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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes…
How is this an overall improvement over leaving the corn stalks in the field to decompose and return nutrients to the soil? This process moves soil nutrients away from point of origin. (Serious question from former Iowa farm boy who still owns corn ground operated by others. Should I let my tenants ship stover away? I want to be a good steward of the soil. )
This approach removes carbon from the atmosphere permanently.
It's also (probably) a net energy producer and it doesn't require creating massive piles of decomposing plant matter everywhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes…
How is this an overall improvement over leaving the corn stalks in the field to decompose and return nutrients to the soil? This process moves soil nutrients away from point of origin. (Serious question from former Iowa farm boy who still owns corn ground operated by others. Should I let my tenants ship stover away? I want to be a good steward of the soil. )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes…
How are you heating it? How are you powering all the chippers, blowers, conveyer belts, and other machinery? Along with the transportation of crop residue to your facility, how much carbon is re-emitted with your consumption of all these industrial products of the primarily fossil fueled powered energy system?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state. Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.
If you rely on material that is scarce in one location but widely available in another, wouldn't it make sense to test where the material is abundant..?
What do you think the article was about?
Ordinarily, I do not reply to these kind of comments, but this article is receiving a lot of them along these lines. The comment breaks down to "Why did you not predict everything that could possibly go wrong before you started this new tech project?"
I hope that it is clear that it would be impossible to identify every problem before field testing. Even in commercial manufacturing, you will run up against novel problems and have to engineer a solution onsite, even though we have had factories for about 250 years.
When they start testing in a different state or country, they will discover a new crop that breaks their system and will go though this process once again. But now, they are more experienced, and it will probably be easier.
> Light and flexible pieces of wheat straw in San Francisco had easily been conveyed pneumatically from the tub grinder into the hammer mill. Okay, that is a very basic failure of engineering/imagination. I’m not saying shame is in order here, but several someone’s should be made to feel uncomfortable over this cock-up. Including the hiring manager because they went for kids instead of people with experience. Why on…
At present, I think direct air capture of CO2 followed by reduction to methane and longer hydrocarbons using water-sourced H2 (all without going through the biological photosynthesis) is going to be the long-term winning technology. One main reason is control of the chemistry is a lot easier when you start with uniform small molecules (CO2 and H2) rather than trying to distill off and separate the products of pyrolysis of biomaterials (or even of crude fossil oil distillation and cracking, a similar process).
This isn't to say that if you have a completely renewable energy based power system, that converting agricultural byproducts to useful materials like biomethane, biooil and fertilizer (phosphorous recovery in particular) isn't going to be a plausible approach in specific situations, and the resulting products could have niche markets.
Now, if your goal is to remove CO2 permanently from the atmosphere, that's more difficult. Making materials like limestone (CaCO3) or perhaps carbon fiber is a better idea for that. Bricks of diamond would be even better, but that's a bit more sci-fi still - but possible. Air-captured diamonds would be a cool product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They discuss a bit in the article, but the material they had prototyped with was very different than the material they tried to scale up with. It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down. So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.
Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially different from the real-world item? I read the article and this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes that point.
Scaling up means testing with new inputs at scale. So now they've done that?
10 tons of biomass per day seems like a really impressive number.