Centralized or decentralized bioethanol plants? (5 posts)

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  • Denis Picco said 1 year, 4 months ago:

    Biofuels Digest reported a recent news. In the UK, local officials are raising concerns about the environmental impact of 50,000 delivery trucks a year required to supply wheat (about 1.1 million tonnes, all by road) at the planned BP, DuPont and British Sugar ethanol plant in Saltend.
    The refinery (€230-million biofuel plant, for a final production of 420 million litres of bioethanol) will convert about one million tonnes of wheat every year into bioethanol and animal feed. Once fully operational, it will be the largest single point of delivery for wheat and the largest animal feed producer in the UK.
    Local official said that local roads leading to the plant were likely to be put under “enormous pressure” from lorries bringing wheat to the site and he is worried about at what price to the surrounding environment. He explained: “We all welcome renewable energy, but I don’t think we will ever know whether the benefits of this plant will outweigh the negatives that are going to be felt by local communities”.
    The Sweethanol project focus on small decentralised plants (max 10-20,000 tons bioethanol production per year). These plants are characterized by a limited impact on the surrounding agricultural areas. But they do not have the advantages spring from economies of scale plant. What do you think about this topic?

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  • Oscar Leòn said 1 year, 4 months ago:

    OK, I understand the point of view of the Local Officials… but apart from this, we need to speak with the workers and employers of this type of factories, because the economic impact of these factories in the near community is high. Apart from this, depending the raw material, the plant scale is very important… in fact, the bioethanol production from cereals is going to be viable only if the production is over 100.000 cubic meters of bioethanol. For other raw materials, like sweet sorghum, the scale could be lower, but the impact over the area is going to be very high too… considering the needs of fields, farmers, etc.. (but a good economic impact, of course).

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  • Denis Picco said 1 year, 3 months ago:

    Our decentralized model consider small bioethanol plants; we talk about plants that can produce from 3,000 to 10,000 t/y of bioethanol.
    The agricultural land use for the production of the raw material is about 1,200-3,700 ha, in areas with a good fertility soils (the considered fresh biomass yield is about 60-65 t/ha).
    The raw material has to be processed or storage (e.g. ensiled with additives) in a short time, because of the high content of fermentable sugars in the biomass, in order to reduce the losses of sugars.
    That’s means that the sorghum cultivation has to be done in an agricultural area close to the bioethanol plant (max distance of 20 km).
    That means that the costs and the impact of the biomass trasport of this biofuels chain are cutted. And the economic impact is local.
    All these things have to be considered when you have to propose a bioethanol production chain in a specific agricultural area.

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  • Roger Ford said 1 year, 3 months ago:

    Our business model is based on an integrated energy facility producing ethanol and electricity from biomass. The ethanol facilities will be decentralized, operating over a VPN/intranet from one location. Planning is for 1-2 million gallon facilities in locations in Kentucky and Southern US that produce up to 25 million gallons annually.

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  • Oscar Leòn said 1 year, 2 months ago:

    Dear Roger,

    considering your production model, what do you think that could be the best scale for your bioethanol plant and what could be the minimum scale?

    For example, here in Europe, sometimes seems to be better the power generation than producing bioethanol, infact, nowdays, in Spain there are more projects of biomass plants for power generation than for bioethanol production.

    If the electric cars would be promoted until be one of the most important alternatives, maybe the biomass plants are going to be the alternative to the bioethanol plants, what do you think?

    Best regards.

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