Tag Archives: energy
Concord Energy, Cool Planet To Bring Biofuel To Asian Pacific Market
Published on Wednesday, 25 September 2013 Singapore’s Concord Energy has signed an agreement with biorefinery developer Cool Planet Energy Systems to establish a joint venture in the Asia Pacific Region for the development of biofuel facilities. Concord Energy is a leading crude oil and refined petroleum product trading company. They have made a financial investment in Cool Planet, which develops and deploys small-scale biorefineries that can convert non-food biomass into high-octane, drop-in biofuels and biochar. “We believe that Cool Planet has developed a unique technology that will revolutionize the production of biofuels and we are delighted that Cool Planet has chosen Concord Energy as its partner,” said John Stuart, chief executive officer of Concord’s Asset Group. Concords extensive operational and development experience in the Asia Pacific is considered key to the J.V.’s plans to establish a presence in the biofuels production market in the region. “We chose Concord Energy because we know they have the strong desire and the technological capability to deploy quickly the Cool Planet technology in East Asia and in Oceania,” said Vital Aelion, Cool Planet’s head of international business development. Commercial facilities for biomass to biofuel Just last week (September 17), Cool Planet also announced another business breakthrough, the second close of“D round” equity raise that garnered them $19.4 million in investments. The round added investors from Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico to a marquee existing investor base, including North Bridge Venture Partners, Shea Ventures, BP, Google Ventures, Energy Technology Ventures (GE, ConocoPhillips, NRG Energy), and the Constellation division of Exelon. The new investors are committing to help bring Cool Planet’s drop-in fuel technology to countries around the world, and Cool Planet is actively developing partnerships to commercialize its technology internationally. Cool Planet now has over $60 million in investments to see the deployment of their technology. A portion of the equity raise will be used to finalize the engineering design of Cool Planet’s first commercial biorefinery in Louisiana in the United States (see related story ). URS Corporation will be the front-end engineering and design contractor for this facility which will begin operations before the end of 2014. The plant will produce 10 million gallons of biofuel a year. – EcoSeed Staff Continue reading
Reaching For Sustainability
By Chris Hanson | September 23, 2013 U.S. pellet producers, land owners and other forestry organizations are heeding the call of international customers and local citizens to demonstrate how the pellet industry is addressing sustainable land management concerns. “Biomass-fired renewable energy is endorsed by environmentalists, utilities and governments as a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels,” says Seth Ginther, executive director of the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association. “Here in the U.S., biomass from forests in the Southeast has unified elected officials from both parties who see the economic and environmental value of working forests.” Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is one of those officials. In a letter to the U.K.’s Department of Energy & Climate Change, which recently published a favorable report on proposals to enhance the sustainability criteria for biomass feedstocks, Deal credits the state’s regulations, sustainable forest management practices and existing infrastructure as being responsible for Georgia growing 30 percent more wood annually than what is being harvested. Although the surge in the demand for biomass feedstocks overseas is still relatively recent, sustainable practices have been in place much longer. “It’s important to note that best management practices have been established by the forest industry and these have been in place for decades,” Ginther says. “Common forest management practices of thinning and sustainable rotational harvesting mean there is a continuous cycle of new growth in the forest. Bioenergy, specifically wood pellets, uses the same standards as every other product coming from U.S. forests.” With the rising demand and a robust market, woody biomass production can become a way to sustain working forests. “Strong markets for forest products keep working forests working, providing essential environmental and economic benefits to society,” says Gretchen Schaefer, vice president of communications for the National Alliance of Forest Owners. “In addition to the standards the forestry industry has in place,” Ginther says, “pellet producers ensure that their product is sustainable and emissions are low during sourcing, production and transport. Every step from the forest to the furnace is environmentally friendly.” By demonstrating sustainable pellet production and forestry management, the woody biomass industry can only strengthen its cause and role in the energy marketplace. Ginther says although current laws, such as the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, are already ensuring sustainable methods are used, many USIPA producers are also certified by internationally recognized forest certification programs, such as the Forest Stewardship Council, Green Gold Label and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. Demonstrating Sustainability At the core of the SFI system are 14 principles, including: provisions for forest productivity and health, protection of water resources and biological diversity, managing aesthetics and recreation, protection of any ecologically or culturally special sites, compliance with applicable laws and regulations, public involvement in sustainable forestry, and more. Forest Management Planning Expanding upon those principles are 20 objectives that use indicators or performance measures to show compliance. Under Forest Management Planning, for example, the indicators include documents showing a long-term resource analysis, periodic forest inventory, land classification and soils inventory, recommended sustainable harvest levels and a review of nontimber issues such as recreation or tourism. The planning objectives also call for documentation of annual harvest trends and a method to calculate growth and yield, plus a system to recalculate planned harvests that can account for productivity changes due to factors such as long-term drought, fertilization, climate change, land ownership changes or improved data. Reforestation, best management practices, use of trained loggers, water quality monitoring, and more, are also detailed. In the 123-page document, the SFI also lays out a chain-of-custody system to track wood fiber through the stages of production, enabling the use of material from certified and uncertified forest and specifying how to calculate certified content percentages. The appendices offer additional resources, plus specifications on how to use the label and seal that come with SFI certification. “The SFI standard and the requirements apply regardless of the final product that is produced from that forest, whether it’s building materials, pellets or paper,” says Nadine Block, SFI vice president of government affairs. To certify sustainable forest products, SFI utilizes third-party audits to assess a land owner’s forest management practices or a company’s supply chain. The process begins with submitting a participation application to SFI. If approved, SFI then contacts one of 10 certification entities to begin the audit. The forest owner must demonstrate that the SFI’s principles and objectives have been implemented into his operation. To determine SFI standard conformance, the auditor examines operating procedures and other forestry practice materials, monitors field performance onsite, interviews employees and contractors and contacts other interested parties such as government agencies, community groups and conservation organizations. If a minor nonconformity is discovered, a conformance certificate can be issued, but only after the lead auditor approves an action plan to address the issue within a set time not to exceed a year. More serious infractions result in the denial of the conformance certificate until approved corrective action has been implemented and a possible site revisit completed. Maintaining Certification If a site is approved, the certified participant provides SFI with a summary report from the auditor to post on the company’s website for public review. The audit report includes a description of the audit process, a general description of the participant’s forest land and manufacturing operations, name of the certification body, dates the audit was conducted, summary of the findings and the certification decision. To maintain certification, SFI requires participants to complete annual surveillance audits in addition to recertification every three years. Although the process may sound intimidating to some producers, the benefits may have a strong impact on its business and customers. For instance, during the audit, a certifying auditor might be able to validate more than one standard, saving both time and money for the producer. One challenge in demonstrating sustainable wood procurement and production may lie with smaller, private forest owners. Steven Meyers, procurement manager for Fram Renewable Fuels LLC, says less than 20 percent of forest land in the Southeast is certified. Of that percentage, a notable portion is held by large forestry companies, he says, whereas small land owners may not have the market incentive or capital to become certified. “There really needs to be something done at the state level,” Meyers says. Some states have even addressed the issue by developing certification programs for small private land owners at low cost and providing the manpower to run the program, he says. By promoting sustainable forest practices through certification standards and working together, pellet producers may see themselves in a beneficial position to address growing demand and sustainability concerns from their international and domestic customers. “Our standard is in a good position to help pellet manufacturers demonstrate their sustainability and demonstrate how they are meeting European sustainability requirements,” Block says. “What we’ve seen is a lot of pellet manufacturers are certified to the SFI standard and that is being driven primarily by demand from Europe.” UK, EU Approval “The United Kingdom and European Union recognize that bioenergy is a vital part of the energy mix that is helping them meet its climate change commitments and renewable energy targets,” Ginther says. Wood pellets are the only readily available renewable energy alternative capable of providing consistent energy to meet consumer demands. It is a complementary technology intended to work alongside other energy sources like wind and solar to balance the grid. “It is with this in mind that the regulatory bodies in the U.K. and EU approach the use of wood pellets. While we can’t predict what the future holds, European regulators have expressed to us they are comfortable with the U.S. regulations, laws and oversight that govern our forests—they are some of the most robust internationally. We expect the industry to continue to grow and thrive in the coming years.” Looking toward Europe’s expanding markets, the U.S. pellet industry got some good news in August when the U.K. Department of Energy & Climate Change released its report addressing feedstock sustainability requirements for power producers to meet the country’s renewables obligation using solid biomass and biogas fuel sources. The response was crafted using input from 73 respondents, including Sustainable Forestry Initiative Inc., the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association and Drax Power Ltd. It indicates the DECC still considers biomass an attractive fossil fuel replacement and addresses the government’s desire to manage sustainability concerns in addition to curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. The new DECC criteria, to be finalized later this year, are based on the U.K. timber procurement policy (UK-TPP), considered by forest industry respondents to be a better concept to follow than the current system that focuses more on sustainable agriculture than forest land use. Additionally, the UK-TPP already recognizes certification strategies that meet its principles and builds upon existing U.K. guidelines to promote consistency, while avoiding costs for both wood producers and customers. The DECC states the policy’s criteria can be met by using certified wood from an approved forest that has been approved by the Forest Stewardship Council or the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification methods, or the equivalent. DECC also responded to calls for policy stability, and says there will be no unilateral changes to the policy until 2027, although it reserves the option to make changes as biomass power generation improves after April 2019 or to comply with EU or international regulations. Author: Chris Hanson Staff Writer, Pellet Mill Magazine chanson@bbiinternational.com 701-738-4970 Continue reading
First Look At Complete Sorghum Genome May Usher In New Uses For Food And Fuel
September 24, 2013 Although sorghum lines underwent adaptation to be grown in temperate climates decades ago, a University of Illinois researcher said he and his team have completed the first comprehensive genomic analysis of the molecular changes behind that adaptation. Patrick Brown, an assistant professor in plant breeding and genetics, said having a complete characterization of the locations (loci) affecting specific traits will speed up the adaptation of sorghum and other related grasses to new production systems for both food and fuel. Brown is working on the project through the Energy Biosciences Institute at the U of I, hoping to use the sorghum findings as a launching pad for working with complex genomes of other feedstocks. The EBI provided the startup funding for the study. To adapt the drought-resistant, tropical sorghum to temperate climates, Brown explained that sorghum lines were converted over the years by selecting and crossing exotic lines with temperate-adapted lines to create lines that were photoperiod-insensitive for early maturity, as well as shorter plants that could be machine-harvested. “Surprisingly no one had ever really genotyped these lines to figure out what had happened when they were adapted,” Brown said. “Now that genotyping is cheap, you can get a lot of data for a modest investment.” Previous studies had looked at a specific genomic region or a smaller subset of these lines. “This is the first study to look at all of them. A previous paper had come out looking at a specific region of chromosome 6. What we did was not much more expensive, and we got a bigger picture that was completely technology enabled,” he said. The researchers used a new technique called genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) to map genetic differences in 1160 sorghum lines. Brown said GBS is a new technology developed in the last two years. Brown and his team, along with other researchers, have made refinements to the process. “Using GBS, we’re now able to cover the whole genome with some gaps in individual lines,” he said. While much improvement has been done for grain sorghum, Brown said little improvement has been done for sweet or bioenergy types. “Part of the reason for caring about all of that now is that up to this point sorghum has mostly been grown for grain. It’s pretty short stuff, doesn’t blow over on the windy high plains, and is really hardy. But now there is a lot of interest in using sorghum for other things, such as growing sweet sorghum in areas where they grow sugarcane, and growing biomass sorghum for bioenergy through combustion or cellulosic technology.” Getting a complete map of the traits researchers are most interested in — plant height and maturity — will help researchers unlock the diversity in the exotic lines and bring it into grain sorghum, Brown said. “We’ll be able to start moving forward. We’ll basically be able to breed all these sorghum types more easily and use the genes that we bred for in grain sorghum over the last hundred years and move them into sweet sorghum and biomass sorghum. We think that finding those genes is going to be critical,” he said. Even with this complete genetic map, Brown said the research is still not at the end point. “The case I always make is that over here we have grain sorghum, where we’ve done almost all the plant breeding, and where we’ve stacked the good genes. Over here we’ve got exotic sorghum, which hasn’t been improved at all, yet it’s where most of the genetic diversity is. For that genetic diversity to be useful to grain sorghum, we need to know where the genes are for height and maturity so we can bring in good diversity while keeping our grain sorghum short and early like we need it,” he said. On the other hand, Brown added that if improvements are to be made for sweet, forage, or biomass sorghum, researchers will need to bring in some of the genes from grain sorghum, for traits like seed quality or early-season vigor. “This is the general agronomic stuff we’ve been breeding for, not the genes for dwarfing and earliness. Most of this sorghum now goes to chicken feed or ethanol in the United States.” “We do have a collaboration with Markus Pauly, an EBI researcher at Berkeley who is looking at the composition of sorghum. But the bigger problem with biomass sorghum right now is the moisture content of the biomass. Unlike miscanthus or switchgrass, where you can go in and harvest in February when it’s pretty much bone dry, and all the nitrogen has already been moved back down underground, sorghum doesn’t work that way,” Brown said. Because biomass sorghum is grown annually, growing until frost comes, when it is harvested it has a high moisture content. “When we cut it down, there’s tons of biomass. I don’t know that there’s anything else that can match it in the area, but the biomass is really high moisture. For the existing cellulosic idea as it stands now, that is not very useful,” he said. “That’s one of the roadblocks to biomass sorghum right now,” he said. “Sweet sorghum, where you squeeze the sugary juice out like sugarcane, may be closer on the horizon. There is an ethanol plant starting up in southern Illinois that plans to use 25 percent sweet sorghum. “Right now, we’re using sorghum as a model –maybe we can find sorghum genes that we can also tinker with in miscanthus or sugarcane,” he said. Brown added that with genetic studies and improvements there are other value-added opportunities for sorghum grain. “It’s not quite as nutritious as corn, but researchers are looking at it as a way to combat obesity. They are looking at compounds that will prevent you from absorbing all the nutrition in your food in the small intestine,” he said. Another gene found shows that sorghum produces a huge amount of antioxidant in the outer layer of the grain. “It produces 10 times more antioxidant than blueberries. The yield of sorghum hybrids with those traits aren’t quite what they need to be yet. There is stuff to work out with all of this,” he said. Continue reading
