To get to the Green Highway, auto makers are making the most amazing and fuel-efficient petroleum-burning engines ever. What doesn’t get nearly as much attention are the huge opportunities to achieve a cleaner world by burning something other than petroleum. A couple of weeks ago, I tried to dispel many of the “ethanol is a scam” myths. This week it’s biodiesel’s turn.
What I knew about biodiesel until recently was that Willie Nelson was probably making homebrew biodiesel in his kitchen somewhere to fuel a rainbow-coloured school bus. It’s true that the back-to-the-land crowd had long ago figured out that a fairly easy way to save the world and beat the taxman was to collect all the French fry grease they could and perform some simple chemistry. Biodiesel is that easy to make and it’s a wonderful fuel.
Biodiesel is a non-toxic and biodegradable fuel that is made from vegetable oils, waste cooking oil, animal fats or basically anything with a lot of fat in it. More on that later. Biodiesel combusts better than petroleum-based diesel, has a higher cetane (like octane) rating and produces fewer life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions. Ethanol is for gasoline-powered engines and there are a lot more of them on the roads than diesels and, as a result, the ethanol industry is much more established. But diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines and biodiesel fuel has come a long way from Willie’s kitchen.
BIOX, a Canadian company with some interesting patented technology first developed in the 1990s at the University of Toronto, has built a 67-million-litre annual capacity biodiesel production facility in Hamilton, Ont. This plant is one of the largest continuous flow biodiesel production facilities in the world. Animal fats and recycled vegetable oils are trucked in and 45 minutes later high-quality biodiesel is ready to be trucked out. “The technology is going great,” says BIOX CEO Tim Haig.
BIOX is processing inedible waste material simply because it’s cheaper than buying edible oil like canola. The biodiesel industry generally is on the ropes because the price of feed stocks have been rising while the price of petroleum-based diesel has been coming down. There is no legal requirement or “mandate” forcing petroleum companies to blend biodiesel into fuel the way there is for ethanol. But it’s coming.
“New federal mandates going into effect in 2012 require all diesel fuel in Canada to contain a 2 per cent biodiesel blend,” said Haig. “Getting a 2 per cent blend across the country would be a monumental feat – that’s 600 million litres in the next few years, but I think we can do it. Canada is producing about 120 million litres a year now and BIOX is producing about half of that.”
Haig says that BIOX is “feedstock agnostic” - which means it can process edible oils or non-edible fatty waste at the same time. But he believes new feedstocks are coming that will lower the price and expand the supply of biodiesel significantly. After BP blows through that first $20-billion for the Gulf disaster you might expect it to become a little more interested in bio-based energy than in more deep-sea drilling. The two most promising new feedstocks are algae and jatropha.
Craig Venter, the man who mapped the human gene, is all over algae. Exxon Mobil entered into a partnership with Venter’s Synthetic Genomics (SGI) in mid-2009 to apply SGI expertise in genetic engineering to create algae that can produce biofuels on a large, economical scale. Exxon Mobil had committed to invest more than $600-million in this effort – which is peanuts for the world’s largest oil company but a lot of money for a scientist.
Jatropha is a plant that can grow in marginal soil and doesn’t have to be fertilized or watered, yet yields more biofuel per acre than corn. Poor farmers in India, China, the Philippines and Malaysia are planting millions of acres of it hoping to turn unproductive fields into a biofuel opportunity. BP is investing in jatropha cultivation.
The adoption of biodiesel, like ethanol, has been delayed by the “Food versus Fuel” argument because both compete with the food industry for raw material. Other potential biofuel feed stocks like palm oil plantations have encroached on rain forests. Algae and jatropha squelch such concerns.
“Petroleum is algae that’s been processed by the earth’s crust for hundreds of thousands of years,” says Haig, “although everyone thinks it’s dinosaurs. But there is now the prospect to skip the earth’s crust’s work and go direct from algae. Algae is up to 50 per cent by weight lipids – fats. That’s perfect for biodiesel.”
Producing renewable fuels – gas from alcohol and diesel from animal fat and plant oils – is already a $2.2-billion industry in Canada, according to the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association. The Gulf disaster is pushing public opinion and political will toward the renewables over the drill-ables. This is happening as science and engineering are on the verge of delivering cellulosic ethanol and jatropha and algae-based biodiesel. Finally, we’re getting green.
Michael Vaughan is co-host with Jeremy Cato of Car/Business, which appears Fridays at 8 p.m. on Business News Network and Saturdays at 2 p.m. on CTV.
