Wednesday’s CBSA program hosted at the offices of Fairfield and Woods featured Matt Ringer of NREL discussing the future of biofuels. Ringer highlighted the government’s “commitment to ambitious biofuel goals” which include “cost competitive cellulosic ethanol” by 2012 and a total of 21 billion gallons of advanced biofuels by 2022. Ringer went on to focus on the near-term opportunities in ethanol production.
While corn is now the dominant crop used to produce ethanol with 134 plants making 7.2 billion gallons per year, there are problems inherent to its use as a feedstock. Along with the general food versus fuel debate, there exist economic challenges to corn’s future because its price is “disconnected from fuel.” For these reasons, Ringer believes that cellulosic ethanol represents a better long-term feedstock for ethanol production. The potential sources for this stock are abundant, coming both from forests and agriculture, and their use for fuel will not compete with food.
But while converting the starch in a corn crop to ethanol is a relatively straightforward fermentation process, conversion of cellulosic feedstock is somewhat more complex. Cellulosic biomass consists primarily of three types of molecules – 5-carbon sugars, 6-carbon sugars (mainly glucose), and lignin – each of which must undergo different processes to unlock its energy potential. The 5-carbon sugars are relatively easy to release, but releasing all 6-carbon sugars require enzymatic treatment. To reduce the significant cost of this enzymatic digestion, NREL partnered with two major enzyme makers, Genencor and Novozymes, and was able to bring down costs about 20 fold. Once the sugars are released they go through fermentation to produce ethanol, the residue remaining contains lignin which can be put through thermochemical conversion to release heat and power.
The price of cellulosic ethanol currently sits at $3.50 per gallon of gasoline equivalent (the amount of ethanol it takes to produce the same power as one gallon of gasoline). NREL is targeting ethanol costs of $1.96 per gallon gasoline equivalent which is the same as $1.31 per gallon of ethanol by 2012. This cost reduction must be primarily driven by reducing costs and increasing efficiencies of the processing as the price of feedstock is only expected to decline slightly.
Ringer touched on other potential biofuel sources – including algae – where he noted that NREL’s official position is that “algae is not ready to go yet” but represents a substantial long-term opportunity given the high concentration of energy it contains. In particular, Ringer noted that since algae consume carbon dioxide, co-location with carbon dioxide producers (e.g. power plants) is very promising. In conclusion, Ringer discussed the opportunities for companies to partner with NREL, ranging from more standard and short-term Analytical and Technical Service Agreements to more flexible technical partnering agreements and CRADAs (cooperative R&D).
The next CBSA program will be a BioBreakfast focusing on a case study into four Colorado bioscience companies on June 17. More information is available here.
