Excellent interview, RR. But I am surprised that you did not ask at one point how long Poet thinks the government should be paying out $1.01 per gallon ($1.50 per gallon of gasoline equivalent) in producer tax credits for cellulosic ethanol. Do they really feel that it is sustainable to scale up production at that rate of subsidy?

Should the government be subsidizing the use of private automobiles -- and that is what gasoline and ethanol are used for mainly -- at that kind of rate. At the extreme end, if all gasoline consumption were to be replaced by home-grown cellulosic ethanol, the subsidy burden on the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) would be $200 billion per year ... indefinitely.

OMGlikeWTF,

You are so onto something! :-)

I have been making the case here on TOD for the last two years that methane seems to be the great alternative that almost no one wants to talk about. It is astounding...the infrastructure requirements are far less than any other biofuel, it uses straight out of the box technology to digest, it is clean, it would blend right into the natural gas system, it would capture a greenhouse gas, it would reduce water pollution from agriculture, it woul help us salvage the internal combustion engine long enough to "age out" the investment we have in it's development, it works perfectly in combination with the plug hybrid idea, on and on and on...

One can visualize cars that are built with essentially compressed natural gas engines and a plug hybrid drivetrain, with recaptured from waste product methane/natural gas engines used as performance/range enhancing engines, clean, smooth, efficient...given the efficiency we could run a huge fleet of vehicles on a relatively small amount of methane. The promise is there, but it just don't use enough infrastructure, it just don't create enough "make work" waste.

Oh well. Once more the Europeans are miles out in front of us.
:-)

RC

On average cob leftovers from a bushel of corn are worth about 91000 BTU. After conversion maybe getting like three quarts more of ethanol out of a bushel of corn.

Crop residue is necessary to maintain enough organic matter in soil to improve water retention and keep the soil loose ro friable. Without crop residues a lot of farmland will turn into something you can make bricks out of.

I have seen figures (V. Smil I believe) showing that 50% of all biomass is harvested already.

any long term analysis like this should be inclusive of risk adjusted return - i.e. mean divided by standard deviation (due to weather uncertainties/impact on crops).

Walking out the door for the rest of the day in 20 minutes, so not much time. A few comments, though.

A good day would be 100 gallons per acre and a bad day would be 85 gallons per acre

No, you are conflating gallons per ton with gallons per acre. 100 gallons per ton is 65 gallons per acre, and typical then is more like 55 gallons per acre - about half the number you suggested.

A good day would be 100 gallons per acre and a bad day would be 85 gallons per acre and I accept that Poet is getting high eighties to low 90's (on average maybe 92.5?).

This is the sort of thing I was referring to. Not only have you conflated acres and tons, but you consistently make sometimes unwarranted extrapolations from what you are told. You take the best case and throw in a bit more, which is not the way these things usually work out. One thing I have learned in my years of technology development is that it is best to make conservative estimates, because all kinds of things go wrong. Just looking at that number - high eighties to low nineties - if you are assuming anything over 90.0 you are tipping off your biases.

R2, don't you find it STUNNING that sugar cane grown in a tropical country barely outproduces US corn ethanol with the corn cobbs thrown in.

That's based on an error that you have made. Further, you always look at gross energy and not net energy. Corn has a much higher fertilizer demand. That fertilizer is made from natural gas. Those are the sorts of things you have to consider when comparing the two.

Clearly cellulosic ethanol can go a long way unlike the gasified dried wood of Choren.

Completely untrue. But I can see how with an error here and an error there you could conclude that. The net yield of a Choren process is significantly better than that of a cellulosic ethanol process - no matter how many times you claim otherwise. Further, Choren has many years of operating their process in Germany, and as such they have a much lower risk of technical failure than some of the newcomers.

I have already pointed out errors in your analysis of Choren versus cellulosic. One of these is to ignore net energy, and another is that you ignore the heat and electricity produced by the Choren process.

You might want to ask Choren why they told you that SunDiesel was the same as petroleum diesel. It's not.

I don't have to ask Choren. I have that information. From your own link, the BTU value of SunDiesel was higher than for conventional diesel in California on a mass basis, and about the same on a gallon basis. SunDiesel, unlike biodiesel, is composed of hydrocarbons (just like petroleum diesel) and as such can be blended in any quantity with conventional diesel (again, unlike the limitations of biodiesel, which is an oxygenated compound). Because petroleum diesel consists of many different components, "chemically the same" means similar hydrocarbons, not that the composition is identical (the exact composition of diesel will always vary). You can't say that biodiesel is chemically the same.

That's all I have time for, but clearly enough to point out the consistently over-optimistic bias in your analyses (unless we are talking about something you don't like, such as a Choren process, and then you swing the other way).

This is the kind of detail that seems to get lost in the first analysis by the company thinking they can buy the cobs for next to nothing. Thanks!

Hi X, thanks for your analysis. I have a question about your need to have equipment to separate the cobs from the corn. Don't you do that already? Or do you store then take corn-on-the-cob to your elevator 8 miles away? What happens to the cobs currently? Thanks - JN2

There are a few more factors you need to deal with.

The combines run at a fixed speed usually. They do not like to stop and off load their bin. So they use 'auger' wagons and the combine off loads into them and they run this full to the waiting tractor trailer which hauls the output off site. To market at a grainery or to the farmers bins.

So if the combine is somehow handling shelled corn plus the cobs in some sort of retention system then another auger wagon of some type and style will also be requried plus perhaps modified trailers to handle a different product than just shelled corn.

The cost of this modified combine is likely to be quite huge as well.

All hinderances to getting that shelled corn harvested will be costly in time and energy as well.

The flayers on the back of the combine will have to be altered as well. They now tend to shatter the cobs and spread them evenly about the fields.

The lack of cobs as fertilizer value means that even more N,P,K will have to be supplied and that is not a fixed, but a changing cost..so the farmer buys in to this whole scheme but later it becomes unfeasible economically and so the farmer then??????? Does what?

You are right that only very big acreage farmers might consider this. In my part of the world we do many acres but the largest I am aware of is about 5 thousand and that is not normal at all. More like 2,000 and much of that is of course rented , and rented means that you could lose it very easily, even on a owner's whim or sellout or change of ownership.

Some of land rental is contracted and some it not. I never signed a contract when I rented mine and never would either. But I never had thousands of acres either.

Right now land is going to be going out of production due to several factors that I recently heard of. The subsidies are going to be drying up ,,word has it. And the taxes are going to be going up as well.....also heard and discuseed and the reason why is that the budget will require tax money to come from somewhere and farmers will be paying an increaseing amount and far far more apt to be audited.

Airdale

I don't think storage and transport are a problem:

Chemical and Engineering News, April 2009: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/87/8717cover.html

"Sturdevant is optimistic that Poet can find a way for farmers to easily gather cobs when they harvest corn. ... The farmers would pile the cobs on the edge of their fields for collection by Poet or a third party."

!

If the economic limit source of cobs is a 25-35 mile radius. The farmers within this radius will have a signficant pricing position for cobs since the competition is limited to those farmers within this radius. In order to determine just how significant this position is you would need to know the total potential volume of cobs produced within this radius and the required cob volume to run the plant efficiently. Once a multi million dollar plant is on the ground the owners won't have much bargining power if the ratio of their cob needs, to the supply within this radius is high. I would gather that the price of cobs would eventually escalate. Similar to what happened with corn prices which led to the demise of so many corn ethanol producers.

Conservationist,
You apparently have not read very carefully Theoildrum.com, this article or RR writings. I suspect you might be a propagandist for the web site you linked to. At least the people at POET energy, unlike you, are open to rational discussion and debate about bio-fuel.

I did a whois search and found that domesticfuel.com is run by zimmcomm.biz who has a bunch of false news sites that appear to be lackeys or propaganda vehicles for vested big agribusiness. I suspect, but I can't prove it, that big money from groups like Archer Daniel Midland and/or Cargil are behind this organization. (By the way, there was a disturbing--to me-- article about a year ago in the NYT about ADM influence in Obama's campaign and it looks like they are getting repaid if they're upping e10 to e15.)

Best Wishes for E0 until POET energy figures out that corn cob thing.

wE HAVE ENOUGH TROUBLE NOW KEEPING OLDER EQUIPMENT RUNNIMG ON E10. e15 MAY BE A GOOD WAY TO SCRAP A FEW TENS OF MILLION OLDER CARS TRUCKS TRACTORS COMPRESSORS GENERATORS IRRIGATION PUMPS AND OTHER GOOD MACHINES WELL BEFORE THEY ARE WORN OUT.

ITS TIME AND PAST TIME THAT THE Free ENTERPRISE FOLKS WERE HEARD LOUD AND CLEAR ON THIS ISSUE.
IF YOU PUT YOUR MONEY IN HOPING TO GET RICH BUT YOU GO BROKE TOUGH LUCK,I THE TAXPAYER AM SICK OF YOUR WHINING-meaning the industry,not you persoonally.

IF AND WHEN ETHANOL CAN STAND ON ITS OWN FEET,YOU CAN START UP YOUR MOTHBALLED PLANTS AGAIN.tHE PLANTS THAT WE PAID FOR FOR YOU ON THE FIRST PLACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If and when ethanol can stand on its own feet it will find a ready market,the tech is already collecting dust in Detroits filing cabinets.

For a person who chooses the handle conservationist you seem to be seriously ill informed of the larger consequences of the ethanol road you advocate.

I would like to see the research on cellulosic ethanol succeed,as it will help us out a lot if waste products can be ulitized .

But every one can rest assured that all this talk of producing million ton crops of thisnthat on so called marginal land w/o rain and fertilizer and environmental consequences is bull shit.
Once the camel's nose is in the tent, it's always a case of just a little more.....

When there is money to be had,you can find professors in nearly any subject who will publicly contradict thier own text books in order to collect it.Ditto all others in need of startup expansion financing money for whatever schemes they can think of.

I am not opposed to biofuels in principle,and I think there is a place for them ,especially if for instance they could be produced in an industrial setting from garbage and sewage.

But we don't need to further stress an already overstressed food production system(which is itself unsustainable!) in order to prop up Detroit for another decade or two.

If it is necessary for my nieces and nephews to ride bicycles to work in the future in order to turn the corner on the environment,so be it.

At least that option offers them the reasonable hope of a future!

And for the record,none of the discussion so far accounts for the byproducts of ethanol production ,which help out considerably in balancing the checkbook.

There are lots of ways the government COULD enhance energy efficiency and conservation without the harm exceeding the good.

A sliding scale escalating tax tax on the gross wieght of all new vehicles not used for commercial purposes would be a good place to start.

Another would be to rewrite the subsidy laws that encourage home energy conservation so that lower income home owners could make use of the subsidies.

There are a number of reasons pushing the ethanol content of gasoline is a poor idea. They include:
- the problem most frequently mentioned by car hobbyists: that ethanol is incompatible with rubber components used in fuel systems and carburettors until about 1990.
- ethanol accelerates the corrosion of aluminum. I have two cars with aluminum fuel pump bodies.
- ethanol-blended gasoline doesn't store well over a period of months. Gum and varnish production is increased over straight gasoline and filter plugging accelerates.
- "E10 is of debatable air pollution merit (and may in fact increase the production of photochemical smog); offers little advantage in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency or environmental sustainability; and will significantly increase both the risk and severity of soil and groundwater contamination." http://bit.ly/wblK4
- Most current automobiles could experience an out-of-warranty condition if operated on a blend higher than E10.
- ethanol blends are incompatible with the fiberglass gas tanks found in many boats.