Tag Archives: fuel
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
UK Biomass: Savoir Or Destroyer?
By Joao Peixe | Thu, 19 September 2013 Taking effect April 2015, all biomass-fired power generators in the UK will have to prove that they are doing more good than harm or face government funding cuts. UK government has warned that biomass-fired power generators have to prove the sustainability of their fuel or lose over £1 billion in new investment financing. In the UK, biomass power generation supports over 3,000 jobs, but the government isn’t necessarily convinced it’s supporting biodiversity. This is something the beneficiaries of the government’s financial largesse will have to prove in line with new regulatory criteria. As of April 2015, the new criteria will apply to all generators 1 MW capacity or more using solid biomass or biogas feedstock, and generators will have to prove that biomass has been sourced using sustainable forest management practices. Ideally, biomass electricity will represent a 70% greenhouse gas savings over fossil fuel as long as the biomass (in this case wood fuel) itself is from sustainable sources. Minister for energy and climate change Greg Barker said that the new criteria will boost investor certainty and simultaneously ensure that the biomass is delivered in a transparent and sustainable way. “Independent audit reports will need to show proof that sustainable harvest rates are used in conjunction with biodiversity protection and respect of land use rights for indigenous populations,” the minister was quoted as saying. There will be no further changes to the criteria before 2027, according to the government, and all biomass generators who adhere to the new guidelines will continue to receive subsidies. Continue reading
Why The Advanced Biofuel Industry Is Struggling
By Robert Rapier | Fri, 13 September 2013 Last week, The Economist posed the following question: “What happened to biofuels?” The biofuels in question are so-called second generation biofuels that are produced from trees, grasses, algae, — in general, feedstocks that don’t also have a use as food. The appeal is obvious to anyone concerned about the world’s dependence on petroleum, and further worried that a major shift to biofuels will cause food prices to rise. So let’s address that question. Entrepreneurs Revive a Century-Old Idea About a decade ago, a number of entrepreneurs began to use their political influence to convince the US government that the only things keeping the US from running our cars on advanced biofuels was lack of government support, and interference from oil companies. These advocates eventually won over enough political support that state and federal governments began to funnel large amounts of taxpayer dollars into advanced biofuel ventures. President Bush spoke of running cars on switchgrass in his 2006 State of the Union address. The federal government sought to deal with supposed oil company intransigence with a mandate requiring gasoline blends to contain growing volumes of corn ethanol initially, but starting in 2010 advanced biofuels as well. The federal government mandated that by the year 2022 the fuel supply had to use 36 billion gallons of biofuels, with 21 billion gallons coming from advanced biofuels. But the history of cellulosic fuels goes back much further than many of those entrepreneurs realized, and many set out to reinvent the wheel with tax dollars. It was nearly 200 years ago, in 1819, when French chemist Henri Braconnot discovered how to break cellulose down into component sugars, which can then be fermented to ethanol. The Germans first commercialized cellulosic ethanol production from wood in 1898, and the first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant in the US was built in 1910 to convert lumber mill waste into ethanol. Nevertheless, many budding biofuel entrepreneurs insisted that this was a field in its infancy, and therefore required generous government support until it could stand on its own. Some attempted to produce fuel from wood via a different route. Wood (or natural gas or coal) can be partially burned to produce synthesis gas (syngas), which consists of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That syngas can be converted into diesel (among other fuels) using the same process that Germany used to produce fuel in World War II. The problem is that this is a terribly expensive process, and so there are only a handful of commercial plants around the world that use either natural gas or coal (South Africa, which had its roots in their inability to secure petroleum because of sanctions resulting from their apartheid policies). We do have a small trickle of advanced biofuels that are beginning to collect EPA credits. In other words, for the first time the EPA is officially approving batches of these fuels for sale into the market. This first took place last year with a batch of 20,069 gallons from a company that subsequently went bankrupt. And therein lies the challenge. Of course this stuff can be produced. But can it be produced economically? The answer to that is no, the approaches that have been taken to date are nowhere near that point regardless of the hype to the contrary. Moore’s Law to the Rescue? The high costs have never been a deterrent for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who wielded Moore’s Law as the solution to every problem. In their minds, the advanced biofuel industry would mimic the process by which computer chips continually became faster and cheaper over time. But advanced biofuels amounted to a fundamentally different industrial process that was already over 100 years old. A decade into this experiment it is clear that Moore’s Law isn’t solving the cost problem. In an interview with Wired Magazine in 2006 called My Big Bet on Biofuels , Vinod Khosla, one of the co-founders and the first CEO of Sun Microsystems, described his investment in Kergy (which later became Range Fuels). He wrote that to his knowledge, they had invented “the first anaerobic thermal conversion machine.” In fact at that time there were hundreds if not thousands of these gasifiers around the world, mostly used to produce power (a much lower cost proposition than biofuel production). My experience touches on all of these areas: biomass conversion, gasification, and production of liquid fuels — and I wrote a number of articles critical of the claims coming from the Range Fuels/Khosla camp. Some referred to me as “Range Fuels’ Number 1 Critic.” But the mainstream press couldn’t say enough great things about the company, right up until they declared bankruptcy in 2011. Hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer and investor dollars had been wasted, and the company never produced a drop of qualifying renewable fuel. Now some might say that failure is just a part of doing business and trying new things. That’s true, and I would never have criticized these companies and their promoters except they were influencing energy policy on the basis of inflated claims and collecting tax dollars as a result. If entrepreneurs try and fail on their own dime, then that’s their business. (I work for an energy entrepreneur). But if they take tax dollars, it’s my business as a taxpayer. And if they take investment dollars, it may become my business if I am advising investors. Epic Analyst Fail In fact I did give a fair bit of investment advice as some of the advanced biofuel firms began to take their companies public. Amyris (NSDQ: AMRS), Gevo (NSDQ: GEVO), and KiOR (NSDQ: KIOR) were three Vinod Khosla-backed companies that went public, and the value of his stakes has reportedly declined more than a billion dollars since (nearly a billion dollars at the time of that article, but the shares of all those companies continued to decline). I have been asked by investors about the prospects for each of these three companies (among others) since their IPOs, and every time I warned people away. That has proven to be good advice, because since their respective IPOs Amyris is down 85 percent, Gevo has fallen 89 percent, and KiOR is down 88 percent. Yet one analyst after another recommended these firms to clients, and then continued to reiterate those recommendations. Take KiOR, for example. KiOR uses a process in which they rapidly heat up wood chips to form a bio-oil, which can then be upgraded with hydrogen in pretty standard refining equipment to produce diesel and gasoline. KiOR has their own spin on the process, but the basic process has been around for a long time. The problem has always been cost. After the IPO, the market promptly bid KiOR’s value up to $2 billion. In response, I wrote an article arguing that KiOR was grossly overvalued. (I explained my decision not to short the company even though I felt they were grossly overvalued, but some investors contacted me to tell me they did short the company on the basis of my recommendations). But analysts remained undeterred. After KiOR announced a net loss of $31.3 million for the first quarter of this year, several analysts reiterated ratings of “Overweight” or “Outperform” on the company. For instance, Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James reiterated the “Outperform” rating that he first made on August 15, 2011 when shares were at $11. When second quarter results came in far below projections, Molchanov reiterated the Outperform rating and $9 price target. Shares are now down under $2, a drop of more than 50 percent just since the Q2 results were released. The point here is that this was totally predictable from the chemistry and low energy density of biomass, and of the science involved in trying to economically turn that into a low margin commodity like fuel. There is no magic catalyst or magic process that can overcome that. No matter how I sliced the numbers, I couldn’t see how any of these biomass to fuel companies were going to make any money other than through government largesse. (I am not saying that no scheme will ever work economically, but many in these space don’t understand the challenges and thus they fail by over-promising and under-delivering). So I advised investors to stay away, even as the analysts continued to believe the hype that many of these companies put out. No Funeral Just Yet KiOR isn’t dead yet though. In fact, I talked to a reporter on Monday, and advised that they would probably bounce off the bottom soon. There is probably one or two cycles of more positive news ahead, and they may very well get additional injections of cash from Mr. Khosla. As if on queue, shares were up 25% in trading on Tuesday. But even though the share price may see sharp gains at times, the road ahead will be very challenging for them, and the risk of bankruptcy is high in the long-term. So I would continue to avoid most companies in this space, unless you simply want to put some money down in lieu of a trip to Vegas. I don’t feel the same way about the entire renewable energy space. Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, for instance, benefit from Moore’s Law effects, but their manufacture is very different than the production of biofuels from biomass. And in fact, we are seeing not only exponential growth in the installation of solar PV panels, we see costs dropping exponentially. I have been reiterating my view for more than six years that I think the future belongs to solar power. The mistake from biofuel entrepreneurs, politicians, and investors in that space was that this is how things would play out for biofuels. By. Robert Rapier Continue reading
