2,000 Gallons of Low-Cost Ethanol Per Acre Made From Wood
ZeaChem — a company launched in 1998 by “two guys in a pickup” and ranked by Biofuels Digest as the 11th hottest company in bioenergy last year — claims that their process for making advanced, next-generation ethanol from fast growing woody crops such as poplars will result in a yield of 2,000 gallons of ethanol per acre.
In case you’re wondering if that number is good, compare it to the current yield obtained by the best managed corn ethanol plants of about 450 gallons per acre. A 2,000 gallon per acre yield is on par with the amount of fuel algae outfits claim they can produce with technology that doesn’t really yet exist. ZeaChem’s process already functions using available technology.
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On top of this, ZeaChem could potentially make the ethanol for as low as $20 per ton of woody feedstock (this was a number that was originally published over at Biofuels Digest, but was subsequently removed. At ZeaChem’s request I have tried to make it clear that this is a speculative number). Doing my own calculations with fast-growing tree crop poplars as an example — 1,500 trees per acre producing 15 tons of feedstock — the base cost to make the ethanol at that processing cost would come out to 15 cents per gallon. Of course, the price you’ll pay at the pump would be higher, but even with profit margins, transportation, delivery and taxes on top of that, it’ll still be rock cheap.
By using a crop with such a large amount of biomass per acre, ZeaChem also reduces the footprint of the land required to feed an ethanol plant by 90% over other ethanol crops such as grasses, which only produce about 2 tons of feedstock per acre and, therefore, require a huge amount of land to feed an ethanol plant. Also, crop trees such as hybrid poplars need only be planted once — after they’re harvested they sprout again from the same stump.
By way of looking at the bigger picture, if you consider that the US uses approximately 145 billion gallons of gasoline each year and the US has about 470,000,000 acres of arable land, you could supply 30% of the US’s fuel needs with about 4.6% of all the arable land in the US using ZeaChem’s process.
The company is currently building its first demonstration-scale plant in Boardman, OR, which will be fed by woody biomass from a nearby hybrid poplar plantation run by GreenWood Resources. If all of what ZeaChem claims is true, get ready for a revolution in how the US handles fuel production — one that doesn’t pit food against fuel.
Follow this link to see a recent slide presentation by ZeaChem Co-Founder, Dan Verser.
Source: Biofuels Digest
Image Credit: Purdue News Service. Image is in the public domain.
Keep in mind, that grasses and corn can be harvested every year. Those poplar farms in Boardman only get cut every few years. (but they spread out which acres get cut every year) Sure, they spring right back, and they are much faster growing then regular trees, but they are still longer growing than things like corn or algae.
Also, since those tree farms primarily grow wood pulp for making paper, I wonder if they are still able to use the wood pulp after extracting the ethanol from it. That would be ideal!
This has some promise to it, hopefully their operation in Oregon is successful. I wonder if there are any noxious/dangerous by products from their ethanol creation process?
I can see the future now with large scale hybrid wood farms growing genetically engineered trees to maximize ethanol product per acre!
Yeah, if you’re measuring per acre, it has to be per acre per year. How long does it take to regrow? Corn would get close to 2000 gallons in four years.
It will be interesting to see if the numbers prove to be accurate, without any downside to the environment. I’m wondering how this approach scales around the globe - to what extent do other countries have the capability (land/water) to replicate this approach?
Although another benefit of this would probably be storage, since your window for harvesting is conceivably any season (unless there’s a whole bunch of snow). For many crops, you have a narrow window for harvest, and then you have to store the material to produce ethanol year-round.
imagine how much per acre we could get with hemp? Pot would give us double that number at least 4000 gallons of bio fuel per acre!! But our president says Marijuana is not a viable option for the future. Why NOT??????? it grows much quicker that poplar trees and has hundreds of other benefits other than smoking it. Lets get our shit together people tell the “man” who seeks to control our lives the real story and how we are going to not let laws come between us saving our planet or just letting it slowly wither away because no one thinks they can do anything! I’m pissed off and you need to get pissed also! Don’t settle for options that are not going to work!!!
ZeaChem might be one of the leaders in cellulosic ethanol, but let’s not start throwing goofy numbers around for futuristic optimum yields that are highly unlikely to be reached. That’s true for either alage or corn or any other technology. Hey, there are farmers now who can get over 300 bushels of corn/acre, so that alone would be about a 900 gal/acre starch ethanol yield. And you can throw in the 500-1000 gal from cellulosic ethanol from the corn stover. But that is meaningless except as some possible goal decades in future, since on average, corn yields now are about 150-160 bu/acre. Same thing above - no way there is going to be an average yield of 15 tons of biomass per acre from any existing or near future crop. And it won’t be close to costing $20/ton - much closer to at least $50-60/ton. Finally, it’s ridiculous to only compare yield per acre for algae, when the COST is the important factor. Besides the $2-3000/acre cost of buying the land to grow corn, there are few other capital costs for feedstock production. Any near term high yield algae will have capex of at least $50-100k per per acre - do the math and see if that looks viable compared to even current corn ethanol.
What is the gallons per acre PER YEAR? Let’s get the apples to apples comparison correct, before we go flipping-out over trees. HOW LONG does it take for the trees to mature to 15 tons per acre?
Solix is getting 3,000 gallons per acre per year. Algenol is getting 6,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year. Both from algae.
5 different companies that I know of are getting 65, 220, 270, 300, and 330 TONS per acre PER YEAR of biomass from algae. This ZeaChem tree thing is great, but in a few years it’ll be no match for fast growing algae, which doubles every 8 hours.
Still, trees may be more practical than algae in the northern climates. You use what you can where you are. So there may be a niche for this. Soft wood is still a good, reliable low-technology feedstock. The neat thing is that ZeaChem has an economical way to process it. That might be used to process forestry waste, industrial woodworking waste, and agricultural waste.
As far as how much land is used, heterotrophic algae grown in dark tanks, on less than 3% sugar and nutrients, is up to 1,000 times more concentrated than algae grown in sunlight. Thus, the amount of land needed is only a small fraction of what you’d need for sun-grown algae, which is itself much faster growing and more productive per acre than trees.
CORN ETHANOL TRUMPS POPLAR TREES
I went to ZeaChem’s website. It takes 3 years for the poplar trees to mature to 15 tons per acre and produce 2,000 gallons. So the actual return is 5 tons per acre per year or 675 gallons – not 2,000.
The grain component of an acre of corn is 45% of the dry weight. The rest is corn cobs and corn stover. We get 1,200 pounds of cobs per acre, and we get an average of 3.75 tons of corn stover per acre (dry). You would take all the cobs and no more than 75% of the stover, leaving the roots and a short, stubby stalk to preserve the soil. That gives you 0.6 tons of cobs and 2.8 tons of stover, or 3.4 tons of corn biomass in addition to the grain.
From 3.4 tons of the corn biomass residue, using the ZeaChem process, you get 459 additional gallons of ethanol per acre per year – from corn. That’s a total of 859 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, plus co-products:
Corn: 859 gallons vs Poplar Trees: 675 gallons
Here’s what you get from an acre of corn per year:
(1) ethanol from the grain: 450 gallons
(2) ethanol from corn biomass: 459 gallons
(3) high protein distillers grains,
used to produce dairy products,
poultry, meat, fish, and farm-
raised seafood: 50 bushels
(4) corn oil: 20 gallons
(5) waste water centrate,
containing 6-11% solids,
suitable for digesting into biogas,
and-or growing heterotrophic
algae in adjacent, dark,
insulated tanks: 13,500 gallons per adjacent acre
Based on acre per year.
(Information: Cobs: University of Missouri; Stover: Purdue University)
Correction:
Corn: 909 gallons ethanol per acre per year…
vs
Poplar Trees: 675 gallons ethanol per acre per year.
vs 675 gallons