Qi BioEnergy

BioCoal™ Fuel
Made from biomass, in pellet form, that has all the
positive qualities required to finally help solve our
energy and pollution problems. BioCoal™ Fuel is
a clean burning product that was once wood, but
processed in a unique way that removes virtually
all the water and polluting volatile organic
compounds before combustion. The wood is
processed in a proprietary manner that changes
the chemistry and structure of the wood into a
friable material that has a high carbon content
that can be used with coal or to replace coal.
Every ton of carbon in BioCoal™ Fuel used will
keep 3.6 tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel
out of our air. BioCoal™ Fuel is resistant to water
absorption and can be stored indefinitely without
decay.

Energex Pellet Fuel, Inc. operates the largest wood pellet plant in North America with an annual capacity of over 120,000 tons. Using a state-of-the-art process control system, automatic packaging facility, and environmental controls, the Energex plant has the capacity to bag 500 tons per day and hold thousands of tons in inventory to service peak demand periods.

Energex people are dedicated to getting product out on time with an offer of next day delivery to most destinations.

In 1993, Energex Pellet Fuel, Inc. acquired the Lac-Mégantic plant which started in 1982 to produce industrial wood pellets. After purchase of the plant, Energex added a packaging facility to bag premium grade wood pellet fuel and completed a total renovation, rehabilitation, and modernization of the plant facility.

In 2000, Energex merged a West Virginia pellet plant with another in Mifflintown, PA.  Energex American, Inc. now has a production capacity of over 50,000 tons per year.

Long considered an abundant, reliable and relatively cheap source of energy, coal is suddenly in short supply and high demand worldwide.

An untimely confluence of bad weather, flawed energy policies, low stockpiles and voracious growth in Asia’s appetite has driven international spot prices of coal up by 50 percent or more in the past five months, surpassing the escalation in oil prices.

The signs of a coal crisis have been showing up from mine mouths to factory gates and living rooms: As many as 45 ships were stacked up in Australian ports waiting for coal deliveries slowed by torrential rains. China and Vietnam, which have thrived by sending goods abroad, abruptly banned coal exports, while India’s import demands are up. Factory hours have been shortened in parts of China, and blackouts have rippled across South Africa and Indonesia’s most populous island, Java.

Meanwhile mining companies are enjoying a windfall. Freight cars in Appalachia are brimming with coal for export, and old coal mines in Japan have been reopened or expanded. European and Japanese coal buyers, worried about future supplies, have begun locking in long-term contracts at high prices, and world steel and concrete prices have risen already, fueling inflation.

In the United States, the boom in coal exports and prices has helped lower the trade deficit, which declined last year for the first time since 2001. The value of coal exports, which account for 2.5 percent of all U.S. exports, grew by 19 percent last year, to $4.1 billion, the National Mining Association said. An even bigger increase is expected this year.

That means that, in a small way, higher revenues for U.S. coal exports indirectly helped the U.S. economy cover the cost of iPods from China, flat-screen TVs from Japan and machinery from Germany. The still-gaping trade deficit of the world’s largest industrial power at the dawn of the 21st century was slightly eased by a fuel from the era and pages of Charles Dickens.

Big swings in the prices of coal and other commodities are common. But while the price of coal has slipped slightly in recent weeks, many analysts and companies are wondering whether high prices are here to stay. As increasing numbers of the world’s poor join the middle classes, hooking up to electricity grids and buying up more manufactured goods, demand for coal grows. World consumption of coal has grown 30 percent in the past six years, twice as much as any other energy source. About two-thirds of the fuel supplies electricity plants, and just under a third heads to industrial users, mostly steel and concrete makers. Click here to read the rest of the article

The issue is demonstrating that we can take these biomass products and make them work as is,’ without adding additional cost by pelleting, etc.,says Benike, general manager of Northern Excellence Seed L.L.C. in Williams, Minn. The town of about 200 is about 20 miles east of Warroad and about 45 miles east of Roseau, Minn.

Soon, Benike will be part of a demonstration to study the effectiveness of electrical generation from perennial grass crops.

It was announced June 27 that Northern Excellence Seed - a handler of turfgrass seed to the nation and the world - will be one of the first commercialized applications of smaller-scale biomass energy in the U.S.

Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, made the announcement. The $230,000 grant will go to the Giziibii Resource Conservation & Development Council in Bemidji, Minn., which channels the money to Northern Excellence to fund the equipment. It is one of a set of annual Conservation Innovation Grants issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service.

The project will use some of the 2 million pounds of screenings at Northern Excellence, as well as perennial grass seed straw from two specific producers in the Giziibii and Pembina Trail economic development areas. The biomass will be burned in a low-water use gasification system to produce syngas, or synthetic gas, to generate electricity for the plant.

The gasifier for the Northern Excellence Seed plant will produce 100 kilowatt hours - enough to take care of the electricity needs for the plant itself and perhaps a little extra that could be sold on the grid. The electricity would displace the seed company’s electric bill, which typically runs in the $50,000-per- year range. If successful, it would eliminate the $10,000 to $15,000 annual bill for burning the company’s waste screenings

Gulf Ethanol Corporation (OTC:GFET) will meet this month with several Central American ethanol producers to negotiate the conversion of existing plants to cellulosic feedstocks. Demand for cellulosic ethanol is high in these countries. Gulf will provide the technology, engineering and installation of cellulosic technology to the plant owners and will share in the profits of each plant.

“The economics of cellulosic ethanol production are compelling,” noted JT Cloud, Gulf’s President. “As smaller nations seeking energy independence have abundant biomass that can be used to produce cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol will reduce fuel costs, support environmental concerns, and reduce energy dependence,” he concluded.

These ethanol plants were originally built to produce ethanol from food based feestocks such as corn and sugar cane. As a result, the price of feedstocks and of food have gone up, placing stress on the plants profitability. Companies such as Archer Daniels Midland (NYSE: ADM) and Bunge Limited (NYSE: BG) have led in the development of traditional feed-stocks. Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) recently announced a joint venture with Weyerhaeuser Co. (NYSE: WY) to develop cellulosic feedstocks from wood products. “The industry has taken a sharp turn toward cellulosic feedstocks for ethanol,” stated Mr. Cloud. “We expect to be a leader in this sector,” he added.

GreenField Ethanol, Canada’s largest ethanol producer, and Enerkem, a leading gasification and catalysis technology company, have signed a Binding Term Sheet outlining their plan to produce cellulosic ethanol on a commercial scale.

“We are excited to work with Enerkem to make cellulosic ethanol a commercial reality in Canada,” said Bob Gallant, President and CEO of GreenField Ethanol. “Canadian consumers are looking for a greener, affordable alternative to fossil fuels and GreenField is delivering by expanding its corn ethanol business to include new bio-based fuels,” added Frank Dottori, Managing Director of the company’s Cellulosic Ethanol division.

The companies agreed to terms that will see them collaborate 50/50 on joint projects to design, build and operate commercial cellulosic ethanol plants using Enerkem technology in specified geographic areas. The first plant location has been secured within Canada and will be announced in the coming weeks. A second plant is also in development.

Enerkem’s technology converts biomass such as sorted municipal solid waste and urban wood residues into cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels. It eliminates more than two tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHGs) per tonne of residues used as feedstock. The company’s founders have been active in gasification for many years. Enerkem’s pilot plant, which has run more than 3,000 hours since 2003, produces syngas, methanol and cellulosic ethanol. The company is currently building a commercial scale cellulosic ethanol demonstration plant in Westbury, Quebec.

“This partnership is an important milestone in achieving Enerkem’s goal to commercialize cellulosic ethanol”, said Mr. Vincent Chornet, Chief Executive Officer of Enerkem. “By joining forces with GreenField Ethanol, we are poised to become the Canadian leaders in the production and distribution of new generation biofuels. GreenField’s experience in building and operating industrial plants will be key to scaling up our production.”

Amyris Biotechnologies is developing a large-scale fermentation process to renewably produce biofuels. Amyris is developing a gasoline substitute that contains more energy than ethanol, will result in lower cost and less polluting biofuel blends, and is fully compatible with today’s cars and the existing petroleum infrastructure. We are also developing a diesel substitute that can achieve lower costs and much greater scale than vegetable oil based biodiesels. Our next generation biodiesel is inherently stable in cold temperatures and does not break down during storage and transport like conventional biodiesel. Both our gasoline substitute and our diesel substitute will be made from the same feedstocks and production plants that are used to make ethanol.

On a blackboard, it looks so simple: Take a plant and extract the cellulose. Add some enzymes and convert the cellulose molecules into sugars. Ferment the sugar into alcohol. Then distill the alcohol into fuel. One, two, three, four — and we’re powering our cars with lawn cuttings, wood chips, and prairie grasses instead of Middle East oil.

Unfortunately, passing chemistry class doesn’t mean acing economics. Scientists have long known how to turn trees into ethanol, but doing it profitably is another matter. We can run our cars on lawn cuttings today; we just can’t do it at a price people are willing to pay.

The problem is cellulose. Found in plant cell walls, it’s the most abundant naturally occurring organic molecule on the planet, a potentially limitless source of energy. But it’s a tough molecule to break down. Bacteria and other microorganisms use specialized enzymes to do the job, scouring lawns, fields, and forest floors, hunting out cellulose and dining on it. Evolution has given other animals elegant ways to do the same: Cows, goats, and deer maintain a special stomach full of bugs to digest the molecule; termites harbor hundreds of unique microorganisms in their guts that help them process it. For scientists, though, figuring out how to convert cellulose into a usable form on a budget driven by gas-pump prices has been neither elegant nor easy. To tap that potential energy, they’re harnessing nature’s tools, tweaking them in the lab to make them work much faster than nature intended. Click here to read the full article on Wired

Like sugar materials, starchy materials are also in the human food chain and are thus expensive. Fortunately, a third alternative exists—cellulosic materials. Examples of cellulosic materials are paper, cardboard, wood, and other fibrous plant material.

Cellulosic resources are in general very widespread and abundant. For example, forests comprise about 80% of the world’s biomass. Being abundant and outside the human food chain makes cellulosic materials relatively inexpensive feedstocks for ethanol production.

Cellulosic materials are comprised of lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose and are thus sometimes called lignocellulosic materials. One of the primary functions of lignin is to provide structural support for the plant. Thus, in general, trees have higher lignin contents then grasses. Unfortunately, lignin which contains no sugars, encloses the cellulose and hemicellulose molecules, making them difficult to reach.

Cellulose molecules consist of long chains of glucose molecules as do starch molecules, but have a different structural configuration. These structural characteristics plus the encapsulation by lignin makes cellulosic materials more difficult to hydrolyze than starchy materials.

Hemicellulose is also comprised of long chains of sugar molecules; but contains, in addition to glucose (a 6-carbon or hexose sugar), contains pentoses (5-carbon sugars). To complicate matters, the exact sugar composition of hemicellulose can vary depending on the type of plant.

Since 5-carbon sugars comprise a high percentage of the available sugars, the ability to recover and ferment them into ethanol is important for the efficiency and economics of the process. Recently, special microorganisms have been genetically engineered which can ferment 5-carbon sugars into ethanol with relatively high efficiency.

One example is a genetically engineered microorganism developed by the University of Florida that has the ability to ferment both 5- and 6-carbon sugars. This microorganism was issued US patent 5,000,000. Other researchers have developed microorganisms with the ability to efficiently ferment at least part of the sugars present.

Bacteria have drawn special attention from researchers because of their speed of fermentation. In general, bacteria can ferment in minutes as compared to hours for yeast.