"Green Options: Fuel"-Ethanol from Sugar
Wednesday, May 14, 2008JEFF YASTINE: The cost of producing corn-based ethanol was a big part of today's debate over the farm bill and those costs have some big U.S. companies exploring ways to produce ethanol from sources other than food. Dupont announced a venture with a Danish company today to do just that. In tonight's, "Green Options: Fuel," we look at another company looking at -- exploring ethanol from an unexpected source. YASTINE: Green reedy stalks of sugarcane dominate the horizon in this part of Florida, just south of Lake Okeechobee. 400,000 acres of cane are planted here. Every day, during the five-month harvest period, hundreds of trucks sidle up to this sugar mill and dump their loads of cane. But people here are talking about another use for cane, besides refining it into sugar. The crop could also be a new source of ethanol for the nation's biofuels industry. Brazil already distills about five billion gallons of ethanol from sugar a year. But Florida Crystals, owner of the Domino and Flo-Sun organic sugar brands, is researching whether it's commercially viable to create ethanol from the pulverized cane stalks called bagasse. It's the waste byproduct at the end of the milling process. Florida Crystals researcher Steven Clarke says it's quite different from Brazil's sugar-based ethanol or the corn-derived ethanol distilled in the Midwest.
STEVEN CLARKE, DIR. OF INDUSTRIAL R&D, FLORIDA CRYSTALS: Traditional ethanol uses a simple carbohydrate like starch as in the corn process. This is cellulosic, ligno-cellulosic material. It's much tougher. If ligno-cellulose wasn't tough, trees wouldn't stand up. Its nature's way of giving structure to plants.
YASTINE: There is plenty of bagasse around. Mountains of it accumulate here during the harvest season. Some is burned to generate electricity for the company's sugar mill. But Florida Crystals Vice President Gaston Cantens says ethanol could become a secondary profit center for the company.
GASTON CANTENS, VICE PRESIDENT, FLORIDA CRYSTALS: Our goal is to be able to continue producing a food product sugar, because we are a food company and to also be able to produce ethanol from the byproducts, the waste products, the agricultural waste that is left over after we produce sugar from our crop.
YASTINE: But producing ethanol from cellulose -- leftover plant material -- is much easier said than done. The key is breaking down the tough plant fibers. Compared to ethanol derived from corn, cellulosic ethanol is a much more complex, technically challenging process. It's easy to do in a lab, but much tougher to achieve in the real world. That's the job of Florida International University researcher George Phillipidis.
GEORGE PHILIPPIDIS, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, FIU-ARC: What we see here is fermentation process going on.
YASTINE: He and his staff are working up laboratory data on cellulosic ethanol production from bagasse. He says the beauty of the fuel is that food crops are not its only source material.
PHILIPPIDIS: It can be adapted to accommodate different types of biomass. We're doing bagasse here. Tith some modifications, the same technology could be applied to citrus peel, to wood waste, to corn waste materials, to any type of green plant material that we generate, to our own yard waste.
YASTINE: An Energy Information Administration report last year notes the costs of a large-scale cellulosic plant at $375 million, is roughly six times the costs of an equivalent-size corn-ethanol plant. Jennifer Bovair of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says cellulosic ethanol needs lower production costs to be viable.
JENNIFER BOVAIR, ENERGY ANALYST, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC & INT'L STUDIES: That's the big question with cellulosic ethanol is how do you get it at scale? How do you move from laboratory to mass production? And how do you overcome that hurdle of getting out of the lab to a scale that's actually commercially viable?
YASTINE: That question may start getting some answers early next year, when a planned small-scale cellulosic ethanol plant starts operations at Florida Crystals' sugar mill. Tomorrow, "Green Options: Fuel," looks at a bacteria that breaks down food waste and paper scraps into ethanol.
