In April, the City of Hoover,
Alabama officially became the
first community in the United
States to fuel their municipal
vehicles with E85 ethanol made
from wood waste collected from
city public works projects and
curbside collection of yard debris.
“To our knowledge and according
to the United States Department
of Energy, it is the first true
application where it is actually
fueling vehicles,” said Mark Bentley,
executive director of the Alabama
Clean Fuels Coalition. This coalition
is among 90 “Clean Cities” state-based
organizations established under
the umbrella of the United States
Department of Energy in 1993 to
facilitate voluntary public-private
partnerships to create viable
markets for clean, alternative
fueled vehicles.
Hoover, a suburban community just
south of Birmingham is the state’s
sixth largest city with a population
just over 75,000, but leads the
state, perhaps even the nation
in the per capita use of alternative
fuels for municipal vehicles.
Of all Hoover’s municipal vehicles,
88 percent are now powered by
E85 ethanol, electricity, commercially
purchased B20 biodiesel and biodiesel
produced from recycled cooking
oil donated by citizens and restaurants.
This first delivery of ethanol
to Hoover was only 120 gallons
from a Gulf Coast Energy demonstration
plant located in Livingston, Alabama
– a baby step in what many see
as a giant step forward for
the United States recycling
of municipal green waste via
cellulosic gasification into
renewable fuels. “We are doing
mostly testing with Hoover’s wood
waste and will send them another
100 gallons during June and a
few hundred more gallons along
the way,” said Mark Warner,
Gulf Coast Energy’s CEO. For
the time being, Hoover is trucking
its green waste 100 miles to
Gulf Coast’s Livingston demonstration
plant. “A far shorter distance
than importing foreign oil over
7,000 miles from the Mid East,”
said Bentley.
Meanwhile, Gulf Coast is looking
for a location and financing to
build a full scale production
plant in the Birmingham metro
area to handle Hoover’s feedstock
as well as draw other woody
biomass from the Birmingham
area. “We have plans for three,
possibly four plants in Alabama
and we are well on our way in
establishing plants in Tennessee
and Mississippi. Using technology
like ours can help extend the
effective life of landfills,”
said Warner.
Hoover Mayor Tony Petelos is the
city’s biggest advocate of renewable
fuels and hopes that Gulf Coast
Energy will soon decide on a location
for a permanent, large scale plant
so the city can begin to work with
it. Petelos has stated that his
city presently uses approximately
240,000 gallons of E85 annually
and generates approximately 1,800
tons of wood waste a year, enough
feedstock to produce roughly 350,000
gallons of E85 annually.
Gulf Coast Energy’s technology is
based on the Fischer-Tropsch process
that dates back to the 1920s and
was extensively used by Germany
during World War II to convert coal
into synthetic fuels. Since then,
the process has been improved and
Gulf Coast Energy holds licenses
to use the latest patents.
Gulf Coast takes in Hoover’s pre-chipped
material, essentially wood and leaves.
“Hoover does a very good job of
separating the woody biomass from
grasses, so we don’t see much grass.
There’s occasional metal, like cans,
but we have magnets to separate
that out,” said Warner.
As Gulf Coast Energy expands, it
plans to do its own chipping. That’s
why it is looking to site its new
plants at mothballed chipping and
saw mills. There are many of these
dormant mills available throughout
the southeast due to the loss of
paper and pulping operations to
foreign competition.
The first step in the Fischer-Tropsch
process is to take the chipped material
and grind it down to a one-quarter
inch size. “In our model woody biomass
is most readily available here in
the southeast, which is essentially
a huge pine forest. It’s very easy
to handle and there’s already an
infrastructure for handling it.
We can also handle landfill waste,
pump sludge and switchgrass.” Warner
said. “It’s been put out into the
general literature that there is
not enough corn and soybeans to
fuel the country and I agree with
that, but there’s more than enough
woody biomass and landfill waste
to fuel the country. And if we want
to get serious about it, we can.”
The use of cellulose to produce
ethanol is considered the “second
generation” feedstock in the United
States – corn being the first. Gulf
Coast Energy and other entrepreneurial
chemical companies are looking at
making cellulosic ethanol from biomass
as a threshold product. The catalytic
chemical process employed, however,
is aimed at a larger objective,
reconfiguring molecules into what
the Department of Energy classifies
at “renewable fuels,” which are
biomass-derived hydrocarbons beyond
ethanol like kerosene, diesel, gasoline
and jet fuel. Gulf Coast, for example,
believes that its patented technology
takes advantage of the latest advances
in carbon re-circulation and waste
heat re-use to produce extraordinary
yields, high energy efficiency and
superior quality biofuel products.
Further, the process is a continuous
process as opposed to a batch process
and is flexible enough to handle
multiple types of feedstock to produce
a variety of different kinds of
biofuels.
In the basic Fischer-Tropsch process
(using ethanol as an example of
an end product) wood waste goes
into a reformation unit where it
is converted to gas. An off-stream
of mixed alcohols is either directed
back to the gasifier to help fuel
it, or sent to a raw material dryer.
The gas then goes to a Fischer-Tropsch
reactor where it distilled and condensed
to make the final product, ethanol.
Ethanol is then mixed with gasoline
with the ethanol component representing
from 70 to 83 percent of the mixture
to qualify at an E85 fuel. To date
there are approximately 1,900 filling
stations in the United Sates pumping
E85, but more are on the way as
E85 production increases and more
municipalities switch to E85.
The City of Hoover is running 181
vehicles on E85 and has centralized
fueling for its municipal fleet,
including a 12,000 gallon E85 tank
and pump. Hoover was one of the
country’s earliest municipal users
of E85 and has been working closely
with General Motors (GM) for the
past five years on a test program
for engine performance burning E85.
“We are the largest GM E85 municipal
law enforcement fleet. So we sent
a sample of the Gulf Coast Energy
ethanol for testing to GM before
we used it and it met their specifications.
The 120 gallons we ran in our vehicles
ran perfectly – no problems,” said
Dave Lindon, Hoover’s fleet management
director.
According to the U.S. Department
of Energy, about two-thirds of what
we throw into our landfills today
contain cellulose and is a potential
source of fuel. More importantly,
cellulosic ethanol yields roughly
80 percent more energy than is required
to grow and convert it. A demonstration
project such as the partnership
between Hoover and Gulf Coast Energy
may prove to the investment community
that this technology is economically
viable for large scale production
of renewable fuel. When oil was
at $150 a barrel, interest in renewable
energy was at an all time high,
but when it fell below $34, investor
confidence in renewables fell with
it. Now oil prices are climbing
again and cellulosic fuels may play
an important role in our national
energy solution.
In areas that have abundant supplies
of fast growing conifers, municipalities
are challenged to dispose of huge
quantities of waste wood, not only
from curbside collection, but from
massive downfalls caused by periodic
storms and from commercial companies
clearing land for development. Green
waste can be viewed either as a
problem for landfills, or as an
unexploited natural resource that
can be converted into renewable
fuels. “We don’t produce corn, but
we can grow pine trees,” said Mark
Bentley of the Alabama Clean Fuels
Collation. “If we can establish
a few large scale plants in Alabama
to convert tree waste into cellulosic
fuels it can be used to power entire
fleets.”
