Steel in the Ground

The fermenters are going in at ZeaChem’s demonstration of cellulosic fuels and chemicals at scale. Are the “five years away” days gone forever? And what’s up with these exotic 2000 gallon per acre yields? The Digest heads to Oregon for some answers.

The commercialization of cellulosic ethanol too often plays out like a Greek tragedy, with the producer as the agonist, the finance community as the antagonists, and the  patient, hopeful public as the chorus:

The Chorus: (wearily) Where are all the gallons? Where are all the gallons?

The Producer: (To the Financier, imploringly, confidently, like Carl Sagan) We can build billions and billions of gallons, if you could only provide financing on affordable terms.

The Financier: (With a resigned air of cynicism) Your technology is always five years away from commercialization. Besides, we don’t finance first of kind technologies without a loan guarantee. We will be delighted to finance your second project.

A Chicken: (Whispering to a nearby egg) See, I told you it was a problem.

A Government official: (Officiously) We’ll get back to you on those loan guarantees in five years.

The Financier: Aha! We told you your technology will always be five years away from commercialization. (exits)

The Producer falls on his sword. The Government official grabs the sword, and sells it to cover loan guarantee application fees. Exits, stage right.

The Chorus: (wearily) Where are all the gallons? Where are all the gallons?

But this week in the little burgh of Boardman, Oregon (population 3,300), which happens to sit adjacent to the second-largest inland port in the western United States (the port of Morrow, on the Columbia River), and at the crossroads of a major rail line and interstate 82, ZeaChem moved forward and starting putting steel in the ground. It’s their demonstration plant, designed to prove out a technology at scale that has been producing 2,000 gallons of ethanol per acre  in its three-year pilot phase.

(Note: that’s based on 135 gallons per ton of biomass, and a correspondingly large productivity in poplar biomass. See our 2009 report on those yields.)

Yesterday, as the cranes swung three 40,000 gallon fermentation tanks into place and locked them down at a site between a massive Cargill processing plant and the Pacific Ethanol’s 40 million gallon corn ethanol facility, ZeaChem’s footprint looked tiny. But the technology, which processes poplar among a wide variety of cellulosic feedstocks from corn stover to switchgrass, is promising to be anything but small or insignificant.

The ZeaChem process

2,000 gallons per acre? They are numbers that usually are associated with algal biofuels, or a liquid-fuel-from-thin-air project like the Joule Unlimited pilot in Leander, Texas. These are not productivity rates generally associated with cellulosic ethanol, and are approximately four times the productivity of first-generation corn ethanol, without competing with food processors and cattle ranchers for edible starches.

There are two arrows in the ZeaChem productivity quiver.

First, its bacterial acetogen-based process does not produce CO2 as a by-product, rather conserving all that carbon for fuels and chemicals. For that reason, the process yields up to 135 gallons per ton of biomass, about 30 percent higher than yields from a standard-range 100 gallon per ton cellulosic ethanol projects.

Second, it uses poplar, which grows like a weed, and is one of the primary reasons for the project’s location along the Columbia River, because it ties in for feedstock to the 30,000 acre GreenWood poplar tree farm, which grows the 15-20 ton per acre per year biomass monster for the solid wood, power and fuel markets.

Known magic bug, standard parts, novel integration

The properties of bacterial acetogens have been known for some time – they are found in nature on a widely dispersed basis, in all kinds of waste. In ZeaChem’s lab, they have been able to assemble C2, C3 and C4 based platforms for both fuel and organic acids.

The bacteria eats cellulose and secretes acetic acid – vinegar, to use its common name. ZeaChem is not modifying the organism – rather, it had the challenge of understanding how to engineer a process so that it could be produced at industrial scale. So, far, it has scaled up 10,000 times from its original beaker scale in the lab, and exceeded its 100-hour batch fermentation time and 50 gram per liter concentration targets – rate and titer, to those of you in the trade.

What makes the project so darn interesting is not the properties of the magic bug – it’s a powerful but not particularly novel bacterium – or any novel types of equipment being designed and built. In fact, it’s the very off-the-shelf nature of the project that anchors its appeal. It’s innovative without creating novel process or stuff.

The plant will be able to move from a 250,000 gallon demonstration to a 25 million gallon first commercial plant (on an adjacent 25-acre site) precisely because it is the integration of known processes and equipment that makes ZeaChem, ZeaChem. That makes it a low-cost, low-risk project that is well suited to the risk-parlous financial condition of the banking community. The only thing particularly exotic about the project are the integration, and especially the yields.

Making ethanol today, and higher-carbon fuels tomorrow

At the two-carbon level, where the project is focused right now under its $25 million DOE demonstration grant, ethanol, acetic acid, and ethyl acetate are the targets. Later, the company could produce, say, propanol and butanol at the three- and four-carbon levels, as well as their associated chemicals and organic acids.

Boardman – a Little Giant of Sustainable Agriculture

The Boardman community itself is worth a look-see by anyone who wants a pretty fine example of the future of sustainable agriculture. In fact, the town is, courtesy in part of a $2 million grant from the Oregon state lottery and $3 million raised from other public and private funds, launching a Sustainable Agriculture educational tourism center, which will feature a 200-person auditorium, and interactive exhibits on sustainable agriculture including a 4-minute, simulated hot-air ballon ride over the Eastern Oregon countryside, designed by the Foundations group, that have constructed a number of important interactive interpretive centers and museums around the country.

It’s a small town, but not sleepy, not at all. Among those located in Boardman – primarily because of the Port of Morrow transportation hub, include ConAgra (making curly fries for your local Dennys), a natural gas generation plant, a large coal-fired power plant which may switch over to biomass by 2020, Cargill, Pacific Ethanol and more. They share process steam from the power plant, among the integrated residues – and interesting, produce almost no wastewater.

Those GreenWood guys

The GreenWood / Collins sawmill at Boardman, OR - working with Pacific Albus (ultra-light, hardwood poplar)

GreenWood’s 7 by 11 mile stand of poplar – well, its really the ultra-light hardwood known as Pacific Albus –  is home to one mighty fast-growing species, and a mill co-managed with Collins processes the biomass for timber markets at an astonishing pace. In the case of ZeaChem, all the traits that make a hardwood popular in the solid wood markets and easy to process, straight, not too many branches, no “bush” effect – are unimportant to a industrial biotech processor. They just need as much of it as possible, as fast as it can grow.

So Greenwood will be intercropping some of the fast-growing “biomass” Pacific Albus in the early years, in its stands designed for the 12-15 year growing period for the tall, straight trees grown for the solid wood market. Those trees are planted 200 per acre, 20 feet apart, and in the first several years, fast-growing biomass-oriented poplar can be grown in the center of that space. Or switchgrass.

So not only do you get a fast-growing, high-yield tree, you get it without utilizing additional land. very cool.

The Arundo option

Then, there’s arundo donax. That’s the mother of all terrestrial canes, when it comes to biomass accumulation rates. It grows so fast, that it grows faster than a weed – as much as 50 tons per acre, per year, and pilot trials have been conducted in Prosser, Washington as a test of the potential for the Pacific Northwest.

(CAUTION: we haven’t verified the trial data – and who knows exactly how much water and nutrients are required to produce results in that range – results will not be duplicated in many real-life situations. But by anyone’s calculations, Arundo grows fast).

It grows so quickly that it has to be carefully contained – in California, it is considered a noxious, invasive plant, and it is unlikely that massive arundo cane forests will be appearing any time soon. But some stands suitable for

Around and ZeaChem’s process – that would be powerful. 135 gallons per ton, 50 tons of biomass per acre. Those are theoretical yields in the 6000+ gallon per acre range. We are miles from those kind of opportunities being commercial realities.

GreenWood is, under a DOE grant, about to start a 40-acre trial of arundo donax and we will see how those exotic yields play out in a setting suitable for commercial-scale harvesting.

Steel in the Ground

So we’ll keep an eye out on the sustainable ag hub of Boardman, as well as arundo and GreenWood. But the main story for now is ZeaChem – putting steel in the ground and starting to generate some of theose 2,000 gallon per acre per year yields, at demonstration scale.

This isn’t a pilot disguised as a demo – its a pure demonstration that all of the processes work together (except one – a gasifier, which will be added at commercial scale – they are simply too big to be utilized in an off-the-shelf demonstration), and that they work with a wide set of target feedstocks including poplar, switchgrass and corn stover.

No more “five years away”

Next step, commercial scale. But it sure is nice to see steel going into the ground. There’s nothing like a 40,000 gallon fermenter being bolted onto a concrete pad to make one believe that the days of “five years away, five years away” are over for cellulosic ethanol, and that the weary, hopeful public chanting”where are all the gallons” are about to have their answer, in spades.