POET's Vision on US Ethanol

The Future of POET: Liberty Project
The 80 million USD grant that the Department of Energy has given to POET is meant to convert a 50 million gallon per year ethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa. The new plant, once converted, will produce 100 million gallons of corn-ethanol and 25 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol. Why convert an existing plant and why the Emmetsburg plant? “The economics are very important, but it also gets back to the farmer network. The ability to collect cellulosic biomass is a very challenging situation for any market and having an existing farmer network already associated with the plant location, we believe provides advantages for the cellulosic plant. The other aspects relate somewhat to economics but also to ‘ease of operation’: the plant already has a rail connection, the plant already has ethanol storage and the plant already has a natural gas pipeline should we not be able to generate the energy that we expect. It has a lot of site specific activities that we just don’t have to replicate or go through process leads to restart. In addition, DOE’s interest in our project is in how fast we can replicate this model. If we learn how to do this by modifying one of our existing plants, the ability to replicate Liberty across our other 20 plants should be easier than doing them from a greenfield.”

The specs of Liberty Project
How will the Emmetsburg plant compare to current ethanol technology. What yield will it produce, is the technology yeast-based or bacteria-based? “If we talk about yield in cellulosic ethanol, we can’t talk about gallons per bushel, so we shift our terminology to yield per ton and those numbers are still too early to get a ledge on. If you look at other people’s work, not POET’s work, a lot of people use between 90 gallons and 100 gallons per US ton of biomass. I think that those are reasonable numbers once the operation gets going. We also know that producing ethanol from cobs and corn fiber will allow us to extract 11 percent more ethanol from a bushel of corn and 27 percent more ethanol from an acre of corn. Regarding our technology, we are not disclosing that, because we are looking at both. The biggest pro for working with yeast is that we have such a great familiarity with it. Working with bacteria allows you greater utility in terms of how you can engineer your microbe to do what you want it to do. I think that’s the trade-off, one that is really easy and robust to work with versus one that is really easy to manipulate.”

Will cellulosic ethanol shift production more towards the coast?
One of the main problems of U.S. ethanol at the moment is that it’s mainly produced in the mid-west, but the main fuel markets are located at the coast. Logistics are a significant cost factor for ethanol because of this. Could cellulosic crops shift production more towards the coast? “I think that the challenge that you have is looking at the economics of those marginal lands with new cropping systems. I think that eventually it will happen, but I think that the time required to produce, let’s say switch grass at a closer to destination market will have many challenges. I really don’t know how to grow switch grasses commercially at large scale. Challenges are plenty: where is the seed, what is the seed source, how are we going to harvest, collect, store and supply? The density of the materials is far less compared to what we have in cobs for example. Currently we still see the highest concentration of biomass in the corn belt, so I think that you will still see the vast majority of ethanol coming from the corn belt. Whether it is cellulosic or first generation. We will continue to use our expertise with corn, corn by-products and residues. But we are very aware, very much watching, very much understanding that the technology we develop for corn is also applicable to switch grass or woodchips and we have to evaluate those on a case by case basis.”