Abengoa Bioenergy Corporation is forging ahead with groundbreaking research at its research and development headquarters in Chesterfield, Mo.
Chris Standlee, Abengoa executive vice-president, says their goal is to make ethanol from cellulose, which is essentially a waste product.
“Our research is ongoing at three facilities,” he says. “One is the pilot plant in York, Neb., which actually produced ethanol from cellulose in September 2007. We phased that up to a demonstration scale facility which can produce over 1.2 million gallons a year.
“We’re getting ready to start up a demonstration scale phase facility in Salamanca, Spain,” he says. “And we are currently working on the engineering and design phase for a commercial scale cellulose facility that is going to be built in Hugeton, Kan.”
Abengoa was able to get two grants from the U.S. Department of Energy through the Energy and Security Act of 2007, one of which is helping to fund the $300 million Hugeton plant.
The Hugeton project, described by Standlee as “very big,” is keeping the engineers busy working on the preliminary design. The plant is expected to open in early 2010 with an expected production of 15 million gallons a year.
When the plant goes online, Standlee says it will “prove the technologies that we have been developing for several years and that we’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing. Those technologies are to prove that ethanol can be produced on an economical commercial scale from otherwise waste products such as wheat straw, corn stover, milo stalks and prairie grass.
“Our goal,” he says, “is to prove our concept and technology, and to improve those technologies. We will tweak them a little bit so that it’s as efficient as possible and become an alternative to additional imports of foreign oil.”
Abengoa also has two ethanol facilities under construction across the river in Madison, Ill. and Mt. Vernon, Ind. Both employ about 65 people and are expected to be operating by late 2009 and produce 88 million gallons per year.
To put this in perspective, Standlee says that among these facilities, the output should be close to “300 million gallons a year which means 300 million gallons of foreign oil that America will not have to import.”
Speaking out about recent criticisms of ethanol and its potential, Standlee says, “Some of the criticism has been leveled at the greenhouse gas impacts of ethanol, and there has been some characterization of ethanol as not being significantly better than petroleum.”
He cited a recent University of Nebraska study indicating that the direct impact of ethanol production reduces greenhouse gases by over 50 percent compared to petroleum.
“And that’s for corn-based ethanol,” he says. “When you get to cellulose-based ethanol, which is what we’re trying to develop and prove, then the greenhouse gas reduction, as opposed to existing petroleum, is closer to 90 percent.”
He also refuted the theory that ethanol production drove up the price of corn. “In the last several months, the price of corn was tied primarily to the price of energy, and when energy and oil went down, then grains went down despite ethanol production continuing to rise.
“That fact leads one to believe,” he says, “that ethanol is not the primary factor controlling the price of corn. That price is more related to energy.”
Abengoa’s goal is very simple.
“Every barrel of oil we import,” Standlee says, “gives the foreign oil economies more control over our destiny, and we want to lessen that as much as we can.”
