Then and Now: 120 Bioeconomy Pioneers look at yesterday, today, inspirations and challenges

Quang Nguyen

Then:  “I was starting up a 1 ton/day biomass ethanol pilot plant in York, NE and commissioning a 90 ton/day biomass ethanol demonstration plant in Salamanca, Spain for Abengoa essentially at the same time.  We were fast tracking the commercialization of cellulosic ethanol.

I was ready after spending many years (since 1977) in process development, designing, building and running biomass conversion pilot plants in Canada and the U.S. (9 years at NREL.)  I started out making animal feed from wheat and barley straw.  I successfully started up and ran the spent sulfite ethanol plant at Tembec from 1990-1993 before helping NREL built their first integrated biomass ethanol pilot plant.  This industrial ethanol plant was decommissioned in 2014.”

Now: “Well, I’m kind of back on the drawing board at INL working on improving biomass feedstock preprocessing.  Pioneer biorefineries and equipment manufacturers underestimate the magnitude of variabilities of biomass properties (especially corn stover) during harvesting, collection, and storage, and the resulting impact on the operability of preprocessing equipment.

We at INL believe that we have made significant contribution in the science and technical development of producing consistent quality feedstock for biofuel conversion from raw biomass.

Inspirations: Most researchers at lab and even pilot plant environment tend to start with clean and uniform biomass (the so-called pristine biomass).  Consequently, many material handling and conversion issues were not encountered until scaling up to commercial operation (i.e., very large scale and 24 hr/d operation for long stretch of time).” Making fuels, chemicals, feed and even food from renewable biomass makes sense because these are sustainable, help local economy, and make a better world for future generations.

Challenges:  The biggest challenge, in my opinion, is lack of long-term policy from governments to support advanced bioeconomy.  Without clear policy business investment will not flourish to accelerate technology development necessary to make advanced bioeconomy viable.