The Rise of Renewable ‘Mobile’ Fuels: Will It Continue?
When I was hired to design, train operators and provide start-up support for the first commercial biodiesel plant in the U. S., I had no idea how fast the renewable fuel industry would grow. WOW! What a rush seeing jobs created and farmers finding another profitable outlet for their crops.
In the past 17 years, more than 300 biofuel refineries have been built in the U. S. supplying ethanol and biodiesel to supplement our “mobile” fuel supply. The Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) is calling the decade of the 2000′s “the era when biofuels came of age.”
Now that the renewable fuel industry is “of age,” we have seen public opinion shift from “freedom from foreign oil” to “renewable fuels are increasing the price of our food.” In December 2009, Congress failed to renew the $1.00/gal. federal subsidy for renewable fuels to help renewable fuel prices stay competitive with the fossil fuel giants. The consequence of these changes has been a slowdown of the U. S. ethanol and biodiesel industries. Construction has stopped on new plants, and some producing plants have shut down due to the loss of profits and/or market.
Contractor Ron Fagen, the CEO of Fagen Inc., put Granite Falls, Minnosata, on the national map by building 47 ethanol projects across the U.S. between 2006 and 2008. But Ron now says, “The U.S. ethanol building boom is over.” Yet despite the job cuts and slowing sales, Fagen remains an unabashed believer in ethanol and renewable energy.
The company will finish one more ethanol plant in Pennsylvania, but Fagen’s attention already has turned to other forms of renewable energy—biomass and wind. Going forward, Fagen said he thinks his business mix will be about 60 percent biomass projects, 25 percent wind energy and the remaining share from building other types of industrial facilities.
His company recently landed a job in Texas to construct the largest biomass power plant in the country. The Minneapolis office of Zachry Engineering is the design engineer on the project. The 100-megawatt plant will serve customers in the Austin, Texas, area.
“East Texas has more trees than northern Minnesota,” Fagen said, but trees won’t be harvested for the new facility. Instead, chips, bark and other wood waste from wood processing plants will be used to fuel the biomass facility.
“We are making use of forestry residue wood to produce electricity, rather than using coal,” said Alison Cochrane, a vice president with Zachry Engineering. Work crews will start pouring concrete on the Texas site this month.
Tom Erickson, associate director for research at the Energy and Environmental Research Center in Grand Forks, said, “We definitely see the use of biomass as a significantly growing area.” Erickson added that the demand for biomass will likely intensify if politicians approve a carbon tax or place a cap on emissions.
“You can combust [biomass] in a boiler to produce electricity or heat. Or you can gasify it, in which you can produce a syngas, which is similar to natural gas,” Erickson said.
Business leaders in the Ozarks have the opportunity to take a similar path as Ron Fagen. We have large quantities of biomass that can be converted into usable energy. We need to promote the use of renewable fuels, and we need to continue to invest in new technologies that can efficiently use the available biomass in the Ozarks.
You can help by contacting your elected officials to promote legislation that will offer incentives to use local biomass to produce useable forms of renewable energy that reduces our dependency of fossil fuels.
It can be done if you and I do our jobs as responsible, “tree hugging” citizens.
Jim Gardner