Economic, carbon neutral biofuels from cellulose. by Alliance BioEnergy +

I did not get to this before the Nov 6 deadline but here are the responses anyway:

Judge 1: The company is installing its first commercial scale reactor this coming year. They are closing on a plant that currently has offtake agreements for 8 million gallons a year of cellulosic ethanol. They are currently raising money, about $30 million, to complete this phase. Part of the funds will be used to acquire the site and the remainder on refitting equipment and the start of employment of a team to operate the plant. For each pound of lignocellulosic feedstock less than half a kilowatt hour is required to complete one cycle of the ball mill. So for 100 lbs of raw material entering the system only 45 kiloWatt hours of electricity is required amounting to an input cost of about $9 for 100 lbs. I'm all too well aware it sounds naive, but in this case all the "naivete" (and the judge actually is saying that its too great a claim to make) is backed up by hard facts. If the final cost of a gallon of aviation fuel is indeed around $1.50, then saying "cheaper air travel without pollution" is by no means beyond credibility.

Judge 2: Normally CO2 reductions for various biofuels are disappointingly low. Initially the ethanol industry was plagued with "well to wheels" analyses that showed that there was no CO2 reduction or that the energy balance was greater making ethanol than just leaving it to diesel or gasoline. After some years the farmers dispelled that intial doubt by improving their systems but as they matured it became clear that they were about 48% - 49%. DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2008.00105.x

Cellulosic ethanol has long been believed to offer reductions of over 80% and this form of cellulosic is deemed to have a greater than 95% reduction in CO2. You are correct in saying that the incentives especially in the US, where D3 RIN credits of over $3.00 per gallon means that at a cost of $0.90 per gallon and a sales price of $1.50, revenues per gallon would be $4.50 for a cost of $0.90 and profit of $3.60 per gallon. This is quite an attractive incentive and all other methods of cellulosic ethanol production are having problems whose costs are eating this advantage up.

Judge 3: The lignocellulosic material is shredded or chipped and added to the contents of a ball mill which already contains kaolinite clay as a catalyst and the required ball bearings. The system is sealed and spun at a specific RPM for just 12 minutes until a carefully calculated 80% conversion rate has been achieved. The mill is opened and water is added to dissolve the sugars. The lignin floats and is taken off with a foaming agent, while the unconverted remaining material falls to the bottom along with the non sacrificial clay catalyst. All parts are cycled back to the start except for the sweetened water and the unconverted remains of the first batch are the first to convert in the second batch. The sweeted water is directly fermented to ethanol or any of myriads of other products.To this point, the 0.45 kWh per lb of lignocellulosic material is the only energy input and this can come from economic night time power or renewable energy. Use of steam at only 0.07lbs per lb, increases the efficiency of the conversion. Cellulose is non soluble and the hydrolysed version with separated sugars and lignin, is soluble in water. Only enough water is added to dissolve the sugars that are there for an optimum fermentation solution. Water administration is a very closely attended to aspect of the process and nothing is wasted, and much is recycled from the distillation and other parts of the process to the start again. Dewatering is very much factored in. In fact, it was discovered that just making sugar syrup used so much evaporation energy that this part of the process was dropped in favor of simply adding the front end as a module to any ethanol distillation plant, avoiding the water recovery issue from selling syrup or granular sugars.