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Cellulosic deliveries

Posted: August 30, 2010 at 11:46 AM CST

The news out of Denmark is that Inbicon has delivered its first consignment of 28,500 liters (7,500 gallons) of cellulosic ethanol out of an order of 5 million liters purchased by Statoil, the Norway-based oil company.

With all the cellulosic news coming out as company after company trumpets the latest “breakthrough,” one might not catch the significance of this. While many have been advancing technologies and moving into demo scale work, there actually is very little cellulosic ethanol being made.

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Iogen facility in Ottawa. The demo plant there has been operating for four years and is working on R8 (revision number eight), with plans for R9 waiting when that’s done. The folks at Iogen shared an interesting insight. Apparantly, up ‘til now Iogen is the only cellulosic developer that has actually made enough ethanol to have an inventory. According to Iogen’s website, they’ve made about 80,000 gallons this year, and a cumulative total of about 350,000 gallons since the demo planted started up. The company has supplied cellulosic ethanol for several racers wanting to use the advanced biofuel in U.S. races—even after suggesting the race drivers check out various U.S. companies to find closer supplies.

The conclusion? Although many are claiming breakthroughs and begun operating demo plants, few have actually made enough ethanol to supply even just 1,000 gallons for a race or two.

Doing a walk through of the research facilities and demo plant at Iogen brings it home. Research starts at a micro scale (think tiny test tubes), moves to beakers on the bench scale and on to pilot scale, which means moving up to batches of a few gallons at a time. The real test comes when scaling up to demo plant size, where the tanks are around 1,000 gallons and one sees what happens with large volumes. Demo plants don’t run continuously. Batches are run to test out various solutions to a problem, with shut downs and reconfigurations occurring between batches. It takes a while before enough of the kinks are worked out where the runs last longer and more ethanol is produced.

The real indicators of progress towards commercialization of cellulosic ethanol will come with announcements like this week’s from Denmark with Inbicon successfully delivering the first 7,500 gallons.

-Susanne Retka Schill