Till, Baby, Till: Syngest CEO offers "Cornucopia" vision for food, feed, fuel, fertilizer from corn
In the Keynote address for BBI’s International Biomass Conference & Expo, which officially opens this morning in Minneapolis, Syngest CEO Jack Oswald led attendees in chants of “Till Baby Till” — while offering a vision of a new “cornucopia” biorefinery model to produce food, fertilizer and fuel from corn.
[Download the complete Syngest presentation at BIOMASS, here.]
“It allows us to produce a greater abundance of all three which are at the heart of the intersection of energy and agriculture. We can put an end to the “food vs. fuel” debate and also provide an enormous amount of nitrogen fertilizer as a bonus,” Oswald said.
We’ll forgive for the moment the reference to tilling, when the industry is aiming to move to no-till farming. We’ll also overlook the slam on GOP chair Michael Steele, who led the first “Drill, Baby, Drill” chants at the 2008 Republican convention (Steele has an undeservedly bad rep as no friend of biofuels – in fact, he is).
“Till, Baby, Till” is just too attractive a line to quibble over minor points.
Syngest CEO Oswald most recently was profiled in the Digest over his call for “energy abundance” to replace “energy security” as a national goal – saying that only abundance would end the debates over scarcity which are at the heart of concerns over food vs. fuel.
At the time, the Digest dubbed his strategy a “Return to Niagara” approach, while Oswald has developed a corn-centric “Cornucopia” moniker to translate his goals into practical actions at the integrated biorefinery level.
“We intend to use each and every component in an ear of corn,” said Oswald. “The cob and bran are gasified into hydrogen for ammonia synthesis, while leaving biochar as residue. The germ is separated into food grade oil and protein, and the endosperm/starch is converted into butanol and animal feed.”
With fermentation, he projects a 20 percent increase in productivity in his integrated biorefinery model – or moving from 12 billion gallons to 14 billion – through higher yields from existing plant and equipment. Ultimately, he suggest, a move to biobutanol and diesel will offer higher yields.
In gasification, he offers the SynGest Biomass gasification system as “the lowest cost way to convert biomass into syngas” using bran and cobs as feedstock. Low cost syngas he suggests, is the lowest cost way to produce valuable products from biomass, with a focus on production of ammonia, methanol, and BioDME (hi methyl ether).
In using germ, he outlines a low cost food-grade approach, to separate food-grade oil from food-grade protein in germ, resulting in a high value food-grade vegetable oil stream, high value food-grade protein stream, with a combined value is much higher than DDGS today, and with more flexibility in terms of storage and transport.
While detailing his Cornucopia plan, Oswald constantly emphasized the word “local” – as in local interests, local supplies of feedstock, local jobs, local consumption of products, protecting the local environment, benefits for the local economy and local financial involvement.
Syngest, which is planning a 130,000 ton integrated biorefinery facility for Menlo, Iowa, said that financing is impossible without a clear vision of increasing farmer incomes through use of cobs and through fractionation, and communicating to financing sources how all of this can be achieved using existing, proven equipment, pipelines and other infrastructure to reduce financing risk.
Oswald said that the Syngest process realizes 200 pounds of anhydrous ammonia per year, per acre of corn, and produces a transportation fuel that can be used in fertilizer application. In a world where biofuels made from corn are too closely associated with price volatility in fossil-based oil, because of the dependence on diesel fuel in farming operations and fossil-based fertilizers — on these grounds alone, the Syngest vision is a compelling one.
A copy of the Oswald presentation is available here.
You can even buy a “Till, Baby,Till” shirt here.
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