The race for nonfood biofuel

• Range Fuels, a Broomfield, Colo., company, announced that in April it raised more than $100 million to help finish construction of its Soperton, Ga., cellulosic ethanol plant. With completion slated for 2009, that plant is designed to turn logging residue into 20 million gallons of ethanol a year using a thermochemical process.

• BlueFire Ethanol’s announcement last month that it will break ground soon on its first commercial cellulosic-ethanol plant. The company says it will use a different process using wood and garden waste from a landfill in Lancaster, Calif., to begin producing 3.1 million gallons annually by 2009.

Adding fuel to the cellulosic fire, the new farm bill passed by Congress last month includes $384 million in new tax credits to spur cellulosic development. The US Department of Energy also is investing about $385 million in six commercial-scale projects to be built over the next four years.

The plants will have a combined capacity of 130 million gallons.

“Just three years ago, people would tell me: ‘Oh, professor, things are not that bad [with the nation’s fuel situation]; there’s not a need for that kind of radical change,” says Lee Lynd, a cellulosic pioneer who is a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and chief technology officer for Mascoma.

But now with food supply, climate change, and gas-price issues, “all of a sudden we have this attitude emerging that the markets [for cellulosic] are very real,” Dr. Lynd says.

Often seen as a technological “silver bullet,” cellulosic ethanol promises to require far less energy to refine than corn ethanol does. It does not require land that might otherwise provide food, as its feedstock is nonfood agricultural waste.

On that basis, cellulosic ethanol could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions up to 87 percent if used broadly in the United States for transport fuel, the US Department of Energy reports.

The potential of cellulosic biofuels to meet world demand is suggested by the current impact of corn-based ethanol, biodiesel, and other biofuels. Biofuels will account for 63 percent of oil supply growth from non-OPEC countries this year, taking global production of crop-based fuel to more than 1.5 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency.

Output is projected to grow by 425,000 barrels a day this year, a 57 percent increase from a year ago, the agency reported.

“We feel like things have accelerated much more quickly in the past six months than they have in the past five years,” says Brent Erickson, vice president for industrial and environmental technology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a Washington trade group that includes a number of cellulosic-ethanol companies.

Still, some environmentalists are hesitant about endorsing cellulosic technology without qualification, since there could be “good cellulosic and bad cellulosic,” says Nathanael Greene, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York.

Basing government funding and tax incentives on the environmental performance of a technology – supporting technologies that use the least water, land, and other resources while cutting more CO2 emissions – is the key, he says.

“We’ve got to pay attention to the performance of new biofuels, not give credentials out for who produces the most gallons,” he says, “but who produces the best in terms of water use, water quality, soil erosion, wildlife and habitat enhancement – and greenhouse-gas emissions.”

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