Green Matter into Black Gold
Biodiversity center turns biomass into biocrude
By Becky Beyers
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the future includes alternatives to petroleum-based energy and products.
The tricky part is figuring out which alternatives will actually work on a large scale.
The Center for Bio-Refining, which is affiliated with CFANS and the Initiative on Renewable Energy and the Environment, focuses on four primary areas, says Center codirector Roger Ruan.
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Roger Ruan, a professor in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, is codirector of the Center for Bio-Refining and will be a speaker at the fall biofuels symposium. |
While corn-based ethanol and soy biodiesel get lots of attention, he says, “long-term, they will not be enough.”
The Center currently focuses on four
primary areas:
- Cellulosic biomass, or the process of making biofuels from tree branches, cornstalks or grasses.
- Biomass from algae. The oil can be extracted to produce biodiesel, Ruan says. “It’s truly an energy crop,” because growing algae in wastewater could help reduce carbon emissions and produce large quantities of biomass at the same time.
- Biopolymers. Biomass products can be super-heated to make a biocrude substance similar to crude oil, which in turn can be refined to make plastic-like products and adhesives.
- Wind-to-ammonia technology. Wind energy can be converted to hydrogen, which can then be used to create ammonia and used for fertilizer
New bioproducts face two key barriers, Ruan says: transportation and technology. Transportation comes into play with lightweight, bulky products like cornstalks and tree branches. The center’s solution: create technology that allows individual farmers or loggers to do the first stages of processing on their own sites. The higher density bioproducts could then be shipped to centralized plants for further processing.
The technology barrier also factors into transportation costs, he says. Much attention currently is focused on cellulosic ethanol, but producing it is still a very expensive process, he says. And about one-third of most cellulosic biomass is lignin, which currently can only be burned to generate electricity. So any commercial-scale production would require huge amounts of feedstock. And that gets back to the transportation issue.
All of the Center’s current projects have the potential to use small on-farm systems, he says. “The first step has to be on the farm,” he says. “If we ask the farmers to do that, then they are producing and making money themselves—they’re selling a value-added product,” rather than a commodity.
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