiny - about the size of a Texas wildcatter's well - even compared to the 2.7 billion gallons of ethanol the US expects to produce this year, largely from corn. But that industry receives government subsidies - something Mr. Appel doesn't receive. At the moment, it costs $15 per barrel to produce oil from the Missouri turkey plant, and costs could drop below $10 as more plants go up, he says. That would put his reprocessed oil on par with conventional drilling costs, roughly between $5 and $13 a barrel.
"Right now the margins are tight," Appel says. "If we really want to reduce [US] dependence on [foreign] oil, we need help to grow more quickly."
The company is also negotiating contracts to recycle municipal sludge, solid waste, and other materials.
Meanwhile, DDS Technologies, a European environmental technology company, is bringing another new waste-recycling system to the US. Already in use by several major Italian companies, the process reuses all the elements of the material it recycles, making it much more efficient than most primary food processors.
"When I look at some of the processes we use to make foods, they're archaic," says the company's COO Kerin Franklin. "The process for making soy milk, it must have been invented by a couple of hippies 20 years ago. You wind up throwing a lot away."
DDS takes all that trash and breaks it down into small enough bits to render it useful on many levels. Take pomace, the stuff left over when oranges and other fruit are squeezed for juice. Currently, fruit processors pay roughly $40 a ton to other companies to haul away the pomace, which they turn into livestock feed. DDS can take the same waste and harvest pectin (used in yogurt, gelatin, marshmallows, and fruit snacks), flavor substitutes (used in baking and animal feed), fiber (used in cosmetics production), and essential oil of orange (used as a flavoring). "Our goal is zero left over,"Ms. Franklin says. "The entire waste stream is utilized."
The US branch of DDS, based in Boca Raton, Fla., hopes to start making use of its innovative air-pressure technology later this year. By accelerating particles of matter then suddenly stopping them, DDS can separate their components much the way a speeding motorcycle, suddenly stopped, would send first the rider's helmet, then the rider, then the bike itself flying through the air.
The company is already working with a major US cityto handle its municipal sludge, and has just signed a 10-year joint venture with biomass-to-ethanol company Xethanol to convert sewage into the sugars used in ethanol production. Because DDS's process uses air and not physical contact with the material, Franklin says, it can assure a higher level of purity than other systems.
While reprocessing agricultural waste has huge potential, no one knows how huge. In a Foreign Affairs article earlier this year, Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, and two coauthors estimated that available agricultural waste could produce 10 times the ethanol that corn does today. But it's unlikely all of it will be reused for energy. Every year some of it gets plowed under, some gets burned, some gets thrown away. Much of the rest - 45 million tons, enough to cover the entire Washington, D.C., area in 17 inches of muck, according to the American Feed Industry Association - is reprocessed into animal feed.
Clearly, if environmental rules continue to stiffen, farmers will be casting about for new solutions. For example: federal regulations ban the burning of rice straw (the detritus left over after harvest) by mid-decade. So the industry is looking for ways to reuse the straw, including ways to process it into energy. Entrepreneurial firms such as CWT and DDS see potential. But some analysts believe such efforts will require federal help to blossom. "There's the potential to accelerate this much, much faster, if this country applies the same sort of aggressive approach we've taken to finding oil," says Dr. Tester of MIT. "But you have to learn by doing it."
We the US is expending vast amounts of capital in the development of tools of war and even more on our efforts in the Middle East. It would seem to me that would be made unnecessary if we could make those nations irrelevant through the development of alternate forms of energy. Imagine if the billions now being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq had been spent on research and development of alternate sources of energy. By this time we in all likelihood would have been in good measure energy independent and the funds needed to subsidize terrorist activities would have been cut off.
Am I being too simplistic? The congress is working on energy legislation. They would probably be more productive working at digging ditches.
I have a brother who works for one of the major oil companies. He was back east this summer and was talking about this. They are watching it closely. If it works there may be major money for this.
WORLD
OPEC cuts its oil output by 3.5 percent
Posted: Thursday, September 25, 8:09am EDT
Fearing a coming decrease in demand, OPEC lowered its oil output ceiling by 3.5 percent in a surprise pre-emptive move that caused crude futures to surge more than $1 a barrel. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries defied expectations on Wednesday and lowered its output ceiling by 900,000 barrels a day to 24.5 million barrels starting in November. The cut startled the market, where oil futures jumped more than $1 a barrel. OPEC defended its decision as an effort to keep prices from plunging when demand slackens early next year. Some analysts also said the cut would have little impact on the prices consumers pay for heating oil and gasoline. OPEC reached the agreement at its Vienna headquarters in a meeting that included Iraq for the first time since the toppling of Saddam Hussein and despite earlier objections from Venezuela. Iraq is a founding member of OPEC, which pumps about a third of the world's crude.
Have you visited the friendly gas perveyor lately and had sticker shock or gotten any inkling of what it will cost to heat the house this winter.
It may take a second mortgage to pay this years bills.
I think such an idea has a much better chance of being implemented than something like solar or wind power. A corporation can make moves to corner the market, or share control of the market with a cartel, in the bones of fowl, or the detritus of fields. They can't do that with sunshine or the wind, which is why no energy company is willing to help fund the development of those energy sources. They might fund the development of these sources because of a better opportunity for market control.
Setanta
Rather than pissing away billions on the war effort and military incursions the government should spend it on subsidizing development of alternate energy sources. In the long run it will eliminate much of the expenditures for a war effort. And further it will make us energy independent, aid in lessening the balance of payment deficit, add jobs to the American economy and starve the terrorist organization.
I agree wholeheartedly with that idea, AU. However, the crew that Enron, Halliburton, et al bought for the White House might not see it that way. I think we're likely not see any such funding so long as the energy industry spends so heavily on political campaigns.
Santanta
It is a sad commentary. The American public votes them into office and big industry buys them. It does not matter whether they be Democrat or Republican they are all up for sale.
There is also the minor problem in that you'll not only be "starving the terrorists" but starving the entire populations of the oil producing countries. Just eliminating our dependence on foreign energy isn't enough. The end solution to the entwined problem has to leave those countries (particulalrly in the mid-east..) with something to survive off of.
I'm not saying we shouldn't chase after energy independence. We just ned to be aware of the full implications of doing it.
Fishin
How much of that wealth trickles down to the people of those nations at the present time? In addition can we continue to place the worlds economy in the hands of the oil rich countries? They could by limiting production bring the worlds economy to it's knees. Gasoline was selling for $2.15 a gallon at some of the stations in NY. And as I said previously just wait until the bills for keeping warm this winter arrive.
The Energy Bill Gets Worse
Published: September 29, 2003
This country needs a purposeful long-term energy strategy that reduces its dependence on foreign oil and deals with climate change and all the other air-quality issues that are directly related to the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal. So how has Congress chosen to develop such a strategy? By passing two mediocre energy bills and then handing the task of reconciling them to Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Billy Tauzin, both reliable allies of the fossil fuel industry (although Mr. Domenici is also a big fan of nuclear power) and neither a visionary thinker. Since Labor Day, these two veteran deal makers have been cherry-picking provisions they like, discarding those they don't and for good measure infuriating their colleagues by adding new items of their own.
This process is undemocratic even by Congress's clubby standards. Even worse is the almost certain outcome: a tired compendium of tax breaks and subsidies for energy producers leavened by a few gestures toward energy efficiency. The best evidence of Congress's bias in favor of production as opposed to conservation is the fact that the legislation would authorize oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while doing nothing to improve the fuel economy of automobiles and light trucks — a more certain and less destructive path to both energy independence and cleaner air.
Indeed, we can think of only a handful of positive provisions in these bills. One — a Senate proposal that Mr. Tauzin is trying to kill — would require power plants to generate 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. A second would open up the huge natural gas reserves on Alaska's North Slope, where oil drilling already occurs. Exploiting these reserves would obviate the need to go poking around in ecologically sensitive areas elsewhere, which the administration seems determined to do. A third provision would devote serious money to promising ways of cleaning up coal, the dirtiest but most plentiful of fossil fuels.
None of this, however, propels the country toward a new energy future. What America needs, and what the bill comes nowhere near providing, is a game-changer: a huge effort to help Detroit build entire fleets of fuel-efficient vehicles using available technology, for instance, or an equally ambitious program to convert cellulose to fuel — not just corn but grasses, wood and agricultural wastes of all kinds — in quantities large enough to make a real dent in oil imports.
Instead, Congress insists on thinking small, settling for timid research programs and unnecessary tax breaks for established industries that, as it happens, provide lots of campaign money. Since the Democrats also benefit from this money, they are unlikely to do the honorable thing, which is to filibuster this bill into extinction.
Your congress in action or how not to solve a problem.
au1929 wrote:Fishin
How much of that wealth trickles down to the people of those nations at the present time?
Quite a bit actually - in most of the mid-east at least. Oil revenues in those countries pay for every government system they have (i.e. health care, education, etc..). In Saudi Arabia for example, there are no personal income taxes and no property taxes for citizens. 75% of all of Saudi's tax revenue comes from oil. Saudi citizens get a government paid dowery when they marry, free housing, and the government hands out cars to citizens like crazy.
Quote:In addition can we continue to place the worlds economy in the hands of the oil rich countries? They could by limiting production bring the worlds economy to it's knees. Gasoline was selling for $2.15 a gallon at some of the stations in NY. And as I said previously just wait until the bills for keeping warm this winter arrive.
I have never suggested we should allow the oil-rich to control anyone/anything. I do think it would be foolish however, to cut the only real source of income out for large portions of the world without thinking about how those nations are going to replace the revenues lost by reduced oil sales. I had started a thread some months back on a topic very similar to this one covering "Bio-Diesel" - the creation of a diesel fuel substitute made from used vegetable oil as a very positive inovation.
Fishin
I know how this will come across but I will be brutally honest. My concern is for the welfare of the US and it's citizens. I do not appreciate the ability of an oil rich nation to economically blackmail the US. I can still remember waiting in long gasoline lines.
Do you think the citizens and governments of other nations feel any differently?
You don't think an oil-rich nation should be able to blackmail the US. Ok, I'd agree with that.
Should the US be able to blackmail other nations? That is the net effect of what we'd be doing if we just ran off on our own way.
Fishin
Any discovery or new process developed in the US would be available to the rest of the world.
Commentary > The Monitor's View
from the October 02, 2003 edition
Importing Natural Gas
The US is experiencing the most severe natural-gas shortage in a quarter-century, driven largely by an industry rush to burn a fuel that's cleaner than oil or coal. Prices have nearly doubled this year. And the supply-demand gap could widen over the next 20 years.
Even though plenty of natural gas lies under US soil (an estimated 213 trillion cubic feet, about a 10-year supply), much of it is beneath environmentally restricted federal lands or waters. So energy companies have decided to look elsewhere. Even Fed chair Alan Greenspan suggested they do as much.
PFC Energy, a Washington-based energy consulting firm, says the global oil and gas industry plans to spend more than $100 billion over the next 10 years to transport gas from gas-rich poor nations to wealthy ones. But shipping it as supercooled liquid natural gas (LNG) is costly, and there are safety, environmental, and aesthetic concerns about placing LNG terminals near coastal cities or towns, not the least of which is the possibility of a terrorist attack.
More than 25 proposals are in the works to build LNG terminals. The US has only four now, and the first new one to be built in the lower 48 states in more than 25 years was approved last month by federal regulators.
Public opposition to LNG terminals can be fierce, as seen recently in the San Francisco Bay area, where plans to build a terminal were finally scrapped. One viable solution to safety and aesthetic concerns is to build floating terminals offshore. But environmental effects, such as on fishing, would still need consideration.
Energy companies especially need the support of state and local regulators. Without that, private investment may be more difficult to come by. The Department of Energy is just beginning a dialogue involving various stakeholders, as energy companies ramp up their efforts for reliable and publicly acceptable LNG ports of call.
With all the natural gas available why should we have to go off shore. I would imagine that extracting the gas is a fairly clean operation. Anyone have expertise in that area?
There was just an article the other day about huge NG reserves in Alaska (the largest in the US) but when they built the pipeline it was for oil only and they have no way to transport the NG out. The environmental groups have blocked all the attempts to do it so far so they are just burning of the NG to get rid of it (it comes up in the same wells as the oil does.)
I'll see if I can find the article again. It was just the other day...
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