Volkswagon, Shell to study Canadian-style cellulose ethanol
Excellent news for Iogen Corp., the cellulose ethanol company based in Ottawa. Volkswagon and Shell, which owns an equity interest in Iogen, have agreed to jointly assess the economic feasibility of producing cellulose ethanol in Germany using Iogen’s innovative process. The three companies made the announcement at the North American auto show in Detroit.
“Iogen’s cellulose ethanol is a fully renewable advanced biofuel made from the non-food portion of agriculture residue, such as cereal straws and corn stover, and is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in road transport,” the companies said in a statement.
Iogen, it points out, operates the world’s only cellulose ethanol demonstration-scale facility and made its first commercial shipments in spring 2004. I know the company has been exploring the possibility of building a commercial plant in Canada and/or the United States but there hasn’t been much news on that front. I’m glad to see the company may get some traction in Europe, and certainly Volkswagon is a great partner to have — not to mention Shell as a minority investor. Certainly a development to watch closely.
The ethanol debate continues to thrive. Ethanol bashers love to cite studies by Cornell academic David Pimentel, who insists that large-scale commercial ethanol production is a fool’s game because the energy it takes to produce ethanol is generally more than the energy you get out of the end product. They say the push for ethanol production, mainly in the U.S., is a farmer subsidy in disguise and nothing else.
The same views exist in Canada. My rip the heart right out of the ethanol bashers’ argument. A former senior executive at Shell came to the same conclusion at a farmers’ conference in England. Fact is, Ford, GM and other automakers are moving aggressively toward flex-fuel vehicles, government mandates are coming into play, and if Canada can’t meet its own mandates locally then it will have to import from somewhere else. Ethanol is here to stay folks, so get over it.
If Iogen can help us meet those objectives and industry demand in the most energy-efficient way possible, then let’s hope Volkwagon and Shell can help kickstart things. In the meantime, is it really injustice to toss a bone to farmers and aboriginal groups trying to find jobs and new markets for their crops?
(BTW: For a terrific post on the ethanol issue, click here for commentary from Joel Makower. He discusses why GM is getting into ethanol, how ethanol production methods have improved, and how Brazil has successfully built an ethanol infrastructure).
(Also, as an FYI, check out this CNET News.com article on biodiesel and alternative fuels. It’s worth a quick read.)
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
January 11th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
A link to George Monbiot’s paper which identifies the limits to biofuels,
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/
Feeding Cars, Not People
December 12, 2004
By George Monbiot
With the main point that:
“To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United Kingdom.(8) Switching to green fuels requires four and half times our arable area. Even the EU’s more modest target of 20% by 2020 would consume almost all our cropland.
If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the impact on global food supply will be catastrophic: big enough to tip the global balance from net surplus to net deficit. If, as some environmentalists demand, it is to happen worldwide, then most of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people.
This prospect sounds, at first, ridiculous. Surely if there was unmet demand for food, the market would ensure that crops were used to feed people rather than vehicles? There is no basis for this assumption. The market responds to money, not need. People who own cars have more money than people at risk of starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel and poor people’s demand for food, the car-owners win every time. Something very much like this is happening already. Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the global increase in crop production is being used to feed animals: the number of livestock on earth has quintupled since 1950.(9) The reason is that those who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who buy only subsistence crops.
Green fuel is not just a humanitarian disaster; it is also an environmental disaster. Those who worry about the scale and intensity of today’s agriculture should consider what farming will look like when it is run by the oil industry. Moreover, if we try to develop a market for rapeseed biodiesel in Europe it will immediately develop into a market for palm oil and soya oil. Oilpalm can produce four times as much biodiesel per hectare as rape, and it is grown in places where labour is cheap. Planting it is already one of the world’s major causes of tropical forest destruction. Soya has a lower oil yield than rape, but the oil is a by-product of the manufacture of animal feed. A new market for it will stimulate an industry which has already destroyed most of Brazil’s cerrado (one of the world’s most biodiverse environments) and much of its rainforest.”
January 12th, 2006 at 11:32 am
If you operate on the assumption that biodiesel and ethanol will totally replace gasoline and diesel around the world, then perhaps you have cause for concern, but I don’t think anybody is suggesting we go down that path. Weaning ourselves — with the key word being wean — from fossil fuels will require a combination of approaches, combining hybrid technology with ethanol/biodiesel and flex-fuel alternatives, and even adding a plug-in electric component so more of our transportation-related energy can come from a grid that will increasingly be dominated by nuclear and renewables. Remember, the less oil-based fuel we use the longer it lasts.
Also, many of the newer approaches to making biodiesel and ethanol use crop residue that might otherwise be burned or composted, while production using corn and other crops that would be ideal for animal feed leaves behind a mash that can still be used as a high-nutrient feed for animals. Agreed, if we’re heading to a point where there’s no more gasoline/diesel and ALL vehicles must run on biofuel then it’s not sustainable, but that day is a long, long way off and becomes longer the more we supplement fossil-fuels with biofuels and rely more on emission-free grid power.
I don’t think you should completely rule out biofuels by taking an extreme view of the situation based on scenarios that may not present a problem for a 100 years.
March 7th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Hey Tyler,
I just wrote an article about cellulose ethanol and Iogen Corp.
http://www.carlist.com/autonews/2006/autonews_254.html
I was also on ABC radio with Jeff Passmore of Iogen Corp. You can hear it at
http://www.carlist.com/wabc_radio/240206/240206.html
January 10th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
The how do you explain Brazil’s results? They have become oil free and use flex fuel cars so that there is no issue with mixture problems with gas. We are tariffing biofuel from Brazil now and if we mandated cars to use flex fuel it would open up trade with Latin America in this field and stop subsidizing our farmers we could allow free trade to do its job due to consumer demand. I trust Robert Zurbrin who wrote, “Energy Victory,” on this one. This is the fastest, cheapest way to oil dependence, until other factors, electric cars, etc., come into play.