As mentioned in the previous post, we announced a partnership with the City of Sioux Falls Regional Landfill yesterday that we would be using their landfill gas to power our ethanol plant. The speeches from that press conference are now on POET TV and can also be viewed here:
If you'd like the text version of Jeff Lautt's speech, you can find it here. Photos from the event will soon be available on our flickr page.
An ethanol plant completely powered by waste? It's possible that POET Biorefining - Chancellor could displace 100 percent of its natural gas usage with renewable energy.
Late last year we announced the construction of a solid waste fuel boiler that will burn wood waste that would otherwise have been destined for local landfills. The energy from the boiler will displace up to 60 percent of the plant's natural gas usage.
Yesterday, we announced a partnership with the Sioux Falls Area Regional Landfill that will see that same facility near Chancellor use methane from the landfill to displace even more natural gas. The combination of the two alternative energy technologies will displace at least 90 percent of the plant's natural gas usage and potentially all of it.
Here's a schematic of the facility that explains the process:
As Jeff Lautt, EVP of Corporate Operations for POET, said in his speech:
As renewable energy has increased in America, defenders of the status quo have become fond of pointing out that the production of renewable energy requires fossil fuels. But, should the lack of renewable energy be a reason to not produce renewable energy? Today, most ethanol production facilities are dependent on fossil fuels, just like our country. But as the renewable economy grows, these same facilities will be able to draw their power from renewable sources, like we’re doing in Chancellor.
Around 12 months ago, construction started on an expansion of POET Biorefining - Chancellor that would see its ethanol production capacity double to 100 million gallons per year. The expansion was completed last week and it took the plant less than 24 hours to reach its new nameplate capacity.
Construction on a solid waste fuel boiler (pictured here) continues at the site and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of this year. Once it is done, the solid waste fuel boiler will replace up to 60 percent of the plant's natural gas usage. For more information on the boiler, see this post announcing the project last year.
Last November, POET announced that an expansion of our Chancellor, S.D. ethanol production facility would include a solid waste fuel boiler. The biomass boiler will replace more than half of the expanded plant's natural gas usage. Last night, a local TV station covered the announcement in more depth. A transcript is available on their web site, but I've posted the piece here:
Environmental Defense produced a video last year called Cap. Trade. Grow. The video advocates a cap and trade system for carbon emissions in the United States. It goes into detail about the downside to America's addiction to oil and features some companies that are part of the solution. POET CEO Jeff Broin is interviewed regarding our cellulosic ethanol project. The 10-minute video has been posted to our favorites section on POET TV and can be watched here:
We brought the video camera to Chancellor for the announcement of the solid waste fuel boiler last week and just got around to posting the speeches. The videos of four speakers can be found here. Representing the corporate office of POET is James Moe, COO of POET Design & Construction and POET Plant Management:
There was also an interesting blog post on the announcement from After Gutenberg. The post focuses on the improvement to the Chancellor plant's EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) and the kudos from a prominent blogger are appreciated. The installation of a solid waste fuel boiler would certainly improve the EROEI, but it also reveals the flaw in using that measure to judge energy production. While many critics of ethanol are basing their calculations on a snapshot, and often that snapshot was taken years ago, the production of ethanol from corn is relentlessly improving its efficiency. Critics often fail to factor in the incremental increases in efficiency or the big increases like a solid waste fuel boiler.
But the flaws with EROEI are even deeper than calculation errors. It is essentially another form of the net energy balance equation that David Pimentel invented for critiquing ethanol. For an explanation of why that is a flawed argument, see Dr. Bruce Dale's paper Thinking clearly about biofuels: ending the irrelevant 'net energy' debate and developing better performance metrics for alternative fuels that ran in the September, 2007 issue of Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining. As Dale explains, the primary problem with the argument is that it treats all energy sources the same when that is not the case:
If all megajoules (MJ) were equal, then energy markets would reflect that fact. But the energy markets do no such thing. At current prices, an MJ (or Btu) of natural gas is worth about 3.5 times an MJ of coal, and an MJ of petroleum is worth more than five times an MJ of coal. An MJ of electricity is worth about 12 times an MJ of the coal raw material from which electricity is frequently generated. Clearly, all MJ are not created equal.
The other curious part of this debate is that opponents of ethanol never talk about the net energy balance of other liquid transportation fuels, like gasoline. Again according to Dale, gasoline is a net energy loss of 18 percent and ethanol is a gain of 27 percent. Who has the net energy problem?
Yesterday, I was at POET Biorefining - Chancellor, an ethanol production facility located about 30 miles from POET's corporate headquarters in Sioux Falls, S.D. We were there to announce the installation of a solid waste fuel boiler that will replace half of the expanded plant's natural gas usage with power from burning waste wood. The installation is part of an expansion that will double the plant's ethanol production capacity to 100 million gallons per year.
(waste wood that will be used as a power source at POET Biorefining - Chancellor).
There was a substantial amount of press coverage and we'll post links to all on our web site, but I thought I'd mention a few here. Two local TV news stations attended the event and posted the video coverage on their web sites: KSFY and KTIV. The story was also picked up by Biopact, a biofuels blog that I've been reading for years. There are photos of the speakers on Flickr and speeches will be posted on POET TV soon.
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