[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," a fascinating discussion on the future of biofuels.

- Corn is a very fertilizer- intensive product.

A lot of the fertilizer get leaked into the soil, so those are the unintended consequences of ethanol production.

But ethanol itself does not increase carbon emission.

- The ethanol industry has invoked all sorts of innovative technology, and they're up between 44 and 52% less CO2 emissions.

With all of these technologies, you could bring corn, first generation corn ethanol down to a net zero.

[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," the future of biofuels.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by, The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

In the U.S., we use a lot of biofuels today.

10% of every gallon of gasoline is required to be corn ethanol.

One third of our corn crop goes to make this, though it's non-food corn, specially grown for the purpose.

Ethanol now has up to a 40% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to gasoline.

Other future areas of interest are cellulosic ethanol converted from non-food biomass and sustainable aviation fuels or SAF.

We'll talk about all this and more with Valerie Reed.

She's the director of bioenergy at the U.S. Department of Energy, with 30 years experience in the space, and formerly the chief scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Yiying Xiong is the assistant director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy National Laboratory with 20 years experience leading renewable energy programs.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," we'll take a broad look at the future of biofuels.

We always like to start with the why our viewers would even care.

What is it that our listeners would want to know and learn about biofuels?

- Sure.

Biofuels are an incredibly important resource we have in this country.

They are renewable fuels that can replace petroleum fuels.

Environmentally, they reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 70, 80%.

In addition, we can create these fuels from waste, so that helps with the waste disposal issues across the country.

Most biomass comes from the land, it's an agricultural crop or a forestry residue, and these things help provide economics to support industries that rely on farmers, and it helps increase our energy security against disruptions from other sources of fuel.

- Yeah, we talk a lot about greenhouse gas emissions these days, right?

In the U.S., 29% of the emissions are created by transportation.

We have several technologies that are being developed to help with that.

The hydrogen, the battery, but also biofuel, right?

Biofuel is something that can replace a significant part of the gasoline.

- What is it?

What's a biofuel?

Just high level, big picture.

What is a biofuel?

- Yeah.

Really simple.

Biofuel is a liquid fuel that is created by renewable, biological resources, and it's very similar to the gasoline we put in our tank in the car.

- And what types are there?

- There are three generations of biofuel.

The first generation is basically the corn ethanol, and the biodiesel that we know, many of our consumers know.

And those are created by food such as corn, sugarcane, cannona, soybeans.

Now here's a second generation of biofuel, which is created by biomass, which is non-food crops.

Right now we're looking at switchgrass, we're looking at prairie grass, willows, pauper trees.

And then there's a third generation biofuel that's generated developed by algae.

- And we can add a fourth good carbon related fuel, and that's coming from CO2 emissions.

We now have the ability through innovation to take CO2 from industry and convert it to a fuel.

So while it's not renewable, it's a fourth generation of fuels that can feed the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere.

- Gotcha.

Where would, would fuels from like french fry oil fit into those first through four?

Are they part of those or are they something different?

- Absolutely.

In fact, the current commercially available renewable diesel, and even biodiesel, a lot of it's coming from what we call fats, oils and greases, or FOG for short.

And that is where- - [laughs] That's the world I live in.

- Yeah, we're all in a fog.

But that is where waste disposal is a big issue.

At one time, these companies didn't know how to reduce that waste, and it was going to landfills and it was a problem.

Now they have to lock it up because it has value.

- Would that be first gen, second gen, third gen, fourth gen, or is it?

- Let's call it one-and-a-half gen.

It's slightly more advanced technologies, but it's a non-food related crop.

- So let's talk about ethanol.

First of all, what is ethanol?

And a little bit about the industry.

- First generation ethanol comes from corn, as well as other starch related feedstock.

Starch is made of glucose.

It's easy to break down the starch to get the glucose, and then we ferment that to alcohol.

And we had, in 2021, 17 billion gallon capacity to produce this first generation ethanol.

- How big is it?

- Seventeen billion gallons.

And that's because it's used as a 10% blend in gasoline.

It is the oxygenate of choice.

And when MTBE, which was a petroleum based oxygenate, was banned, corn ethanol, or ethanol first generation was the logical choice.

- Interesting.

How many gallons of gasoline?

Do we have any sense of that?

- In 2019, we used 143 billion gallons of liquid transportation fuels.

So now that's across- - The U.S. did?

- The U.S. did, across all of the modes of transportation.

- You know, criticisms will be, we're using food for fuel.

- Well, there's an interesting point there.

For recent years, 30 to 40% of the corn crop has been produced exclusively for fuel.

This is not food corn, it is grown on agricultural land.

However, so it does displace the possibility of growing different food on that land.

- Right.

Don't let me put words in your mouth.

If they didn't do that, they would struggle to make the economics meet or they would- - It would change how food is priced because we have now established an economy that requires income from that corn for fuel.

And if the farmer's not getting that, he's gonna increase the price potentially of the corn he sells for food.

So there's a fine balance if we were to shift too far away too quickly.

- So everybody can plan for it.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

And adapt to that.

Anything to, to add on the corn side?

- So the ethanol has this thing called blend wall, where you can only blend up to 10 or 15% into the existing gasoline without causing harm to the combustion engine that's in their cars right now.

In other economies like Brazil, where they produce a lot of ethanol from their sugar canes, they can blend up to 85% with the different engine design.

So there is that little maximum amount.

- I do have to disagree slightly.

Studies we did in the early 2000s, in existing engines, you can go up to E30.

- Corn ethanol.

Is that an emissions reducer, or?

- So if we look at the fuel itself, it does reduce emissions.

What's maybe increasing some of the emission is during the process of growing the feedstock, our process of transportation.

Right, corn is a very fertilizer intensive product, so a lot of the fertilizer get leaked into the soil and there's emission from the soil.

So those are the unintended consequences of ethanol production.

But ethanol itself does not increase carbon emissions.

[Scott] Yeah.

Interesting.

- Can I build a little bit on that?

Early days of the ethanol production, ethanol was assigned 20% reduction over petroleum for the full lifecycle, meaning from the seed in the ground, all the way through to the end of the refinery.

Today, the ethanol industry has invoked all sorts of innovative technology improvements, and there at up between 44 and 52% less CO2 emissions.

You mentioned soil carbon and releasing soil from the carbon, carbon from the soils.

There are ways to prevent that.

No-till harvesting doesn't turn up the soil, doesn't release the carbon to the atmosphere.

Other ways to reduce the CI we call it, which is carbon intensity, of the process is to utilize renewable power.

There are farms that have access to solar and to wind, in addition, renewable natural gas in place of natural gas, and, in the processing of the fuel, fermentation.

We know that when you ferment sugars, it releases CO2.

Carbon capture sequestration technology has eliminated that CO2 from being spewed into the atmosphere.

So overall, we really believe, with all of these technologies, you could bring corn, first generation corn ethanol down to a net zero.

- Interesting stuff.

I know CCS have been in that world a long time, and certainly the potential for at scale - Really important technology.

- sequestration is a big piece of all of these things.

Let's talk about the cellulosic stuff.

What is that compared to what we were just talking about?

How is that different and has it made progress?

- So cellulosic fuel uses the non-edible part of the crop to produce the fuel.

Like cornstalk instead of the kernel.

The technology actually was invented, probably about 200 years ago.

But it didn't really advance until more recently.

Still, as of right now, as I know, there is no production-scale cellulosic biofuel plants in the U.S. - You're using the whole thing, the stalk, the leaves, the roots.

A lot less waste - Exactly.

- than if you were just using the kernel of corn.

But we're still converting kind of a carbohydrate to a hydrocarbon.

What's the energy in that conversion facility?

- There are some pilot projects out there that are basically creating a net zero ecosystem where the facility, conversion facility, is located very close to the growers.

So they can source the feedstock nearby, reduce that transportation or storage, and then they can use renewable energy generated onsite to feed into that conversion process.

So it creates a- - So it's not a high-yield process.

- Right.

It's a circular bioeconomy process that we're talking about.

And then the residues we can convert into bioproducts like plastics, makeup, or even Tylenol.

- We also have to have a variety of conversion processes.

One size isn't gonna fit all.

And quite honestly, biological conversion isn't going to fit all.

So we have numerous processes that look very much like petroleum refineries with gasification, pyrolysis, these are very high temperature, high pressure, ways of reducing the biomass down to carbon molecules that can then be built up into the final product.

[Scott] So you're creating hydrocarbons from biomass.

- Basically bio oil, but it's like in its infancy compared to petroleum, which is very old.

- So it's opposed to mostly a chemical process.

There's a heat component involved with that.

- And for some of what we're studying, we're using yeast and microbes to- [Valerie] Biological conversion as well.

- Yeah, many different pathways.

- Gotcha.

It's incredible really.

Lifecycle, carbon footprint of that process and is it, is it truly carbon neutral?

What's the footprint look like?

- Let's just focus on the feedstock itself.

When you have an annual crop, there's not much of a root in there, so most of the carbon is stored in the stem, the above ground portion.

And when you harvest it, convert that into a fuel, it burns and releases that carbon back to air.

So that's more of a carbon neutral.

However, if you look at the perineal type of feedstock, where these plants trap half of the carbon underground in the root system, it goes very, very deep.

So when you harvest it above ground part, it's only 50% of the carbon that eventually gets released in air, even if you add more carbon from the other lifecycle processes, it can still be carbon neutral, or carbon negative.

- Interesting.

Interesting.

Well, that's a neat background.

Let kind of get into the demand side of things here.

Let's start with cars.

How much gasoline can electricity replace in the car side, first of all?

- So if you look at, we have 280 million cars and SUVs on the road today- [Scott] U.S.?

- In the U.S. And that produces about 58% of the 29% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

But, as of today, only 0.86% of the cars and SUVs on the road are EVs.

- Right.

- If we are going to go as a nation fully electric, this will be way out into the future and we can transition with lower CI score biofuels.

- Yeah, on the electric side, is that gonna free up corn ethanol to do other things?

- With reduced gasoline from whatever the source, we're gonna see a reduction in ethanol, right?

Because again, 10% ethanol in every gallon, there'll be less gallons.

The ethanol industry is already looking for other markets because they recognize that in the future there will be potentially less need for ethanol in that market.

- Let's talk about sort of medium and heavy duty transport.

This is where liquids help, I think, a lot.

- So right now, heavy duty transportation still is a heavy emitter for CO2, right?

They account for about 23% of the greenhouse gas emissions out of the 29% of the total transportation carbon emissions.

And again, biofuel, or biodiesel, can be easily replacing those existing gasolines or diesel.

And then one thing that's really good about biodiesel is that it doesn't have that blend wall as ethanol does, a lot of these biodiesel engines, they can blend up to 85% or even 100% by biodiesel.

So there is a pretty good future there to replace the existing fuel.

- But one of the other areas that is often overlooked is rail.

In that rail, we only emit two percent of the overall transportation greenhouse gases.

So if we shift from the heavy CI medium and heavy duty trucking to a larger rail system, we can have an immediate impact on CO2.

- So if we go into the air and the sea, now marine and airplanes need pretty dense energy, dense fuels, you see a good role for biofuels on that sector?

- What we've come to understand is that batteries and hydrogen, beyond having to re-engineer and having safety concerns, they're very heavy.

So now, these are just not necessarily feasible.

One in particular process that we're helping develop is one called alcohol to jet fuel, and it's a drop in replacement fuel.

So at a 50% blend, you can use it today, and there have been numerous flights, and by the way, if you're flying out of California, you're probably using some version of SAF in your aircraft.

So it's a really exciting area and I don't think there is another solution other than biofuels.

- They already serve a lot of alcohol on jets.

May as well put it in jets, right?

[all laughing] - I like to say, we drink the best, we drive the rest.

[all laughing] Now, marine, you mentioned marine, and that also is an international market.

And right now, marine fuel is really kind of the dredges of the barrel of oil.

Right, they're looking at green hydrogen, they're looking at renewable methanol, they're also looking at renewable diesel.

They don't have necessarily the same safety issues as well as aviation.

- The demand and interest in biofuels, how does it differ in the U.S. versus the EU, for example?

- Right now, biofuel needs are actually increasing all over the world, but it's increasing in different ways in different economies.

For example, in the advanced economies, U.S., Canada, Europe, the biggest increase are in sustainable aviation fuel and cellulosic biofuel.

But in more emerging economies, India, Brazil, Indonesia, it's more biodiesel, ethanol, to help them get more energy security and also reduce their oil import.

One other aspect that I think we need to look at is people's lifestyle, right?

In the U.S., most of the families rely on cars- 92% of families own cars.

But in Europe it's much lower, even in more developed countries, and then in developing countries it's even less, right?

So depends on how many people are actually driving cars versus taking public transportation or even walking, that drives the difference.

Like in Europe, actually the overall market demand for fuel has gone down, but because of the mandate, the demand for biofuel has increased.

[Scott] And driven by an emissions driver there.

- Exactly.

- Interesting.

- Let's kinda look out in the future a little bit.

How's the industry focus in this whole biofuels world gonna shift?

- So there's a lot of focus in the cellulosic, the second generation biofuel right now, feedstock-wise, we're looking at, you know, trees and grasses that are essentially weeds, so they're not used for food for human or feed for animals.

And they're growing on land that are not suitable or currently used for agricultural purposes.

- And those don't take extra water or fertilizers.

- If any, they take very little fertilizer or no fertilizer.

They naturally grow faster and they have higher yield.

And we are also doing research to modify their genes so they're more climate resilient.

[Scott] What else do you see coming?

- All of that is so important to what we're trying to do over in the bioenergy technologies office.

We publish a report, it's entitled "The Billion-Ton Report" so I'm kind of giving away the end result.

We believe that the U.S. could produce sustainably, critical word there, a billion tons of biomass in all sorts of forms for production and use for bioenergy.

A billion tons of biomass, using an average conversion process, would produce 60 billion gallons of fuel.

So it's not a silver bullet, right.

It's only about, you know, a third to a little more than almost 50% of what we're going to need.

That's why we really need this diversified way of looking at transportation, electric vehicles, hydrogen, and you know, biofuels.

- When are we gonna actually see working biorefineries?

- Well, they're already here.

- There are, there are.

They're under construction.

There is one being built in South Dakota, and believe it's supposed to start producing in 2026, so it's pretty imminent.

Now, the cost of building biorefineries are very, very high.

That's why we need a lot of public investment and private investment.

- Yeah, it's the major focus of the bioenergy program and government dollars to buy down the risk of what we call a first of a kind, where government grant programs can help support scaling up these technologies and then the financial community can become more comfortable.

- Can I add some things?

[Scott] Sure.

- A lot of the reason that the price for biofuel is high is because of the upfront cost, but can we come up with creative ways to build or retrofit some existing facilities?

For example, the oil and gas companies have a lot of infrastructure.

If we can find a way to incentivize them to convert their existing facilities into biorefineries, making them coprocessing facilities, or even convert them completely into biorefineries, that brings the infrastructure cost down.

That brings the fuel cost down.

- So what's gonna drive the industry in this direction?

What's needed to help it expand?

- So, let's be honest, we are very spoiled in this country.

We have very, very low gas price, and that creates a barrier for biofuel to become competitive with government subsidy policies, carbon credits, allowing more carbon trading.

And also with technology improvement, we can reduce the input cost of those feedstocks and fuel.

- The incentive programs help.

But we have to remember, we're incentivizing more than just the cost of that fuel.

We're incentivizing the carbon reduction, the economics at rural communities, the energy security, all the things I talked about that are the benefits of biofuels.

[Scott] Making some of the intangibles tangible.

- Exactly.

- So, when do you see this happening?

I mean, what are some of the challenges that get in the way of that timeframe?

- It's hard in the political environment we have where we have presidents for four years at a time to worry if we're going to have the government support for this.

But I really truly believe that we have crossed over to where the consumer as well as the industry that provides that consumer really want to move into this space of decarbonization.

And so that market demand is another key piece here.

[Scott] There's a pull to it.

- It's a pull.

- And also we need to educate the farmers to be able to provide that kind of feedstock at the time when we need it.

And we need to get that message out there for people to start understand and start, you know, moving into either consuming biofuel, or producing the products that can move us into the biofuel.

- Final thoughts?

Yeah, a couple points, two or three points you'd like to hear or have our listeners take away from your thoughts, Yiying.

- Yeah, I think one thing that's important for people to know is that what we are studying right now on biofuel are non-crop feedstocks on non-agricultural lands.

And that would hopefully ease people's concerns about food, feed, and agricultural activities.

Also, there's no one single silver bullet for the energy transition.

It's not a biofuel versus battery, biofuel versus hydrogen.

We need to look at everything.

But also, in the meantime, we need to look at time.

Biofuel is an existing technology that can be used even in the interim period while we're looking for the next great disruptive technology.

- Yeah, I like that, yeah, good.

Valerie?

- And I mean, those were perfect ending points, but resilience, you know, just coming back around, I've been doing this for 30 years, and there are lots of factors that come into play that take us from being up here to down here.

And what we need to do is continue to move up that chain so that we ultimately get to the final result, which is a bioeconomy.

You said the word, and that's a word I'd love for your listeners to take away.

- Outstanding.

Well look, I appreciated the visit.

- Oh, thank you.

- Valerie.

- Terrific.

- Nice talking to you.

- Thanks for having me.

- Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

- Nice talking to you, too.

- Nice talking.

[Scott] Some have criticized corn ethanol for using a food crop and requiring subsidies.

Valerie countered that the industry's non-food corn feedstock is now an established market segment, which stabilizes prices for food corn, and yields reliable returns for farmers.

She also said, that with carbon capture and storage, corn ethanol could reach an 80% CO2 reduction compared to gasoline.

Cellulosic ethanol has been in development for years without reaching commercial viability.

Both guests believe that further government support and private investment could bring it to scale, especially if the process can yield other valuable bioproducts.

Marine fuels, and especially sustainable aviation fuels, have already entered the market in small quantities, often due to government mandates.

While it should be said, many other experts are less positive, my guests see great potential in the future of biofuels.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.