Colorado bark beetle
The dead wood left behind from bark beetles could replace some of the gasoline that fuels our cars — at a lower cost — said John Scahill, an engineer with the U.S. Department of Energy.“This gasoline and diesel is indistinguishable from what you put in your gas tank,”
Scahill said at a biomass conference Thursday at Colorado State University.
“It would be a premium or superior product from what we currently get from petroleum.”
And it would cost about $2 per gallon, which is cheaper than petroleum, Scahill said.
The conference focused on different ways of converting biomass, specifically the dead wood found in Colorado forests, into a renewable, clean energy source, thereby reducing fire danger and the further spread of bark beetles.
Methods include wood chip and wood pellet heating, as well as turning the wood product into liquid fuel as described by Scahill.
“We can essentially melt trees, and what we end up producing is called bio-oils,” Scahill said.
Scientists then remove oxygen from the oil to turn it into a petroleum replacement, he said.
Cellulose-based ethanol can be made from most plant wastes, including wood, and even from garbage and manure.
Range Fuels, a Broomfield-based company begun in 2006, is building the nation’s first commercial-sized plant to produce cellulose-based ethanol in Georgia.
Bill Schafer, Range Fuels’ senior vice president for business development, said such refineries could, some day, provide a large amount of the nation’s transportation fuel.
Other biomass plants, designed by the KL Process Design Group in Rapid City, S.D., to create cellulose-based ethanol, are in different stages of completion in Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska.
The goal is to someday produce commercial amounts of ethanol, a cleaner, sustainable fuel, said Jim Schultze of KL Process Design Group.
“We truly believe that cellulose-based ethanol is going to be the future of ethanol,” he said.
That future is viable, but more research needs to be done to ensure the product will remain stable while it is stored and to create a stable market, Scahill said.
And businesses need incentives and assurances before they will invest in infrastructure and technology, Scahill added, echoing the words of U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, who spoke earlier during the conference.
Georgia offered such incentives to Range Fuels for the plant it is building, making it economically competitive, said Schafer.
While the possibility is exciting to many, those on the forefront need to think about the long-term impacts to the environment and make sure not to create too large an industry, cautioned Rocky Smith, program manager for the Colorado Wild Forest Watch Campaign.
Harvesting too many acres of wood could damage the soil, pollute the air, hurt the tourism industry and consume a lot of water, he said.
“It’s not going to solve all our energy needs, but it can make a contribution,” Smith said.
“It’s gotta be small. It’s gotta be local, and it’s gotta be flexible. … If we can do that, I think we can have our cake and eat it too.”
Carl Spaulding, president of the Colorado Timber Association, agreed: “We can use it or we can lose it. We can’t have an industry that’s too big, and we can’t have one that’s too little.”
