(150a) Rethinking Cellulosic Biofuels: Toward a Depot-Enabled, Nuclear-Assisted Biorefinery System

The U.S. effort to develop a sustainable large scale, cellulosic biofuel industry has essentially failed. Given the urgency of addressing both petroleum supply security and climate security, a radical rethinking of cellulosic biofuels is required. We believe that a successful, scalable and sustainable biofuel industry requires large scale farmer involvement, large scale feedstock logistics systems, large scale biorefineries and very large downstream product markets.

Current approaches do not address these requirements and will therefore continue to fail.

We propose instead a system wherein sustainably produced local biomass is processed in farmer-owned depots into uniform, easily transported commodities. These commodities are then shipped using existing logistics systems to very large (~250,000 barrels/day) modified oil refineries. The modified oil refineries convert biomass commodities via known processing approaches into hydrocarbon feedstocks that are then refined into the entire range of existing petroleum products. Such processing approaches include Fischer-Tropsch, direct hydrogenation, etc., depending on the biomass commodity. The low-carbon heat and power are provided by co-located nuclear plants with hydrogen via pipeline from (1) nuclear, (2) natural gas with steam methane reforming and CCS or (3) other sources.

In the proposed system, U.S. agriculture changes radically to make farming both more profitable and more environmentally sustainable. Existing logistics systems and existing oil refineries are used to the maximum extent possible, thereby reducing the time, expense and carbon cost required to replace this infrastructure. Existing downstream markets and infrastructure for hydrocarbon products do not change at all.

Bruce E. Dale, University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University

Charles W. Forsberg, Principal Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology