I hope they factor in the risk of future legislation effectively mandating carbon sequestration for just about anything based on coal. Ignoring this risk would be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Biomass gasification is a viable process for rural municipalities. It may make more sense to focus on GHG neutral electricity production from locally produced fuel than on ethanol production for E85. What matters is the aggregate GHG production, not the source.

The City Council in Des Moines might want to study the example of the town of Guessing in Austria.

http://www.a-e-r.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Commissions/RegionalPolicies/EventsAndMeetings/2005/Presentations_Norrbotten/R-Rauch.ppt

They can use corn stover for heat in the process. Bring the corn and the stalks to the same location. If they gasify the stover they could sell the energy products on the market as well...and all this would be CO2 neutral.

What is the point of using natural ga to produce ethanol, and then use ethanol to power vehicles? Is it not much simpler and cheaper to use directly natural gas to power vehicles? The technology is available since the '50s, and any gasoline-powered vehicle can be converted to nanatural gas at a quite reasonable cost.

Having just moved to a small town in iowa I can tell you that nat gas for cars won't work out here. What you see all over are propane tanks for home heating. Less than a mile from me is the site of a new biodiesel refinery.
Fueling a car at home raises the problem of fuel tax collection. It is easy to collect those taxes at the fuel pump.

Starting with natural gas as a feedstock, what is the most efficient way of getting it to power a car ?
Compressed or converted into some other fuel -
If converted, why pick ethanol ?

Perhaps the group could suggest something better.
Rafael ???

Natural gas can be used directly and there are 5 million + CNG vehicles in the World today.

Since Coal is cheaper, Coal based Ethanol will be able to compete easily with gasolene.

"..optimize a gasification process for the production of producer gas from biomass to replace the use of natural gas in ethanol plants."

Now this is the right idea, even though the earlier post indicates a very odd bit of research involved. Just gasify the stover..a proven method.

One take currently being developed on biogas: a Texas-based company is building a couple of ethanol plants next door to cattle feedlots. They feed the post-ethanol distiller's grain to the livestock, then take back the manure produced thereby to get the methane by fermentation. I don't know how big of a feedlot operation is needed to balance with a plan for a 50 million gal/yr ethanol operation.
http://www.pandaenergy.com/

Rick:

This is a great project. And it is just initial step to utilize synergy of food/fuel production.

Cow manure should be composted or digested in order to be used as organic fertilizer any way. In that respect collection of biogas from manure anaerobic digestion is pure surplus. Due to high nitrogen/carbon ratio of manure, anaerobic digestion is severely suppressed. This problem could be solved by addition of high C/N ratio plant residue – agricultural waste. It does not require future break-through technology as for cellulosic ethanol, anaerobic microorganisms eat plant biomass fiercely right now. Speed and yield of anaerobic digestion per unit of volume of digester could be tripled this way. Excess of biogas (close to 65% methane, 35% CO2, and some H2S – by volume) could be directly used in lean-burn diesel generators to generate electricity with very high thermal efficiency of about 38%. Additional CO2 effectively serves as cooled EGR, and as a result emissions of NOx are very low. For medium-size electricity generation lean-burn gaseous fuel diesel generators are the cheapest technology currently possible. Such technology is widely utilized on sewage treatment plants.

High-temperature exhaust (with some portion of biogas burning to increase temperature beyond sulfuric acid dew point after heat exchanger) could be used for distillation of bioethanol, and further after dry desulphurization to heat-up anaerobic digesters. If temperature of digester is raised from 35C (mesophilic digestion) to 55C (thermophilic digestion), productivity of digester is doubled further. Excess of biogas could be washed from CO2 and fed into local NG system.

Now, anaerobic digestion produces highly concentrated pumpable organic fertilizer – anaerobic process retain all nitrogen and other nutrients, unlike aerobic composting. This fertilizer will be used on adjacent fields.

High concentration stream of CO2 is potential candidate for purification and sale. Excess of CO2 could be fed to adjacent hot houses for carbon fertilization of the grown vegetables. Currently most greenhouses use ridiculously wasteful practice of burning NG, cooling exhaust, and feeding it to greenhouse to maximize the yield. Note, that due to controlled environment hot house production is free from pesticides and herbicides. It could be fertilized from the anaerobic digestors, and could return waste biomass back to digestion.

All in all, the system could involve into near closed loop system (with energy of sun as major contributor), with yield of meat, milk, near organic vegetables and crops, electricity, NG, and biofuels. With minimal addition of synthetic fertilizers and energy, if any.

Emerging technologies, such as cellulosic ethanol, biobutanol (having very beneficial synergy if blended with ethanol for use as gasoline additive), CO2 enhanced algae ponds, biodiesel fuel feedstock extraction from corn used for ethanol production, tallow conversion to biodiesel, etc., could add to the complex additional benefits and flexibility.

I believe that such incredibly beneficial for farmer’s communities industrial/agricultural complexes are way more efficient and promising way to spend money then for fashionable BS such as corn E85, pure organic farming, or geological carbon sequestration.

Would it make sense to use the waste heat from a conventional, coal fired power plant, to boost efficiency of an ethanol producing plant, which could use biomass as feedstock?

With friends like these, why does the ethanol industry need enemies? That is, assuming it isn't in fact renewables' enemies behind this, in key measure. I can tell you right now that out here in California where the customers are, when people hear of ethanol being made using coal (spewing mercury, SOX, NOX, thorium etc.) they are going to ask why don't we redirect the money and cut out the farmer.

Assuming tons not tonnes that's 8.28 lbs CO2/gallon of ethanol; CO2 positive, but not by a lot. Coal-to-liquids is more likely to have the pollutants removed, even CO2.

A plant with a coal heater can have it replaced in the future, but one with a natural gas heater can't? That's the marketing you need in order to slip through a coal plant. But natural gas isn't that much better, since we're running out and when we have to depend on imports we'll need to change again.

Using any kind of fossil fuel to inefficiently distill ethanol is an obscenity. You don't need the high-temperature heat that fossil fuel is good for. You only need a temperature rise of a few tens of degress C, and that is easily achieved by several more benign methods. Easy solar, cogeneration, process by-product heat, other fuel synthesis byproduct heat, heat pump heat, geothermal, or combinations thereof.

Why is it that people in India seem to know what they're doing, but Americans don't? Solar ponds work, and are a cheap solution.

The best solution would be set up a PV farm next to this thing using cheap solar cells, probably with concentrators and let them heat up a bit, liquid cool them and use the 'losses' to distill the ethanol. Solar cell efficiency goes down maybe 12% (low pressure distillation at 50 C) but the free heat should be worth it. Use a giant heat tank so you can distill around the clock. The cells'll be cheap soon. Less than 1% of the land needed to grow the corn, and the electricity is probably worth more than the ethanol.

The only way to save the renewable industry from pre-obsolete solutions is to institute a 'virtual carbon tax' that subtracts from their subsidies if they are emitting carbon in the process as if the carbon tax were already here. Otherwise when we finally get the tax we will have to start all over.

There are developments in DME in China:

Currently, the market trend today is such that many Chinese coal chemical companies are moving towards optimising low cost and abundant coal feedstock for expansion into DME production.

If you would like to know more on COAL to Syngas to DME developments, join us at upcoming North Asia DME / Methanol conference in Beijing, 27-28 June 2007, St Regis Hotel. The conference covers key areas which include:

DME productivity can be much higher especially if
country energy policies makes an effort comparable to
that invested in increasing supply.
By:
National Development Reform Commission NDRC
Ministry of Energy for Mongolia

Production of DME/ Methanol through biomass
gasification could potentially be commercialized
By:
Shandong University completed Pilot plant in Jinan and
will be sharing their experience.

Advances in conversion technologies are readily
available and offer exciting potential of DME as a
chemical feedstock
By: Kogas, Lurgi and Haldor Topsoe

Available project finance supports the investments
that DME/ Methanol can play a large energy supply role
By: International Finance Corporation

For more information: www.iceorganiser.com,

How can convert Biogas to electricity in cheaper method .
I hav a biogas plant hav a capacity of 4 metre cube.