Then and Now: 120 Bioeconomy Pioneers look at yesterday, today, inspirations and challenges
Paul Wever
Then: In late 2005, NG prices skyrocketed from $7.00/M BTUs to a high of $15.38/M BTUs and oil climbed to $140.00/barrel. Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast,and I wanted to find a way to help. Katrina left 4M cords of wood lying on the ground that likely would end up rotting. I had an idea to start a New Generation Cooperative to cut and process the wood for use in northern regions. I presented my plan to preprocess the wood and put it on back haul barges to the north. But after thousands of hours of research and four trips to Mississippi, I came back empty-handed, unable to secure interested parties. I began looking for ways to better utilize waste stream wood for energy and I met Dr. Paul Anderson of Normal, Illinois a retired geography professor who was working on cooking stoves for third world countries that involved the technique of gasification. During this research I found out that Illinois dumps over 5M pounds of biomass in landfills every day.In 2007, we collaborated as Chip Energy.
Now: In 2017 the Chip Energy Biomass Conversion Facility Depot is slated for completion and will be capable of producing 100 tons of value-added feedstocks per day. My ultimate hope is that this effort provides a basic foundation to start a sustainable bio-economy. It’s important that we build a bio-economy infrastructure that takes advantage of the most sophisticated logistical system that exists today, the intermodal logistical system. As I researched my design concepts, it became obvious that the cube of an intermodal shipping container and the commodity-type issues that we have with the logistics of biomass were a marriage made in heaven. I hope to take my hobby and turn it into something that can change the world. We have to think about this differently to where we build smaller, super-efficient facilities that can rationalize taking these low-value biomass materials and convert them into products that we sustainable use in our every day lives.
Inspirations: Effective use of America’s 1.4 billion tons of annually available biomass is not possible without some type of recycling infrastructure.Chip Energy is building a new and more efficient logistical infrastructure for harvesting, storing, preprocessing and transporting under valued biomass feedstocks such as (corn stover, right-of-way grasses, energy crops and landfill diverted woody biomass) to industrial customers that are ready to convert these material into bioproducts such as fuel, chemicals, feeds and co-combustion products.The benefits of the BCFD will increase feedstock value for the producer farmers and provide reliable and consistent delivery to the appropriate industry through improved field to factory logistics. Introducing the use of commercially available forage harvesting machines will allow chopping and collection of many different types of biomass during any season, handling wet or dry material efficiently. This, I hope will be my gift to the next generation.
Challenges: The existing 2017 DOE and USDA $80.00/DT target price delivered to the current bio-economy manufactures is not competitive with $50.00/barrel oil for competitive conversion to value-added commercial products. Chip Energy will integrate current forage and chip wood harvesting methods with the existing National Intermodal Logistics System. Chip Energy will recycle and repurpose over 1 million 20ft. Intermodal Shipping Containers into a national biomass logistics system that can be 30% more efficient than the current biomass feedstock delivery system. 30 to 60% of the finished goods costs are feedstock delivery to the reactor throat.This decentralized depot system can serve highly variable feedstocks; produce the appropriate density feedstock’s, and is compatible with a multitude of rural farms, small communities and remote forests. Production will be cumulatively measured in millions of tons of finished, high quality biomass feedstocks ready for biorefineries, feed and energy consumer.
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