Biofuels Mandates Around the World: 2012

Jim Lane | November 22, 2012

Brazil, India, the US, China and the EU point the way towards a 60 billion gallon biofuels market by 2022 – but can the capacity be built, and can the mandates survive pressure from opponents?

In Florida, the Digest today releases its annual review of biofuels mandates and targets around the world, looking at the state of biofuels mandates in 52 countries.

The bulk of mandates continue to come from the EU-27, where the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) specifies a 10 percent renewables content by 2020 but is under significant challenge over food vs fuel and indirect land use change concerns.

13 countries in the Americas have mandates or targets in place, 12 in Asia-Pac, and 8 in Africa.

Besides the EU, the major blending mandates that will drive global demand are those set in the US, China and Brazil – each of which has set targets – or, in the case of Brazil, is already there – at levels in the 15-20 percent range by 2020-2022. India’s fast-growing economy also has a 20 percent ethanol mandate in place for 2017, but the country has a shaky record of implementing mandates, so far.

Mandates in the Americas

Argentina
Has a B7 biodiesel mandate in place – increased in 2010 from B5. The government had previously been on a program to reach B10 biodiesel blending by October, up from 7 percent in May, but a report in Agra-Net suggests that high soybean oil prices are the causal factor in delays in B10, in addition to falling demand for diesel which is bringing down import pressures.

Also has an E5 ethanol mandate in place.

Brazil
Mandates a minimum ethanol content of 18-20 percent – reduced from 25 percent last year when ethanol supplies tightened on rising global prices for sugar.

On the biodiesel side, the Brazilian biodiesel industry is pushing for an intermediate blending rate of 7% for 2013 before the expected implementation of B10 in 2014 to help boost local demand for biodiesel. The country currently has a B5 policy but about 60% of the installed capacity is currently idled. In order to reach the B20 seen for 2020, the industry says it needs $14 billion in investment. has a B2 biodiesel mandate, scheduled to increase to B5 in 2013

Canada
Canada has a Renewable Fuel Standard featuring E5 ethanol, and B2 biodiesel. Canada introduced the 2 percent biodiesel mandate as of July 2011, and he Canadian Renewable Fuels Association and the Canadian Truckers Alliance are locked in a tit-for-tat debate over it. The CTA is claiming that the mandate will push diesel prices higher and that biodiesel is bad for some engines. On the other hand, the CRFA claims price increases would be unnoticeable over a 25-year period and that engines have shown better performance under state testing than with fossil diesel.  Four provinces have individual provincial mandates, up to E8.5.

Also, the national government released its final regulations last year for its 5 percent ethanol mandate. The Canadian Renewable Fuels Association said that an assessment conducted by econometric firm Doyletech Corporation concluded that, “the grand total of the annual positive economic impact of renewable fuels is $2.013 billion.”

Colombia
Has an E8 ethanol mandate in place since 2008, with discussions underway to increase the mandate to 10 percent.

Chile
Has an E5 ethanol and B5 biodiesel target in place, no mandates.

Costa Rica
Has an E7 ethanol and B20 biodiesel mandate in place.

Jamaica
Has an E10 ethanol mandate that took effect last year.

Mexico
Has an E2 ethanol mandate in place in Guadalajara, and will expand the blending mandate next year (2012) to Mexico City and Monterrey.

Panama
In Panama, the country is preparing to introduce an ethanol mandate beginning with 2% in April 2013, rising to 5% from April 2014, hitting 7% in April 2015 and reaching 10% by April 2016.

Paraguay
Has an E24 ethanol mandate and a B1 biodiesel mandate in place.

Peru
Has an E7.8 ethanol, and B2 biodiesel mandate in place. Expected to move towards B5 biodiesel.

Uruguay
Has a B2 biodiesel policy in place, but isn’t obligatory, and requires the use of domestic biodiesel. Expected to move to E5 ethanol in 2015. A plan is underway to develop a biodiesel plant in Montevideo and an ethanol plant in Paysandú for a total investment of $130 million. The B5 policy should be obligatory by 2015.

Last winter in Uruguay, he government said it was hoping to implement a B5 policy this year but it will depend on the ability to boost domestic biodiesel production. Already a B2 policy exists,

USA

President Obama supports the preservation of the Renewable Fuel Standard, as a part of an “all of the above energy strategy”. However, there is fear that affordable private capital will not be available to support any major capacity building for advanced biofuels — putting the RFS itself, with its steep annual volumetric increases, in considerable jeopardy. The resulting lack of capacity and rewriting of mandates to support lower levels of capacity building — well, many US observers (including the heads of all the industry trade associations) take the view that the resulting market uncertainty will likely further reduce (or even zero out) investor interest in the sector.

The EPA proposes to mandate the blending of 15.2 billion gallons of renewable fuel into the US fuel supply in 2012, and increased the proposed mandate for advanced biofuels by 48 percent, to 2 billion gallons. The agency recently released its proposal for 2013 biodiesel requirements under the Renewable Fuel Standard:

Biomass-based diesel (1.3 billion gallons for 2013)

Other mandates have not yet been finalized for 2013. #012 mandated figures are:
Advanced biofuels (2.0 billion gallons; 1.21 percent)
Cellulosic biofuels (3.45 – 12.9 million gallons; 0.002 – 0.010 percent)
Total renewable fuels (15.2 billion gallons; 9.21 percent)

Overall, the US is moving towards a 36 billion gallon biofuels target by 2022.

Mandates in the EU

EU-27
The EU currently has a 5.75 percent mandate directive in place, and was scheduled to move to 10 percent by 2020. But the European Commission has now proposed to reduce biofuel targets from 10 percent to 5 percent, introduce indirect land use change into calculations on acceptable feedstocks, phase out the use of certain arable crops altogether, and provide “multiple counting” benefits that they say will accelerate advanced biofuels adoption by providing huge incentives for their development.

“Given the EU’s existing 10% biofuels target for 2020 – which is not changing – the new policy means that the increase from 5% to 10% will have to come from non-food feedstocks,” noted Raymond James energy analyst Pavel Molchanov. “Put another way, what is currently a ~$22 billion annual biofuel market in the EU would have to double entirely via non-food feedstocks.”

The revised targets have met with hostile response from current EU producers.

“A proposal based on unfounded and immature ILUC science and a 5% cap in 2020 would destroy the biofuels industries and related sectors such as crushing and sugar facilities. It would also cut off European farmers from a key market, reducing the crops diversification,” said the ePure ethanol industry association, in a statement released at the time of the EU proposal.

There are some winners. “The new EU policy will not exclusively benefit energy crop companies such as Ceres,” said Raymond James’ Molchanov. “Waste biomass and algae can also serve as non-food feedstocks that would meet the new EU criteria – in fact, the Commission specifically identifies them as good options – but there is no question that the new policy would meaningfully support the adoption of energy crops.

The algae producers also applauded the new proposals.

“This is important good news for the EU algae sector and for future support to algae biomass development, research and production in Europe,’ said the European Algae Biomass Association, in a prepared statement. “In addition to the quadruple counting – which per se is potentially going to attract strong investment and economic potential to the algae biomass production chain in Europe – the proposal that will be published today also highlights that algae will be among the few raw materials for biofuels production for which European and public support will be ensured well beyond 2020, as clearly stated at paragraph 2 (“Aims”) of the explanatory memorandum.

Mandates in Asia-Pac

Australia
The states of New South Wales has an E4 ethanol blending mandate and a B2 biodiesel mandate in place. The Queensland E5 ethanol mandate was expected to take effect in Fall 2011, but was shelved after opposition from the Against Ethanol Mandates Alliance.

China
Overall, the country seeks to move to a 10 percent biofuels mandate by 2020, and currently has a 15 percent overall target for 2020. Nine Chinese provinces have required 10% ethanol blends to date, including – Heilongjian, Jilin, Liaoning, Anhui, and Henan.

Fiji
The government approved last year a voluntary blend of 5% biodiesel and 10% ethanol with an eye on a mandate by the end of 2012, but action on the mandate has not been forthcoming

India
The country has an E5 ethanol mandate,  scheduled to move to E10 as soon as production is in place, and ultimately has set a goal of 20 percent for all biofuels content by 2017 – it is highly doubtful that they will reach the target.

Indonesia
An on-and-off 2.5 percent biodiesel mandate, and an E3 ethanol mandate.

Malaysia
The country’s B5 blending mandate  kicked off in June 2011. The program begins in Putrajaya and will be phased in over time throughout the rest of the country. Biodiesel will be price controlled while the government has recently removed the subsidy on fossil diesel.

New Zealand
Back in May, the Labour Party began pushing for the government to reinstate the biofuel obligation that the party had introduced in 2008 when it was in power that the National party later replaced with a biofuel subsidy—a policy that has allegedly failed—when it came into power. Without a subsidy or an obligation, the Labour Party says the burgeoning biofuels industry has been left without any support to grow or create jobs.

The Philippines
Has an E10 ethanol and B2 biodiesel mandate, supporters are asking the biodiesel mandate to be increased to B5.

South Korea
Currently has a B2 biodiesel mandate in place. This year’s introduction of a B2.5 biodiesel mandate is expected to boost demand for imported Malaysian palm oil for use as fuel. Malaysian palm oil imports accounted for 32.2% of South Korea’s oil imports during 2010. Palm oil is beginning to make in-roads in the Korean market for cooking as well.

Taiwan
Has a B1 biodiesel mandate in place since 2008; considering an E3 ethanol mandate.

Thailand
Has a B5 biodiesel mandate in place.

Vietnam
Has an E5 ethanol blending mandate.

In Thailand this month, the new policy mandating 5% blending of palm oil-based biodiesel came into effect on Nov. 1. The move to B5 from B4, which requires additional supply of 200,000 liters per day, was delayed due to lack of availability of locally-produced palm oil due to poor weather conditions but the supply issue has since been resolved, making way for implementation of the higher blend.

http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2012/11/07/thailand-rolls-out-b5-mandate-as-palm-oil-supplies-increase/

In Vietnam, the government was developing a plan as of October to promote biofuels production and consumption. Submitted by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the plan will include 5% mandatory biofuel use in some big cities. The plan includes increased production of ethanol and biodiesel to 1.8 million tons through 2015 with a vision to expand the plan to 2025.

In Taiwan, the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research released a report in October on the benefits of ethanol blending in Tainan. Just last year, the country began producing ethanol from agricultural waste products, and has been exploring the possibility of introducing a blending mandate with 95E3 ethanol, a blend of 3% ethanol. “Tainan has a vigorous sugar industry and a lot of fallow farmland,” noted Tainan Mayor Lai Ching-de. “Setting up a factory here would help revitalize the economy in rural areas and encourage young people to return home.”

http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2012/10/08/taiwan-looks-to-ethanol-blending-following-successful-ethanol-production/

In the Philippines this month, a government-owned corporation supporting more than 3 million Filipino coconut farmers, CIIF Oils Mills Group, has again asked the Department of Energy to increase the 2.0 percent minimum mandated biodiesel blend to 5.0 percent.

Mandates in Africa

Angola

Has an E10 ethanol blending mandate in place.

Ethiopia
Has an E5 ethanol blending mandate in place.

Kenya
Has an E10 mandate in place in Kisumu, the country’s third largest city.

Malawi
Has an E10 ethanol mandate in place, but depends on availability.

Mozambique
Has an E10 ethanol mandate in place.

Nigeria
Has an E10 ethanol target in place, no mandate.

South Africa
Implemented an E10 ethanol blend rate in August – enforcement expected to begin this December.

Sudan
Has an E5 ethanol mandate in place.

In South Africa this month, recent blending mandates that require minimum blending of 2% bioethanol have prompted a prominent law firm, Norton Rose, to release a warning that the requirements could lead to further price increases. According to the government, the policies aim to develop the local biofuels industry in an attempt to attract investment in rural areas and promote agricultural development.

In Zimbabwe, the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries is pushing for mandatory E10 blending no later than December in line with the mandate put in place by South Africa on Aug. 23. South Africa doesn’t yet have commercial scale ethanol production but Zimbabwe’s own ethanol facility has been idle since February due to lack of a local market. If the government approves a 20% ethanol blending mandate, Green Fuel will need to raise about $40 million to fund an expansion that would allow it to satisfy increased demand. The roughly 2,000 employees who were put on half-time salaries in February when the plant shut down after reaching its maximum storage capacity are strongly urging the government to put a blending mandate in place.

SG Biofuels expands jatropha platform; confirms $99 per barrel crude jatropha oil

Jim Lane | October 31, 2012

Jatropha 2.0 crude oil costs drops below Brent crude petroleum price

In California, SG Biofuels announced at Advanced Biofuels Markets that it has expanded its global network of hybrid trial and agronomic research sites to 15 with the addition of eight new JMax Knowledge Centers in Guatemala, Brazil and India, and has achieved costs of $99 per barrel or less across three continents.

By comparison, the Brent crude price is averaging $113.02 per barrel this month, according to Oilenergy.com.

Fully loaded costs

This cost is “all-in, fully loaded, from buying our seeds, growing, harvest, crush into crude, capex, opex, all of it,” noted SG Biofuels CEO Kirk Haney. “We’ve partnered with energy companies and planted side by side with local material, and seen 200-900 percent yield increases.”

“All the airlines say that crude jatropha oil provides a best-of-breed biojet,” added Haney. “It’s been all about how to get the volume, the yield per acre, and we’ve solved that in a definitive way.

“Coal, gas, food, biofuels — people who know the space know that it is always about the feedstock, because 70-80 percent of the cost is in the raw materials,” Haney noted. “We’ve seen failures in jatropha. Five years ago we made that call, too. Every product that didn’t use hybrids or some kind of genetics will fail. Its just impossible to get a high and consistent yield without an improved line. Those who do not have the hybrid vigor will never be successful. They will never see the early flowering, the big fruit clusters — and in the end they will be people who were very good at selling a vision.

More JMax Knowledge Centers

Backed by the strong hybrid performance, the additional JMax Knowledge Centers significantly expand the company’s multi-phased platform for deploying productive, profitable Jatropha projects that overcome the economic and agronomic challenges of previous efforts with the non-food oilseed energy crop. In anticipation of strong seed demand, the company also continues to expand its production facility located in Guatemala.

The additional trials include four locations in India, three in Brazil and one in Guatemala, and are in addition to the company’s existing trials and research centers in each country and at its corporate headquarters in San Diego, California.

JMax Knowledge Centers use experimental design and statistical analysis to evaluate hundreds of hybrids in a range of environmental and agronomic conditions. The centers serve as outdoor classrooms where SGB agronomists and technical teams conduct training and field tours with customers and growers, develop localized agronomic studies and recommendations while advancing the top performing Jatropha hybrids for commercial deployment. SGB’s hybrids have been developed following five years of research, drawing from a diverse germplasm library including more than 12,000 unique genotypes.

One such location has been deployed in Brazil in conjunction with JETBIO, leader of a multi-stakeholder initiative including Airbus, the Inter-American Development Bank, Bioventures Brasil, Air BP and TAM Airlines. SGB is working with Bioventures Brasil, an energy crop project developer, and other program partners on a multi-phased program leading to the deployment of intercropped Jatropha plantations in the Central-west region of Brazil for the purpose of bio jet fuel production.

“Developing the best hybrid material from SGB’s collection while establishing best agronomic practices are the foundations for our project,” said Rafael Davidsohn Abud, managing partner at JETBIO. “As we scale our project, using the best hybrid material and operational expertise from SGB gives us the greatest opportunity for success.”

Petrol from thin Air? Carbon dioxide to methanol then to petrol!

Fuel From Thin Air? The skinny on making gasoline from air and water

Jim Lane | October 26, 2012

By Robert Rapier, Energy Trends Insider

This week a U.K.-based company called Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) announced that they were producing gasoline from thin air. The raw materials for their process reportedly being literally air and water.

A company spokesman explained: “We haven’t broken the Second Law of Thermodynamics or anything. We take carbon, we combine it with hydrogen, put it in a reactor to make methanol, then we take the methanol and put that in another reactor to make petrol. The processes of making synthetic petrol from carbon are well known and have been around for many, many years. The Germans were doing it during the Second World War. The South Africans were doing it during the apartheid years. But they were taking their carbon source from coal. We’re taking our carbon source from the atmosphere.”

Is such a process viable, in terms of technology?

The company is looking for investors, but given the extraordinary claim a bit of due diligence is in order. In cases like this, the most basic due diligence starts with: If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. This certainly looks too good to be true, so what is the real story?

The first question to ask is “Is such a process technically viable?” The answer is that the process is indeed technically viable. In fact, one could take the same ingredients of air and water and make an incredible variety of things. Those same ingredients could be used to make acetaminophen, insulin, clothing, carpet, or plastics — because all of the required atoms for these materials are contained in air and water.

The economic and energy input challenge

But, there is more to the story than was reported by most media outlets. As the spokesman for Air Fuel Synthesis indicates above, the Germans used and the South Africans continue to use coal as a source of carbon for production of liquid fuels. AFS is using carbon dioxide as their source of carbon to do the same thing, albeit by a very different process.

But what’s the difference between coal and carbon dioxide? Coal is an energy-rich fuel, and carbon dioxide is the product of combusting a fuel. And it will always take more energy to convert carbon dioxide back into a fuel than you will ever get from combusting the fuel. That is a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics mentioned by the AFS spokesman — and it necessarily means that this process consumes more energy than it creates. This is the same sort of reason that it is technically feasible to fuel a car with water, but you will always require external energy inputs to do so.

Imagine for a moment that they could connect the output of their process to the input. They could convert carbon dioxide into gasoline, and then burn the gasoline to produce carbon dioxide which is fed back into the process. The only way such a process can run is to input large sums of energy into the process. To produce 1 BTU of gasoline from carbon dioxide will always require the input of more than 1 BTU of energy, and quite possibly a lot more than 1 BTU.

When and how is CO2 attractive?

Now there are some circumstances in which a process that is essentially an energy sink could be attractive. After all, photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient process, but it is driven by abundant and free solar power. Thus, one might envision using excess solar power at the peak of the day as a process input if the solar power can’t otherwise be used.

It might also be economical to convert very cheap coal or natural gas BTUs into electricity to drive the process. However, even if the process was economical under those circumstances, it would accelerate the depletion of those resources. It would be far more efficient to simply use a fuel like natural gas to directly power a vehicle instead of going through the inefficiencies of converting it into a liquid fuel.

So, while this process is not a perpetual motion machine, it is unlikely to be economical. It is of major scientific interest, to be certain. But the truth is a lot more complex than what you are likely to garner from the press releases. And this is what potential investors in the company need to know.

This article was republished with permission from Consumer Energy Reportunder a content partnership with Biofuels Digest, and originally appeared inEnergy Trends Insider, a free newsletter from Consumer Energy Report focusing on financial and investment issues in the energy industry.

New kind of fuel from FURANs, heard of it?

Incitor and the birth of a new low-cost fuel molecule

Jim Lane | October 4, 2012

A new drop-in, low-cost, high-octane fuel molecule? How does that work, and why, and when?

How does it change the energy independence equation? 

Today, the Digest visits Incitor to find out about Alestron.

Back in 2008, there was a flurry of coverage of a new class of fuel molecules that could be made affordably from cellulose – the furans. There was some exciting work at Berkeley. Companies like Avantium and Lignol were working with one member of that class, furfural. Raven Biofuels had a process that landed it briefly in the 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy.

The efforts didn’t pan out as hoped – primarily, the companies simply couldn’t shake enough of the costs out of the process, and had more promising near-term technologies to focus on.

But the idea was most intriguing.

First, the processes didn’t lose carbon by producing CO2 as a byproduct of fermentation.

Second, they generally produced a fuel molecule with around 120,000 BTUs (around the same as gasoline), that could safely run in 50 percent blends with gasoline or diesel.

Third, they used ethanol as a feedstock for the second step in a two-step conversion process – thereby giving you a path for getting around the E10-E15 ethanol “blend wall”.

Now, along comes Incitor. This intriguing company aims for some of the same chemistries, and a cost of $2.25 per gallon for a fuel that it has dubbed Alestron (which it produces from a process that also yields companion chemical market molecules, including ethyl levulinate). All based on a modeled cost of $75 per tonne of biomass.

The company has been working in an Albuquerque-based lab the past couple of years (moving from 500L/year to 4000L/year scale this year), recently completed a $2.5 million capital raise that will expand its facilities, and will embark on a $10 million cap raise to complete a pilot facility that can handle 8,000 tons of biomass per year.

The goal at Incitor has been to knock the cost down to a market-making level by designing a process that co-founder Troy Lapsys describes as “building it from things you can find at Loews and operating it from things you can find at Costco”. For example, avoiding the use, where possible, of high-cost stainless steel and working with low-cost plastics in the process design.

The process

The basics of making furanics from biomass-derived CMF, and an alcohol

The Berkeley research demonstrated in 2008 that — as an alternative to fermentation – you can bathe cellulosic biomass in hydrochloric acid, lithium chloride and a recyclable solvent to make a molecule called CMF.

Now, a lot of researchers have touted CMF over the years as a precursor to fuels – but you can’t burn it directly as a fuel molecule, because of the “C” in CMF.

It stands not for carbon, but chlorine – and, in a burn, you produce poisonous chlorine gas. The attraction of CMF is that it uses 5-carbon and 6-carbon sugars, and all the carbon goes towards fuel, instead of producing one CO2 molecule for every ethanol molecule, as in fermentation. That has energy implications, and lifecycle emissions implications.

Troy Lapsys: "building it from things you can find at Loews and operating it from things you can find at Costco"

Note the use of low-cost, off-the-shelf materials throughout the Incitor facility - in particular, the absence of high-cost metals and plastics

But, in a second step, you can mix ethanol (or any alcohol) with CMF and – in the presence of a catalyst, produce a set of furanic molecules that can be burned as a fuel.

Part of Incitor’s magic? They are using an organic catalyst – no expensive rare-metal catalysts that have to be recovered as completely as possible due to their high costs, requiring a whole recovery system to be designed into the overall process. And, a low-temperature process, which shakes out much of the energy cost.

You can read more about Incitor’s process here.

The feedstocks

Incitor’s process works with “corn stover, wheat straw, woody waste, solid waste, algae, or pretty much any sugar containing biomass,” the founders say.

Intriguing, that algae option – generally, that means residual algae biomass after the lipids are extracted – as sugars are the target here. Gives some food for thought, to algae companies, that there could be a customer, at scale, for post-lipid extraction algae biomass at $75 per tonne, in New Mexico, not far from where the CO2 pipelines travel, and near a lot of flat land, sunlight and brackish groundwater.

The “If, thens”

Incitor has a long ways to go to design and demonstrate their process at scale. But let’s think about the consequences, should they reach their final goal of producing a $2.25 fuel molecule, using ethanol as a feedstock, with about the same BTUs as gasoline, that typically blends at 50 percent with gasoline or diesel with no performance issues, and has an octane rating of 110.

OK, let’s think about ethanol, first. In their second step, Incitor uses a 40/60 mix of ethanol and CMF, and produces a fuel molecule that blends at a 50 percent clip. Well, that’s a path to taking, for example, 8 billion gallons of ethanol and $75 per tonne biomass, and producing 20 billion gallons of renewable fuel at gasoline-like BTUs.

Combined with the current US biodiesel capacity, the residual ethanol production from gallons not utilized for Alestron, and currently scheduled advanced biofuels capacity (through 2016, in our Advanced Biofuels Project Database) – that meets the entire 36 billion gallon RFS target. No E15, no blender pumps, no ethanol pipeline, no kidding.

Now, that’s math drawn to illustrate a potential, not a roadmap to meeting RFS2. Other technologies are reaching scale, and Incitor is at an early stage.

Second, let’s think about next-generation internal combustion engines, of the type that are expected to be needed to help the US reach its 54.5 MPG CAFE standards that automakers just agreed to. There are two types of advanced engines that we may see a lot more of – Direct Fuel Injection (DFI) and homogeneous-charge compression-ignition (HCCI – also known as the no-spark gasoline engine).

Learn more about DFI here  and HCCI here.

Now, those engines really like high-octane fuels, especially HCCI engines that deliver their efficiencies from higher compression – there, 82-85 octane gasoline as produced at the typical US refinery is going to have an epic fail, leading to engine knock and significant engine damage. So, Alestron’s 110-octane rating comes very much in handy – delivering no loss in energy density but giving you the octane you need.

Third – let’s think about how this kind of technology could work with, say, the kind of ethanol output that Joule is working on with its models and technologies. To meet the entire RFS2 target (allowing for existing and planned advanced biofuels capacity), you would need 9 billion gallons of ethanol (to make 23 billion gallons of Alestron, which would count for 30 billion ethanol-equivalent gallons for RFS2 purposes).

The possibilities are fascinating – even if they are well down the line.

The Ifs

There are four major ifs.

First, the company needs to demonstrate its process at scale. The good news is that catalysis processes are, generally, less tricky to scale that fermentation technologies (where we have seen, as in the case of Gevo and Amyris, that side reactions can depress yields at commercial scale).

Second, the company needs to complete its cap raise, and it has taken on the added task of severely limiting, in its next $10 million round, the amount of equity it will seek – hoping to secure the bulk of its finance through non-dilutive instruments such as new market tax credits and debt.

Thirdly, Alestron will have to go through the long and expensive process of becoming certified as a fuel molecule for the transportation fleet – the tests for emissions as well the engine and road testing for performance.

Fourth, in its current process it produces about half Alestron, half other valuable compounds like ethyl levulinate. There may well be limitations for the company’s growth based on saturating the markets for its chemical compounds long before the fuel markets saturate. But, fair to say, that would be a substantial amount of capacity building down the line.

The bottom line

Incitor's key management - CTO Troy Lapsys, CEO John Ellis, VP Jake Berman

It’s early days for Incitor and Alestron. But the company’s progress illustrates a couple of points very well.

First, innovation is still rampant in the biofuels industry. Beware of anyone who starts a sentence with “biofuels are…” or “biofuels can’t…” — that’s a sure sign that that speaker is not tracking the science.

Second, there are many paths to fulfilling RFS2, and biofuels targets in general, that do not necessarily involve infrastructure change, or limit ethanol production, or run into blend walls or questions over the viability of fermentation systems at scale.

Third, there’s a whole lot of cost-shakeout going on at some smaller, innovative companies that are finding ways to eliminate the need for costly parts and process.

Change the World: Sapphire Energy’s Green Crude Farm, in illustrated

Jim Lane | October 2, 2012

Eric Clapton performs his Grammy-winning "Change the World"

Growing crude oil as a crop – Sapphire Energy and its Green Crude Farm – can it be the sunlight in your universe and change the world?

What does it look like? How does it work? The Digest does the show and tell.

As locations go, Columbus, New Mexico is hard to find but is a pretty good place to stage the first attempt, here on Planet Earth, to cultivate crude oil as an agricultural crop.

Let’s say that again – growing crude oil as an agricultural crop. It’s never been done before. Not a crop for something to eat, or to wear, or for materials for walls or floors – but something that is deep inside all three: energy itself.

To do so, three partners are attempting to do something else that has never been achieved before – using algae as a major, global crop platform – not on the scale that has produced vitamin and nutritional supplements, but on the scale and at the costs more closely associated with the dozen or so great staple crops around the world. Which is to say, this is a tall order. A monumental, change the world attempt.

The partners? The US Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture and the private investors behind Sapphire Energy – who have jointly financed the construction of Sapphire’s Green Crude Farm, of which 100 acres is in place, out of an eventual 300-acre facility, converting brackish water, CO2 and sunlight into oil-rich microalgae, from which a crude oil is extracted.

The resonance

Traditional chile pepper harvest to the left, using freshwater; algae cultivation to the right, using brackish groundwater; In the background, mountains in Mexico.

There’s some historical resonance in the site for those who trace the resolve to restore US energy independence to the 9/11 attacks. Columbus is the border town to Mexico’s Chihuahua state wherefrom Pancho Villa, in 1916, staged the last armed incursion by a foreign power on to US soil.

There’s some geological resonance. Columbus is sufficiently hot, flat and uncrowded – primarily because, millions of years ago, an algae-abundant ocean called the Western Interior Seaway or the Niobraran Sea sat right here.

If you connect the demise of the Seaway with the hydrocarbon-rich shale formations that are found all over the eastern slopes of the Rockies – formed as sea retreated, from the Dakotas to the West Texas plains – well, you get a bonus star. That old algae? After millions of years of maturing under geologic pressure, it’s known as petroleum and forms much of the current US reserves.

There’s some agricultural resonance, too. On the site of Sapphire’s Green Crude farm, agriculture ceased in the early 1970s when salt intrusions into the groundwater made it impossible to carry on with the cultivation of chili peppers and cotton. It’s of the reasons that 57 percent of the population of Columbus lives below the poverty line.

All that resonance has resulted in a suitable patch of ground – Sapphire owns 3,000 acres here, graded on a 1 percent incline. The sunlight is abundant, and the temperature avoids the extreme highs that kill off algae. And there’s plenty of salty groundwater that is unsuitable for traditional agriculture. According to the National Ground Water Association, “75 percent of New Mexico’s groundwater is too saline for most uses without treatment.”

The CO2

CO2 services are provided by Linde, who are tasked with figuring out the best way to scale - through co-locating with a CO2 emitter or tapping in to the CO2 pipeline system

CO2? For this small scale operation aimed at producing 100 barrels a day of crude oil, the CO2 is trucked in. But, keep in mind, the nation’s CO2 pipeline system – built primarily for enhanced oil recovery and use in drilling operations – centers around Denver City in West Texas, and the Cortez pipeline runs through New Mexico.

To secure the long-term source of CO2 – for example, through co-location with a power plant or by tapping the pipelines – that’s where Sapphire has partnered with Linde as its CO2 acquisition partner.

Duke University created this graphic of the US CO2 pipeline system back in 2008 - note the proximity to West Texas and New Mexico.

Now, let’s look at the Farm itself. How does it work? Growing algae is finished science – but growing algae at yields, and with costs, that compete on the economics with petroleum – that’s another.

The Dogma

The labs in Las Cruces, NM where Sapphire tests its dogma-busting algae

What has been removed, to some extent, is cost. But what really has been removed is dogma. Dogma that begins with “algae is…” or “algae isn’t…” or “you have to…” or “you can’t just….” – dogma that has built up as subtly and inflexibly as shale itself.

It’s understandable. Algae is the absolute bottom of the food chain – - the Chihuahua of the waters – designed by Nature to be weak, and preyed upon by zooplankton and other microscopic predators. There a pretty good list of the dogma around algae in “38 reasons Algae will never replace oil”, here.

Sapphire Energy’s Green Crude Farm is still in the “if it works…” stage – though not at all insofar as producing, harvesting and extracting crude oils from an algae farm. Even on the 30 acres that Sapphire is operating at a time, right now – that’s finished science. There’s no doubt they can do it. Doing so at the right cost – they’ll be proving out their case over the next four years, as they build out to a 5,000 barrel per day scale – 76 million gallons per farm per year.

Passive agriculture

Paddlewheels, motors and plastic liners - part of the design on the Green Crude Farm's first phase. Phase 2 foregoes the liners for dirt ponds. Future phases aim to eliminate the paddle wheels to reduce energy intensity and cost.

But here’s what we know — what Sapphire has learned – or, rather, relearned about agriculture. It’s Zen-like in its passivity. Nature never acts unless absolutely necessary – activity takes energy, and energy is a precious resource that must be conserved – whether you are a bear, plant or a microalgae farm.

So, the first thing you’ll see at Sapphire is an attempt to build the most passive system you can imagine. The bustle of activity is confined to the harvest and extraction areas. The Farm itself – well, if you see a moving part or anything man-made at all, there’s someone at Sapphire right now trying to figure out how to remove it.

In fact, that’s really what Sapphire is up to – like Apple, using its considerable force of expertise in order to create simplicity and reduce costly complexity.

The Farm

Sapphire's 3,000 acre Green Crude Farm stretches into the distance

The proxy here is rice cultivation.

You start with flattish land. Not flat land, as our friend Energy Skeptic and the dogmatics assumed – flat land doesn’t work, because then you have to move the water. That costs. But flattish works, a slight grade as you find in much of agriculture. That way, you get a gravity assist in flowing water downhill. When it reaches the bottom of the farm, it can be pumped back to the top with very energy-efficient pump technology. Much more effective that energy-intensive paddle wheels.

Like rice, the field is flooded. Abundant water is at hand. For example, Texas has 2.7 billion acre-feet of brackish groundwater. Enough, at the 5,000 gallon per acre per year level to replace every gallon of refined petroleum produced here on Earth.

The strains? Sapphire has tested millions of candidate traits and strains in its labs in San Diego – its throughput as a synthetic biology shop is renowned. That’s like sorting out all the hopeful young athletes from those that will compete at the Olympic Trials. Only the chosen few proceed to Sapphire’s pilot facility and test outdoor ponds in Las Cruces, about 50 miles east of Columbus. From that group of candidates, a winter and a summer algae have been selected at Sapphire. Right now, they are ready to transition the ponds over to winter algae.

The Scope

The underlying land in Columbus, NM - salt intruded groundwater made traditional agriculture impossible - but the land was left with a 1 percent grade from cotton and chil pepper planters of long ago, making it suitable for a gravity-assisted algae production.

Sapphire’s operation is, by algae standards, massive. 100 acres finished out, 300 in total in scope for this project. Working ponds up to 2 acres in size – double that previously though possible.

For this phase, you see plastic liners and paddlewheels. Those are expected to be gone in the next design phase.

The Predators and Pests

A classic algae predator munches microalgae at Sapphire Las Cruces, NM lab - the brown color indicates the ingested algae

Defending the weak, that’s a tough job. There are competitors, pests, diseases and predators to worry about – the same as for all forms of agriculture, except to say that microalgae are weaker and smaller than anything else.

The focus at Sapphire is understanding the science by which all four groups wreak their havoc. Like a scout team in football, there are science teams at Sapphire that are dedicated to developing predators and competitor, studying their behavior – the teams’ job it is to defeat each candidate algae strain.

The good news – victory in microalgae is in the aggregate – like salmon heading upstream and running the gauntlet of the waiting bears, the object of the exercise is to overwhelm the bears with numbers, and then reproduce quickly and massively.

Think of it this way. If algae doubles its mass every 24 hours, as most strains do, in a 365-day growing season starting with two kilos of algae, you’d produce more biomass by the 4th of July than the entire mass of the known universe. Bottom line, you can afford to lose some along the way. If 99.99999999999% of the algae is overwhelmed by pests, predators, competitors or disease, you’d still produce more biomass than the known universe by September. So, you get the idea.

The Combine

The DAF )diffused air floatation) technology used in wastewater treatment is well-suited to Sapphire's cost goals

OK, so you have microalgae in a very, very low concentration in water. Perhaps as much as 1 percent. How do you get them out of the water – affordably? Harvest has been perplexing farmers for millenia – as they have sought to automate what was, originally, a manual operation for every known crop.

Today, we have rice combines that have replaced manual laborers in the field. Sugarcane harvesters are set to replace cane workers. Corn combines have replaced corn cribs.

In the case of microalgae, DAF technology is employed at Sapphire, and screwpresses to further drive out the water. That’s diffused air flotation – essentially, you generate microscopic bubbles that bond with the algae and they rise together to the surface. It’s used in wastewater treatment. In algae cultivation, it was avoided because the limit of DAF’s concentrating power is around 15 percent, and the dogma in algae is that extraction couldn’t be done without a drier form of the biomass. Hence the use of drying technologies and centrifuges. Too expensive.

Ginning and Fractioning

One aspect of ginning technology at Sapphire's Green Crude Farm extracts algae from water

Which brings us to the gin – which is to say, to Sapphire’s wet extraction technology. Like extracting cotton seeds affordably from the cotton balls — it’s their key technology, their Eli Whitney breakthrough and secret sauce, in so many ways. They don’t talk about it much, and except to say that they have it, and can affordably wet extract their crude oils from the 15 percent concentrations.

A partial view of Sapphire's ginning technology

You see, affordable wet extraction makes DAF affordable and, combined with passive farming techniques to combat predators, eliminate the cost of moving water, use dirt-lined ponds, and rely on brackish water- that’s essentially the secret of how you grow algae at scale, affordably.

The Crude

After extraction, what do you have. Green crude oil. Suitable, as with all crude, for shipping to refineries for conversion to everyday fuel and chemical products. It’s drop-in – suitable for pipelines and existing refinery infrastructure – and results in an infrastructure-compatible, drop-in fuel.

The bottom line

When will we know? 2018, finally – when the 5000 barrel per day facility is built out and is producing at full scale. Until then, we will have the data from the Green Crude Farm to assure us, or not, that the results can be scaled from a 300-acre collection of 1- and 2-acre ponds to a facility 50 times that size.

What we know for now is this. The resources of CO2, sunlight, and brackish water are sufficient – in the Sapphire approach – they have made it come together into a working end-to-end technology. We have yet to confirm that the costs will come down as far as making $100 barrels of oil.

Given the combination of sunlight, flattish land that has fallen out of agriculture, brackish groundwater, and access to the Denver City CO2 pipeline hub – we wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see West Texas emerge as the global leader in green crude fuels. Wouldn’t that be just a darn surprise to all the Texans who can’t find a nice thing to say about advanced drop-in renewable fuels. A new Texaco rising out of oil fields that never deplete.

Drill, baby, drill? Indeed, drill away. The world needs that CO2 pipeline that drilling supports