GROWTH OPPORTUNITY
ANALYZING THE POTENTIAL OF BIOMASS RECOVERY
Fourth Biomass Conference evaluates the role of biomass and bioenergy in carbon management — reporting on resources, feedstocks and methods to create green energy and value-added products.

Robert Feinbaum

The enormous potential to utilize biomass to create sustainable bioproducts and bioenergy was the focus of the Fourth Biomass Conference of the Americas held in Oakland, California in early September. Organized by the California Energy Commission, the United States Department of Energy (DEO), Natural Resources Canada and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the conference brought together 500 participants from around the world to report progress in achieving value-added products derived from biomass.

Since the conference took place less than a month after President Clinton’s Executive Order on Biobased Products and Bioenergy, the Oakland sessions had an extra aura of relevance. The Executive Order sets a goal of tripling U.S. use of biomass by 2010, which could generate $15 billion in new income and reduce carbon emissions by the equivalent of taking 70 million cars off the road. An Interagency Council of Biobased Products and Bioenergy was also established, with representatives from the heads of the federal Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Interior departments, the EPA, the Office of Management and Budget, and the National Science Foundation. The first annual strategic plan for achieving goals for “safe and affordable supplies of food, feed and fiber” is April, 2000.

IMPACT ON GLOBAL WARMING

Over the past decade, the biomass utilization field has been driven largely in response to oil supply disruptions and the challenge of meeting the Kyoto agreement on global warming. If the United States Congress approves, Kyoto requires this country to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by seven percent below 1990 levels. According to several papers presented at the conference, wider use of biomass can move industrialized countries along the road to achieving those types of goals. G. Jungmeier and colleagues at the Institute of Energy Research in Graz, Austria concluded that “greenhouse gases can be greatly reduced by replacing fossil with bioenergy systems.” Two other researchers, Bauen and Kaltschmitt from the University of London, calculated that “two to eight percent more CO2 would be emitted within the European Union without the current use of solid biomass” and that the “remaining biomass potential indicates that CO2 emissions could be reduced a further seven to 28 percent.”

Some countries are already ahead of the United States in making productive use of their biomass resources. Brazil’s national alcohol program is the largest commercial biomass utilization in the world. S.T. Coehlo from CENBIO (National Reference Center on Biomass located in Sao Paulo) reported that 13.7 billion liters of ethanol from sugarcane bagasse were used for automotive purposes in 1997. Altogether the use of alcohol for transportation and cogeneration of electricity “avoided emission of 9.54 million tons of carbon.” In Finland, combined heat and power (CHP) plants use a higher percentage of wood residuals for electric generation than any other industrialized country; over 17 percent of the country’s energy is provided by those sources.

Conference papers reported on biomass research and demonstration projects around the globe. Malaysia is exploring the use of oil palm residues for energy. Portugal is looking at rapeseed as a crop for biodiesel production. Bark residues in Quebec, and eucalyptus wood in Brazil, are undergoing tests as replacements for petroleum-derived phenol in the manufacture of phenol-formaldehyde resins. Biomass gasifiers are being developed to use palm nutshells in Indonesia and olive stones in Spain. China is looking at its vast resources of biomass (especially straw and stalk, animal excreta and municipal solid waste) as “a rich and sustainable resource, important for developing the social economy and improving the environment,” according to two researchers from the Energy Research Institute of the State Planning and Development Commission.

CHALLENGES FACING BIOMASS

All this activity makes it difficult for the public to get a good handle on biomass. Some speakers pointed out that the industry has a job on its hands to convince the public of its “green” nature. NREL recently published a pamphlet titled “Separating Fact from Fiction,” which combats objections to ethanol and concludes that “once the facts are revealed, it becomes clear that using and producing ethanol for transportation is good for our country’s economy, environment and energy future.”

Conference participants engaged in an extensive discussion of the obstacles that lie in the path of shifting from a petroleum-based economy to one based on biological resources. Among the more important are: the challenges of gathering a dispersed resource such as biomass; issues related to transforming raw biomass into suitable feedstock for energy, ethanol or oil production; and the role of government in the shift to a sustainable future.

By their very nature, agricultural residues (such as rice straw in California and corn stover in the Midwest) and forest slash from thinning are difficult and expensive to collect. These materials are now burned, disked into the soil or left in brush piles, and land owners are unwilling to bear additional costs to gather and transport these potential resources. The California Energy Commission (CEC) developed a computer model (the Biofuel model) that estimates the costs of collection of various types of feedstocks for energy generation. Prab Sethi from the CEC staff told conference attendees that estimated costs ranged between $22 (urban wood waste) and $44/bone dry ton for rice straw delivered to an energy recovery facility. Since biomass is bulky and expensive to transport, all these costs are highly sensitive to hauling distances.

Special equipment may also be necessary to efficiently gather biomass. Whole log harvesters are now being tested in California and Finland. A researcher at Auburn University in Alabama reported on field chopping as a lower cost alternative to baling for switchgrass. New harvesting techniques are under investigation for rice straw, and at Texas A&M, a prototype of a harvester for small, shrubby biomass such as mesquite, which grows abundantly in the Southwest, is being developed.

TRANSFORMING BIOMASS INTO BIOENERGY

Biological materials are not as easy to manipulate for industrial processes as coal or oil. They vary in moisture content, particle size and chemical composition depending on the source, and even on the season of the year. Much attention at the conference was devoted to issues related to conditioning various types of biomass for use in energy facilities, or as feedstocks for ethanol or oil production.

A team of German researchers studied harvesting the giant reed, Miscanthus, for energy production and found that the quality of the biomass decreased with increasing content of water, ash, sulfur and salts. “These substances” according to the team “can complicate the power plant operation or cause environmentally harmful emissions.” D. Vaidyanathan, an industrial consultant in India, looked at sugar cane trash and rice husks as possible boiler fuels. He found that boilers have to be adapted to handle different feedstocks (from heavy bagasse to light rice husks) and that seasonal availability is a key factor in planning for fuel supplies. Dutch researchers looked at gasification of ten biomass fuels and noted that “feeding of all the different biomass materials turned out to be not straightforward” and that water content of the material affected the fuel gas output.

GOVERNMENT’S ROLE

Through the Department of Energy and the national laboratories, such as NREL and Oak Ridge, biomass has been on the research agenda of the U.S. government for the better part of a decade. Within the Regional Biomass Energy Program, DOE has funded projects throughout the nation to increase the production and use of biomass resources. Legislation (S. 935) sponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R–Indiana) seeks to appropriate nearly $300 million over the next six years for bioenergy research and development.

States also have been active in pursuing biomass projects. The Southern States Energy Board, the California Energy Commission, and the Governors Ethanol Coalition, which encompasses 20 states in the mid and southwestern United States, are some of the main governmental organizations pursuing the objective of increasing biomass use.

States are helping biomass in more direct financial ways. California’s energy deregulation includes a “transition fund” that provides support for biomass energy plants through the year 2002. Without that support, many of the state’s 45 remaining plants would have gone out of business. Consultant Greg Morris looked at biomass in a broader perspective, urging “targeted cost shifting to promote the use of designated types of biomass residues to solve specific environmental problems associated with the disposal of those residues.” Morris’ idea was echoed by other conference participants. Government policies, at all levels — federal, state and local — are necessary to provide economic support for biomass so that environmental benefits for the entire society (CO2 reduction, lessened air pollution and reduced amounts of solid waste buried in landfills) can be achieved.

DECENTRALIZED OPPORTUNITIES

Energy planners are moving away from large centralized power plants to a more decentralized concept of supply. Such a scenario fits nicely with the nature of biomass resources. Researchers at the Agricultural University of Norway developed a combined gasification and combustion oven that accepts a variety of untreated fuels, including logs, fuel pellets, sawdust, biogas and municipal solid waste. The capacity of the system is only 2,000 metric tons/year. But the Norwegian research team believes that to compete with well established energy carriers such as coal, oil, gas and electricity, the comparative advantages of biomass “have to be utilized: namely that they are distributed resources often found close to an energy consumer and that the raw material fuels have low prices.”

Conference participants listened to a number of presentations by developers of microturbines. These small energy generation systems can make use of locally available resources, and seem ready to displace diesel fuel generators at remote sites. The economics look very favorable, and the environmental benefits are substantial. Like photovoltaic systems a generation before, these biomass systems are poised to enter markets where sources are abundant and high costs of fuel and waste disposal are likely to motivate owners to switch.

But for biomass to enter the mainstream, for the transition to a biobased economy to pick up steam, system costs have to drop substantially and performance in large-scale applications has to match the encouraging results reported in conference papers. Many of the conference participants are optimistic. An informal poll taken by one of the speakers found that participants believed that the use of biomass would increase by a factor of five in the next decade. If the human energy and creativity displayed at the Fourth Biomass Conference of the Americas is any indication, odds are the optimistic scenario has a good chance of being achieved.