Lack of money not technology biggest block for biofuels
source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/05/BUTB17F9IA.DTL&feed=rss.technology
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Engineers and entrepreneurs meeting in San Francisco this week for the 31st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals said the industry stands at a major turning point.
Companies trying to make ethanol from grass, crop stubble and wood are building demonstration plants across the country. Within the next two or three years, the world will finally see whether these cellulosic ethanol plants can make large amounts of fuel at competitive prices.
"It's not a question of if it will happen," said James Flatt, senior vice president with Mascoma Corp., which runs a demonstration facility making fuel from wood chips in Rome, N.Y. "We have a handful of companies that are right on the cusp of building commercial-scale facilities to prove this can work."
But this turning point comes as the economy struggles through a severe recession. Biorefineries can cost $200 million to $300 million to build, and financing is hard to find.
"Capital availability has gone down exponentially," Flatt said.
Funding hasn't dried up completely. Doug Cameron, chief science adviser for the Piper Jaffray & Co. investment bank, said money will start to flow again when some of the cellulosic ethanol biorefineries finally open. Unlike older biorefineries, which make ethanol from corn, these next-generation facilities make fuel by breaking down the cellulose in woody plants.
"There's a lot of money out there, a lot of people who want to invest in this but don't know which (projects) to invest in," Cameron said.
The symposium, which started Sunday and ends today, was organized by the Society for Industrial Microbiology and sponsored in part by the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley.
While many of the event's panels focused on science, some addressed the larger political debates swirling around biofuels. Attendees talked about balancing food production with fuel production. They discussed ways to calculate the environmental effects of biofuels.
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Switchgrass as a Bioenergy Crop
Switchgrass is not the only or possibly even the best biomass species for cellulosic ethanol production, but it does possess some ecological characteristics that make it a very good candidate. Among its positive qualities, switchgrass offers:
pest and disease resistance,
high yields of cellulose,
low fertility needs,
cultivars that are locally adapted and relatively available,
excellent wildlife habitat,
carbon sequestration in its extensive and very deep root system,
tolerance of poor soils and wide variations of soil pH,
drought and flood tolerance (depending on the ecotype and variety), andefficient water use in grassland ecosystems.
But many other perennial warm-season grasses may possess these same characteristics and more. What makes switchgrass particularly suitable as an ethanol feedstock? In research trials beginning in the mid-1980s, the Department of Energy began to seek plant species that would yield high quality and quantity biofuel feedstocks. Among the plants considered were reed canarygrass and switchgrass, among some other grasses and legumes. In the trials, switchgrass had the highest yields and breeding work was subsequently focused on switchgrass to the exclusion of the others.
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