INEOS Bio produces cellulosic ethanol from waste, at commercial scale

Feedstock trends?

“The mix of feedstocks will entirely depend on the location, Said Williams. “The system is designed to be agnostic, between wood waste, MSW and ag waste. What really is the trend is that you have to have economics, and then we see communities that are either looking to work on greenhouse gas emissions, or seeking a great solution to waste problems in communities.

The INEOS Bio New Planet Energy project in Vero Beach, FL (as of January 2012)

Moving from Mechanical Completion to regular operations

The plant was mechanically complete in the first half of last year — and critics became vocal about shortcomings in the core technology when the plant did not complete its commissioning period more quickly.

As it turns out, the long commissioning period had little to do with the core technology — but rather, issues that come from being a new industrial plant in a non-industrial area.

“As we moved from mechanical completion to where we are today,” said Niederschulte, “we were surprised at extent to which we had to deal with non core technology issues. For example, there was Florida Power & Light, which had a number of power outages. As we got our power export system to cooperate, with the frequent storms, we experienced a number of issues caused by problems in the grid that backed into our plant and caused us to shut off the plant’s power. This system is designed to operate continuously, and it can be a painful restart that takes a couple of weeks.

“Another example,” Niederschulte told the Digest, “we designed the system to take landfill gas but there were problems with the landfill gas compressor at the Indian County landfill. We lost steam a couple of times and that shut down the turbine generator. It’s been a bit frustrating, because you don’t expect issues like that in commercializing new technology.

The fix? “As we’ve done a retrospective, we don’t want to learn the same lesson twice,” Niederschulte noted. “We’ve modified the design to deal with the issues we’ve seen in the interface between our facility and the outside. It works fantastically.

Moving towards full capacity

“With any plant, you turn it on, then start pushing it find out the bottlenecks,” Niederschulte said. “In this phase, we’ve got some not very expensive equipment to install – soon – probably September. Then we’ll see how those modifications lead us to another bottleneck, or it could be that that’s it. But we’re starting to see increased production, from better feedstock handling and processing, and improved overall operation. Until those mechanical changes are complete we’ll continue to see some constraints.”

In today’s Digest, BIO’s Brent Erickson helps us put the news into RFS2 perspective, plus the Digest’s Take  — by following the page links below.