Biofuels: Solution or Problem?

This event was held Oct. 17, 2007 at the University of Winnipeg, and was organized by:
The University of Winnipeg, Environmental Studies
Provincial Council of Women of Manitoba
Manitoba Eco-Network
Council of Women of Winnipeg
Consumers Association of Canada - MB

The moderator for the evening was Reg Sherren, CBC National Reporter

Panelists were:

John Morriss, Associate Publisher and Editorial Director, Farm Business Communications
Dr. David Levin, Associate Professor, Dept. of Biosystems Engineering, University of Manitoba
Shaun Loney, Director of Energy Policy, Government of Manitoba
Ken Sigurdson, Farmer and Researcher on Ethanol for National Farmers Union

John Morriss provided an overview on What is Biofuel?
Dr. David Levin - Biofuels: Solution in Transition (708 KB pdf)
Shaun Loney - Biofuels in Manitoba (913 KB pdf)
Ken Sigurdson - Ethanol: A Costly Misadventure (148 KB pdf)

What is biofuel? - by John Morriss

I've been tasked with giving a neutral presentation on this isse. I don't know if I can be neutral but I can legitimately claim to being a hands-on expert on the subject -- here's the woodpile that I've been building at my house at Winnipeg Beach for the last several weekends. I'll use it as an example to make a few basic points on the subject:

1. There are two main components of interest here -- solar energy and carbon. Through the process of photosynthesis, plants harvest carbon dioxide and solar energy and store them -- in this case in what we call wood -- for release when you burn the logs in the wood stove.

2. Carbon dioxide or CO2 is in the news lately and that issue needs no further explanation other than to make the point that this process is carbon-neutral. The CO2 going up my chimney was already in the air -- it's not fossil carbon from long-dead dinosaurs, or at least not all of it. It would have gone back into the air eventually, only more slowly through the natural process of decomposition.

3. There is no question about the energy balance of this process, as there is for other processes such as ethanol from grain. That issue will come up later, but in this case there is no doubt. I humped all this in from the local bush, and this represents about a half-gallon of gasoline in the chain saw plus whatever physical effort I expended in cutting, splitting and carrying. I'm pretty sure I couldn't heat my house for long on a half-gallon of fuel or by standing in the living room and doing calisthetics. On the other hand, if I were one of those people justifying a four-wheel-drive pickup to drive to work by claiming I needed to haul a cord of wood a year, that would be another matter.

4. The energy balance may be highly favourable but I make no such claims about the pollution factor. A good wood stove is probably only burning at 60 or 70 per cent efficiency and that's when it's at full throttle. At less than that they tend to smoke and on a calm winter morning with only a couple of us burning wood you can really smell the smoke in the area, and I understand that smoke is a problem in some areas such as Whitehorse where many people are burning wood, especially when you get atmospheric inversions. This is a nice way for a few of us to cut our electricity bills and get some exercise, but it is not a large-scale solution for the energy crisis.

5. This particular process -- the wood stove -- is a function of available technology -- a cast-iron box -- and the physical nature of the biofuel -- a log which you can pick up and haul into the house. It wouldn't be particularly efficient, at least on my part, to be cutting willows or cattails or switchgrass and stuffing them into the wood stove. But such materials, especially in managed plantations, will produce far more carbon per acre than my local wild stand of poplar and ash. With more sophisticated harvesting and combustion technology than I'm using in my wood stove, such products can be burned much more effectively to produce hot water, steam or electricity.

The technology issue is an important one when considering this question. We'll be hearing a lot about ethanol tonight, but keep in mind that one of the reasons that it's so far advanced is that the harvesting technology and delivery infrastructure was already established. You had to build the ethanol plants, but supplying them was just a question of having the truck or train diverted from the grain elevator or feedlot. There is no such system for switchgrass or willows or cattails. You can bale straw but that's still a pretty light product and the economics of transporting it any distance are not favourable.

When I was at the Biomass Energy Institute in the 1970s I met a gentleman who had been in the position of the proverbial buggy whip manufacturer after the Model T was introduced. Before the advent of the combine -- the combine harvester, because it combines harvesting and threshing -- those operations were separate. The grain would be cut, stooked and then fed into a stationery thresher that separated the grain but also left a big straw pile, which was often burned. During the 1940s, this gentleman designed a portable machine that could be hauled to the straw piles and then would turn the straw into pellets that could be fed into stove or furnace instead of the coal that was the main fuel at the time.

There were two problems. Along came the combine, and the end of the straw pile, and about the same time fuel oil became available, so oil furnaces replaced coal. But if such a machine were available today, it might change the economics of harvesting biomass for fuel.

At this point, I'd like to think in terms of tons per acre -- I'm being highly approximate so it can be your choice of metric or imperial tons.
- A cord of wood is about a tonne.
- The average yield of wheat on the Prairies is about a tonne an acre, but higher-yielding wheats in moister areas can be double that. There will also be about a tonne of straw produced as well.
- Corn produced in the U.S. Midwest yields about four tonnes per acre, and again, about the same amount of straw or stover. Ontario corn would be about the same, but in Manitoba our corn yield is only about 2.5 tonnes per acre.
- This is just a rough guess based on a web search but it seems fair to says that bionergy crops such as switchgrass or willows or cattails can produce 8-12 tonnes per acre. In Brazil, the sugar cane yield is apparently over 70 tonnes per acre.

What can we take from these numbers?
- We are only touching the tip of the iceberg if we're really serious, but we need the technology to use these materials.
- If we are talking about ethanol from grain, note that Manitoba is at a disadvantage to other areas. This is simply a function of moisture and frost-free days. In the farm community there is much discussion about whether Canadian wheat yields are being restricted by the variety registration system. I'm straying into an area where I could be accused of ignoring my instructions to be neutral, but let's just say that there is a certain amount of politics mixed up with the science on this issue, and that I liked the comment by one farmer that these are "Sasquatch" varieties -- everyone thinks they might see one someday, but no one ever has. We are certainly never going to approach U.S. corn yields with wheat in Manitoba or anywhere else.
- So far, ethanol has been produced from corn and wheat because they are more amenable to the action of the natural yeasts and other organisms in the traditional distillation process. If you could produce alcohol from some of these other materials such as straw or switchgrass, which have a higher yield and don't require as much fertilizer and other input costs, the economics of the system would change dramatically. This is the so-called "cellulosic ethanol" process. I'm a but tempted to use the Sasquatch analogy again here. When I was at the Biomass Institute over 30 years ago, this technology using enzymes or the like, was just around the corner. Today it's just around the corner.

So I retain some skepticism, but on the other hand, some pretty big outfits are now putting research money into this -- Volkswagen, Honda, Royal Dutch Shell, DuPont, ADM and others. That makes you suspect that they just might pull this off. If so, this will drastically change the economics and energy balance of ethanol. Again, this is to say the least controversial. I've seen estimates that producing ethanol from corn results in anywhere from a net loss of 25 per cent to a net gain of 35 per cent. One way or another, that's not too impressive. If the process can be made to work with straw or dedicated biocrops producing several tonnes more per acre than corn or wheat, then the economics and energy balance change considerably.

As for producing diesel fuel from oilseed crops such as canola or soybeans, it appears the net energy balance is more favourable. However there is recent controversy as to whether burning these fuels actually produces more greenhouse gas because of the nitrogen fertilizer requirement, at least for canola.

I claim no expertise on that question. I can only observe that if the technology allows us to move to the next generation of biofuels and process crops grown specifically for energy. I would not want to be long corn or canola futures.

There are also crops that might produce more oil at lower cost, such as Jatropha, a plant which grows as a weed in Asia and Africa and which produces an inedible nut with almost 40 per cent oil. I was at Bayer headquarters in Germany last month, and it is putting a major research effort into this crop.

We don't need a high-tech solution such as cellulosic ethanol -- the technology is already here. Again, burning plant material to produce hot water, steam or even electricity is no great trick. We seem to have forgotten an old but perfectly feasible technology in this country -- district heating. Until a few years ago, 140 buildings in downtown Winnipeg were heated with steam heat from the Amy St. steam plant, and there was also a plant in River Heights, where many homes were built without chimneys and were connected to central heat until the 1970s. They became uneconomic but I believe part of that was age and inefficiency and I assume that systems would be more efficient today.

In Denmark, 1.5 million houses are heated with district heating, many of which are fueled with biomass. Some are co-generation plants, producing electricity and then using the waste heat for district heating. This is a town in Denmark with a combined solar and biofuel district heating system. In St. Laurent, the community is hoping to build a district heating plant fed by cattails, using a biomass burner designed by Vidir Biomass, a local company.

The other component to mention is biogas, or turning manure and sewage and other material into methane in a biological digester. I left the Biomass Energy Institute in 1975 with the then-general opinion that it wouldn't work in our cold climate. Then four years ago I visited an 840-cow dairy just a few miles into Minnesota, where the farmer had built a unit which was producing all the heat for the farm plus running a generator producing over 3,000 kilowatt hours a day - enough for 75 homes - and feeding it to the grid. It had been running 24/7, 98 per cent of the time for four years. Conclusion. It works just fine and since this process greatly reduces the volume and odour of manure or sewage, may have a lot of potential for smaller communities or large livestock operations.

That sums it up. I hope I've been reasonably neutral, though I do have an opinion, which has probably come through, which is that biofuel has big potential, but not necessarily with current technology. I look forward to the discussions later.
Thank you.

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