Bioreality: Biomass Fuels, Products
Not that Far Away

By Brad Haire
Photos by Stephanie Schupska

If you know how to do it, you can turn a handful of wood into enough fuel to power a small car about 1.5 miles. K.C. Das chuckles when he makes this comparison. It isn't exact. But it isn't far off, either. And neither is the day, he thinks, when the average U.S. citizen will use fewer products made from crude oil and more made from biomass.

Things such as wood chips, sawdust or agricultural waste are just a few examples of biomass. "What we're doing is looking at various sorts of biomass available and how to use it in the most optimum manner," said Das, an engineering professor with the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

Energy is all around, Das said. There is solar, hydro and wind energy, for example. Energy is also found in biomass. If you've ever thrown a stick (or a dried cow patty, for that matter) onto a fire to keep it burning, well, you've seen biomass energy at work. But there's more than energy inside waiting to be unlocked.

"We're doing this with a biorefinery process," Das said.

"We&'e doing this with a biorefinery process," Das said.

Hydrocarbons, such as coal and oil, and carbohydrates, found in biomass, are about the same chemically. The biorefinery process, similar to refining crude oil, is a way of turning biomass into products like fuel, char and chemicals that can be used to make a product like plastic, said Das, who also coordinates the UGA Biorefining and Carbon Cycling Program.

"By taking a biorefinery approach, we're looking at making systems that are sustainable and utilizing as much of the biomass as possible," Das said.

You can do this in various ways, he said. One is called pyrolysis. It uses high heat.

For example, and simply put, if you took that handful of wood, which would be in the form of wood pellets, and heated it to around 800 degrees Fahrenheit in the absence of oxygen, you'd get oil, gas and carbon char, the remains of the wood.

\You could stop there. But you could go further and get more from the wood. If you ratchet up the heat to the oil and gas to about 1,475 F and throw in steam and a catalyst like nickel, you can capture hydrogen, which you can then transfer to fuel cells.

The common way now of making hydrogen, which is tough to produce economically on a large scale, is by using natural gas, which isn't a renewable resource. The natural gas way also releases greenhouse gases, believed to cause global warming. Pyrolysis doesn't create any new greenhouse gases.

"We're making hydrogen using biomass," Das said.

Eprida, Inc., a private company that has partnered with UGA, is commercializing products using the hydrogen captured from pyrolysis. It's also making a nitrogen-based soil amendment derived from the char.

The technology works, but there are some hitches, he said. The oil it produces is very reactive, making it hard to store and handle. But it can be modifi ed to run in an engine with a few extra steps. CAES scientists are working on that, too.

From recovering chicken fat from poultry plants to finding the right feedstocks for industrial use, around 15 projects involve about 25 faculty and staff members working under the Biorefi ning and Carbon Cycling Program umbrella, which started about two years ago.

"The program is rapidly growing building on UGA's strengths in biological sciences," Das said.

Just as gasoline prices have spiked at the pump in recent years, Das said, so has the U.S. interest in biorefining technology. But none of the stuff is really completely new. "A lot of this technology has been sitting on the shelf in the United States for decades because crude oil was cheap."

Countries such as Russia and South Africa have used biorefining techniques and products since the 1950s, he said. Brazilians have run their automobiles on ethanol refined from sugarcane since the 1970s.

"I think the average person would be surprised at what could be available through conversion technology," Das said. "It's competitive today because fossil fuel prices are going up."

Last year, CAES biorefining and hydrogen-production projects received about $1.8 million in federal and state grants, he said. The same amount is expected in Fiscal Year 2007.

"What we're doing and what we'll continue to do is improve the technology in an effort to make it more widely available and sustainable," Das said.

When asked when products from biomass will replace those made from crude oil, Das chuckles again. "That's tough to predict," he said. "Some of it has already begun, like bioplastics. I think within the next five to 10 years, the technology and the products will be more widely available and accepted ... There's a lot happening now."

Georgia is set to fuel a biorefi nery movement with biomass, says Dale Threadgill, head of the CAES department of biological and agricultural engineering.

"With more than two-thirds of the state covered in forest land," Threadgill said, "we produce more than any other state in the Southeast."

Cuttings picked up from curbsides in Atlanta create biomass, he said. So does thinning millions of acres of Georgia pine forests. A farmer could produce crops to supply high-grade biomass, too.

"Biomass in Georgia is actually a revenue stream in waiting," Threadgill said.

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