Molecules for Christmas: A visit with Australia’s mysterious bio-expert, Dr. Westlake, for holiday treats and strategies

My old mate, the mysteriously well-informed Dr. Brian Westlake, called me from the mangy old desk he keeps on the verandah at his home and laboratory, Wambangalong, a large station along the Bindiwarra River in the west central of Queensland, by Ininagai country. On this occasion the semi-annual flooding of the local billabong had cut off the only navigable road, and Dr. Westlake had time to school me on quite a number of the Daily Digest’s failings and specifically our lack of attention to stoichiometry and thermodynamics.

I can picture him, six feet and two inches, dark hair and a weatherbeaten face, so deeply wrinkled that you knew him as a man who had spent much of life outdoors. Spending his first twelve years in a saddle, Westlake chafed at city life and headed back to Wambangalong and the hard Bindiwarra country. There, the lack of rainfall, a year divided into a long dry, then a big wet, then a short dry, then a small wet, then back to the top of the year, made him a man who distrusted the certainty that others express. He knew the panting and the slobbering of the cattle when water is short and the heat is on, the foam around their mouths,  the hard manure, the ground-licking, the eyes gone dry. It makes him more skeptical and direct than other blokes, which I like in him.

He wished me a happy Christmas, and I almost got a happy Christmas back to him before the torrent of advice began.

“Matey, you’ve gone and done it now” he declaims in his bold west Queensland accent, and I know that I am about to get a whacking. “Encouraging all those corn ethanol producers to make SAF when there was no justification to do so except in the present of massive carbon prices, or in the case that lunatics taken out for an airing had found themselves elected to board seats. You got plumb lucky on some recent policy wins, and you know it.”

A look at ethanol and SAF

“You don’t like corn ethanol or you don’t like SAF?” I asked plainly.

“I like them bloody both, you intellectual form of heat death,” he growls. “Ethanol is a miraculous little molecule, though some times I wonder why we use it for fuels instead of chemicals. And SAF will be the salvation for aviation. You probably didn’t known that Qantas was founded just a few miles up the road from me, right there in Winton.”

I did not know that, I confirmed.

“Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service, that’s what it stands for.  And Qantas has been rightly adamant about using SAF, it’s the only way they be sustainable and affordable. But using corn ethanol wasn’t possible until a few days ago, you dolt.”

No corn ethanol, I scribbled, then asked, “Why? The Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, perhaps,. which states that no producer will ever make a molecule when the underlying intermediates have more value. That’s NLACM.”

“Good one, that, obviously you couldn’t have come up with it.”

“Eric McAfee of Aemetis,” I confirmed. 

“Thought so.” He paused, as if reaching for a thought.

“SAF,” I reminded him. “My failings. You were enumerating.”

“Ah, yes. Not your failings. Your gross misunderstandings.”  I thanked him for the clarification.

“It’s not the NLACM, though that McAfee bloke is on to something there. It’s the carbon intensity.”

“How so?”

“Pull off those dark glasses that prevent you from seeing. Here’s how it went. The Biden Administration basically said, we’re going to electrify everything, on the ground, so you’ll lose the light duty blended ethanol market. But don’t worry, we’ll give you the aviation market, instead of 15 billion gallons of fuel in cars at the 10 percent blend, you can have 15 billion gallons in US aviation at 50 percent blends, and you’ll need to start with 32 billion gallons of corn ethanol to get that. So, she’ll be apples. Then the aviation industry established the CORSIA standard, which was definitely not the CORNsia standard if you take my meaning, Basically, the industry was stuffed unless the GREET standard was adopted.”

“Which the US government wasn’t pushing hard enough on?” I enquired.

“For sure,” Dr. Westlake confirmed with a laugh. “You’d think the Administration would have gone for GREET from the outset, after all, it’s the Argonne National Laboratory that came up with it and US taxpayers who paid for it’s development.”

“But they fixed that,” I objected.

“They didn’t fix it. Your Secretary Vilsack fixed it. Bull of a man. Miracle he got it done. I’ll miss that block when he hangs up his boots,” Westlake used. “He saw the alternative, and it sure looked like sugarcane ethanol.”

“Cane ethanol?” I exclaimed.

“Yes, cane is good, 2G biomass is better, biogas is best of all.”

The methane story

“Methane to SAF? That’s quite uphill, thermodynamically, isn’t it?”

“Fancy you quoting thermodynamics, you bit of shark biscuit.  Thermo’s beside the point, matey. Think about ethanol plus biogas.”

I scribbled on an envelope I had handy, “That’s C2H5OH plus CH4 right?”

“Good Lord, yes, move along from the obvious, thanks..”

“So, you get C3H10O, I suppose. Which is C3H8, and water.”

“Wrong! It’s C9H20 plus water and hydrogen. Now you have jet fuel. Much better than dehydrating ethanol to get to ethylene. Less hydrogen lost to water!”

“But we need methane to make chemicals, don’t we? Plastics like PHA.”

“No, pinhead. I am still wondering why none of these companies focussed on fermenting methane to chemicals address the amount of oxygen required and the associated high cost. It’s plain stoichiometry.”

“So you wouldn’t make chemicals from methane?”

“I’d make chemicals from methanol. Wonderful feedstock. Very easy to make from wood, you know.”

“Wood?” I spluttered. “Hardly anyone is using wood.”

“UPM is, you drongo. Geniuses, those Scandinavians. Remember, the answers to all your questions are in the forest.”

“What else, though, for corn ethanol produces. It’s SAF, or nothing?” I was puzzled.

The ethylene oxide story

Westlake slammed his hand down on his desk, so close to the phone that it produced a measurable tremor on the Richter scale. “NO! Where do you get these ideas?” They can make ethylene oxide.”

“Ethylene oxide?” I tried to remember what it was used for.

Westlake thundered at me, triumphantly. “Only one of the world’s biggest chemical markets. 28 million tonnes per year. That’s 8.4 billion gallons for brain-absent creatures such as yourself. And the math is simple enough for you in this respect, it’s ethanol minus green hydrogen.”

Turning to hydrogen

“Hydrogen?” I perked up. “Everyone wants green hydrogen. But, what about the market value, after all, ethanol’s got the Renewable Fuel Standard and chemicals have nothing, I mentioned.”

“Streuth, you’re as thick as a brick, Jim. Ethanol’s sold for $700 a ton, ethylene oxide’s sold for $1900. Plus, you get a hydrogen bonus. 50 kilos per ton, adds another $150 or so and they’ll snap it up quickly, hydrogen buyers, at that price. Not to mention, you get a hydrogen credit.”

“Why would you get a hydrogen credit for splitting ethanol?: I wondered.

“For the same reason you get a hydrogen credit for splitting water. It’s not how you get there, it’s where you get to.” Westlake intoned.

“How do you split ethanol into ethylene oxide and hydrogen” I asked with interest. “Who’s doing it?”

“Details, useless details, Westlake said, dismissively. “The stoichiometry’s the thing. Doesn’t matter if someone knows how to do it. Someone should find out how to do it.”

“Sounds very energy-intensive to me,” I volunteered.

“You need a catalyst, boyo. If variety is the spice of life, the spice of chemistry is the catalyst.”

“Probably a catalyst made of unobtanium.” I muttered.

The hydrogen sulfide story

“Heard that, you non-believer. But riddle me this. If a low activation energy is all you and your mateys care about, why are you splitting water instead of hydrogen sulfide?” I blanched. I had no idea. “Words fail you, Mister Digesterati,” Westlake said, “because you have never thought about it. Go look up the figures, mate. You want to chase a low energy reaction, go get your hydrogen there. But of course you’re thinking about hydrogen because you’ve no education in the field – your readers will have recognized in one second what it would take a lifetime for you to understand, that the Claus process which is the basic process for making elemental sulfur, can be replaced. Making sulfur from hydrogen sulfide, via Claus, it’s a two-step process, and what you get is the sulfur you need and water which does you no good at all. Splitting hydrogen sulfide directly is a one-step process, my bloody oath, giving you the same sulfur, and hydrogen, maybe not a lot, but something you can feed back into the process at refineries and pulp manufacturers that produce H2S — better for them, because right now they make hydrogen by reacting natural gas and in that method they produce a lot of CO2.  Think of this improvement as the Santa Claus process — you get free hydrogen free for Chrissie, and no need to make CO2 to get it, the sulfur is the hydrogen carrier

“Hydrogen sulfide? What about the yield”” I asked.

“Yield. Yield is all you want? Use methane or ammonia, 25 percent hydrogen, those. Water’s just 11 percent hydrogen. Hydrogen sulfide is lower, 3 percent, but it’s about the cost of energy and the feedstock is cheap, refiners and pulp companies are replete with it. Lots of hydrogen sulfide available as a waste byproduct from heavy industry. But, back to our subject, I come not to praise H2S but to point to ethylene oxide. That’s a molecule I’ll put in your stocking.”

I thanked him.

“But one more, mate.” 

Oh?

The syngas gambit

“Syngas plus biogas equals ethanol,” he chirped. 

“You mean CO + H2 + CH4 —> C2H5OH?” Again, I fumbled the equation on the envelope, scratching out a formula erasing, scratching again, sweating it.

“Math’s right, isn’t it?” he guffawed.

Another job for that unobtainium catalyst of yours, I muttered. Where’s the value when biogas is already at a high value. “Isn’t the ethanol market saturated?

“Carbon storage, crikey, you Neanderthal.  You can inject a hundred times more carbon into a formation if it’s a liquid, I’ll wager. So, combust half the biomass, feed half to the digesters, you’ll have Co2 on your hands but combine that with steam and methane to make more ethanol. Chuck that down the well, reduce your capex by an order of magnitude because the well can hold so much more. But I’ll go you one better.”

The limestone option

“Yes?” I enquired.

“Burn limestone,” Westlake quipped. 

I choked back my laughter. “Why would I burn limestone? That makes CO2!”

“Yes, but at the point source, capture that, mix it with methane and steam, make ethanol. Now you have ethanol and calcium oxide. Chuck the CaO into a pond, watch it grab CO2 from the water to make new limestone. Them, the pond will absorb the same amount of CO2 from the sky. Passive capture of skyfill, paid for with low carbon ethanol sales that are worth more than the power purchased to run the system. Prest-o, change-o, world’s CO2 problem, solved. That’s the stoichiometry!” He seemed pleased with himself, adding quietly, “That’s your Christmas present, matey.”

Finishing up

I could hear it in the phone, it was evening now in Australia and the wind would blow hard all night. The glossy black cockatoos and the galahs had struck up in song with a scratching and a pulse that was like two rubber boots being scraped against each other. There was more rain on the way and the road down to Longreach might wash down in flood, and it was time to go. We wished each other a happy Christmas, and then he rang off. I sat there, as always, thunking about what Dr. Westlake had outlined. Is all of it possible? Is any of it possible? Does he have it tested, proven, patented? Our wily Australian never quite confirms it one way or the other. Leaving me to wonder, which I suppose is the point of it? Now, if Santa would just bring me some unobtainium, we might be somewhere.