Mascoma's magic world for magic bugs

September 2, 2010 |

The first thing you notice when you arrive at the Mascoma demonstration plant in Rome, NY is the machine gun emplacement guarding the entrance to the parking lot.

It gets you attention, but what the emplacement actually guarding is the Eastern Air Command, the NORAD unit that handles aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and defense for the US and Canada. It happens to be next door.

While convenient to have a nuclear deterrent at one’s fingertips, the reasons for Mascoma choosing the old Griffiss Air Force Base site had more to do with an existing facility, spec-built and brand new, with a rail line and sufficient utilities already installed.

Mascoma execs at the feedstock delivery area of the company’s demonstratino plant in Rome, NY. From left: Plant Director Eric Oleson; Senior VP Alan Belcher; Sr. Director, Process Engeneering Steve Licht; Biofuels Digest’s Flavia Marples

This is the Rome Labs site, which does quite a bit of intelligence-related R&D. The super-secret nature of cellulosic development is not entirely different – though hugh-hush cadres of generals and admirals are supplanted by hush-hush cadres of investors, strategic partners and dudes from the Department of Energy.

At Mascoma, only the distilklation column is outside and on view. The rest is inside, and no photos please.

But let’s go inside and see what we see. In a space perhaps originally envisioned for a defense industry scale up. The primary difference being that, in the War on Carbon as opposed to the Second World War, when they tell you to take the most impossible hill imaginable, you have to take it on a timeline, on a budget, and armed with a tiny microbe as your chief weapon.

Aim small, miss small

“We make as little ethanol as possible,” chuckles Alan Belcher when I ask the veteran Senior VP of Operations about the plant’s actual output, compared to its publicly-discussed capacity of 200,000. In the engineering of pilots and demonstrations, the goal is not to build as big as possible to achieve economies of scale. The goal is to build as small as possible to achieve economies of not-building-anything-you-dont-have-to.

Nor is the facility some weird place where three-headed bioprocessing monsters make Frankenfuels. In fact, the bacterial and yeast-based microbes do their work silently, although you can feel the process heat when you come close to a fermenter. Tropical aficionados, these magic bugs, they really like the heat.

What you really notice are the boilers, and pipes that are as complexly laid out as a microchip. I think it was Jim Renner of Victaulic who once remarked that half the cost of bioenergy construction is in the pipes, and he’ll get no argument from me at Mascoma.

It’s a scaling exercise. You start at the bench with a beaker, and generally go up in increments of 5X – sometimes, 10X if you are feeling risky, sometimes more. But it takes a lot of steps to build out to 7,500 gallon fermenters that are king of the hill in a small demonstration plant. Not only do you have to scale up in terms of building out the fermenters, you have to test out the microbes’ performance at each step along them way.

Turns out that microbes like to have some room. “One of the surprises along that way,” explained senior process engineer Steve Licht, “is that the bugs perform better in the larger fermenters than on the smaller scale. That’s been a fairly consistent trend.”

The basics of cellulosic ethanol at scale

In a demonstration of cellulosic ethanol there are a couple of basic modules. You have a feedstock delivery area. Turns out that contract woodchips and sawdust comes with rocks, critters, and “other” attached. So you have to clean. Then, you pre-treat to soften the material and make it easier for the enzymes to liberate the sugars from the cellulose. Then, you perform the hydrolysis, which is freeing those complex C5 and C6 sugars from the wood biomass. Then the fermentation, where the sugars are converted into alcohols in a process not entirely unlike making beer. Then, the resulting alcoholic swill is distilled into pure ethanol.

Here at Mascoma, the footprint is a little smaller, and cheaper, because there are no separate hydrolysis and fermentation units. That’s what consolidated bioprocessing is all about. It takes a pre-treated biomass and produces ethanol directly in one step.

But the Mascoma team is not really demonstrating its front end feedstock storage system, nor its distillation unit producing ethanol. These are well-understood technologies, and the only questions surround the integration with the overall design. Mascoma is demonstrating the rate and yield with which it can convert hardwood into ethanol.

You see, fast rate, low capex – you need a smaller plant and less steel for a rated capacity. High yield, low opex – you need less biomass, and less feedstock acquisition, storage and handling, per gallon of fuel.

The business of risk and de-risk

“We are in the business of de-risking” says Belcher, who along with Licht is a veteran of the first generation ethanol business. I ask if, from that point of view, the delays in financing cellulosic ethanol at scale have produced more opportunity to optimize and de-risk the process, and Belcher concurs. But he does so with the rueful look of someone who would rather be in Michigan worrying about how fuel he could produce, rather than how little.

For now, the team is working in campaigns, each run designed to test and optimize new equipment, new process, and new brothers and sisters of the microbes as they are developed and optimized at the company’s New Hampshire labs.

“You have to like the challenge,” says plant director Eric Oleson. “There are new elements in every campaign that have to come together at the right time, and in the right way.”

Among the new elements: biologists who have never worked with consolidated bioprocessing at industrial scale, and engineers who have never tried to coax a fuel efficiently out of a living microbe.

For the former, the pristine environment, the precision equipment are gone, and their fuel-making Mighty Microbes have lo leave the womb and make fuel in the cruel world of the industrial factory.

For the latter, the inorganic catalysts and compounds are gone, and all the work, and all their progress, depends on a microbe that has no idea where it is, or why it is being asked to make fuel (and fast).

The learning curve

The people learning curve takes “two months”, according to Licht. “Surprisingly, its the biologists who adapt to the environment faster, even though many of them are used to developing in a lab. For them, it is easier to learn the basics of pre-treatment and distillation, than it is for some of the engineers to learn about the world of synthetic biology.

Woods vs grasses

One of the few constants – the wood. Although there are variances between batches that will be eliminated when Mascoma is at scale and is accepting only whole logs at its gate, the most consistent thing about this project is its feedstock.

That’s not always the case. DDCE is working with cobs, and switchgrass, Iogen is working with stover, having switched over from hardwood. Why the consistency here?

“Switching horses in midstream is not a good idea,” says Belcher. “We are working with other feedstocks like bagasse in the lab, but all our planning is based on hardwood. It’s not just about optimizing yield, its the entire system that you are building, including the hardwood feedstock of our partner, the site location that works for that feedstock, and everything.”

“The logistics are there,” adds Licht. Basically at the front end we are a pulp & paper plant, and we get to use all that infrastructure and knowledge that has been built up over the years, and the supply chains. We have to invent a whole lot less.”

The team is also capable of producing other end materials, but is focused relentlessly on ethanol.

Ethanol vs biobutanol

“Ethanol is better than its reputation,” contends Belcher. “Butanol is overrated if you consider the smell factor.”

The smell factor?

“It smells awful,” adds Licht. “You wouldn’t want it splashing on you. What about butyric acid? That’s the smell in rancid butter.”

Or body odor, or vomit. I looked it up. Ick. But that’s butyric acid, of course, not biobutanol.

The focus

But not a concern here and now. In the here and now – that is to say, at Mascoma in Rome during September, the focus is on moving the process as quickly towards optimization as possible. Demonstrating to the DOE and investors that the project risk has been appropriately minimized.

The investors are counting on that. A DOE loan guarantee, according to CEO Bill Brady, is crucial to scaling at the company’s 20 Mgy planned facility at Kinross. That can be expanded to 80 Mgy in capacity later on.

It’s a classic risk or reward. Too much risk, no rewards. So the investors and observers, who have put the proverbial foot on the accelerator with the steady investment in Mascoma, are waiting now to harvest the fruit of all their efforts.

Maybe that’s why the machine gun is sitting outside.

Of course, it all comes down to a little bacterial guy who knows how to make fuel but has been reprogrammed to eat wood, instead of sugar. Like a bacterial termite. Little does he know what a Taj Mahal has been erected so that he can do his stuff.

Category: Fuels

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