Page 10 - Georgia Forestry - Issue 2 - Spring 2023

Wood Aviation Fuel Projects in the Southeast
AVAPCO isn’t alone, but it’s certainly a leading contender in the race to produce sustainable aviation fuels. In its January award cycle, DOE handed out $118 million. The $80 million given to the Thomaston plant was the largest award among the 17 recipients of funding.
With the $80 million, AVAPCO will be charged with producing fuel at a min- imum sales price equivalent to conven- tional jet fuel and a material that can be used by rubber manufacturers for tires and other products.
There is also work going on in other Sun Belt states. Last October, the U.S. Forest Service awarded Strategic Bio- fuels a cooperative agreement under its Wood Innovations Program for the first phase of a project to develop a tracking system. The system enables the forestry feedstock sector to supply the raw data that can be transmitted to the biofuel producer and validated by a third-party auditor for Environmental Protection Agency compliance.
The feedstock for the fuel production needs to be compliant with the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS).
“Critical elements in qualifying the thinnings and slash are documenting that they are from managed plantations established and first planted prior to December 19, 2007, and that the thinning was being done to concentrate growth in the remaining existing trees,” Schubert said. “Thinnings from natural stands can potentially be used as long as it is not from federal or state forests or from ecologically sensitive timber stands.”
Strategic Biofuels’ Louisiana Green Fuels project in Columbia, LA is expected to be the world’s first carbon-negative commercial renewable fuels plant using forestry feedstock. It is expected to start producing fuel in 2027.
The Strategic Biofuels plant will use about 1 million metric tons per year of thinnings and slash from the plantation pine industry to produce about 28 million gallons of pure synthetic diesel fuel (not biodiesel) and 4 million gallons of naphtha. The project will also use about 1 million tons per year of sawmill waste to power the plant.
“Just like synthetic motor oil is superior in performance to regular motor oil, this renewable synthetic diesel fuel will be superior to fossil diesel,” Schubert said.
Each batch of fuel produced generates federal credits and is assigned a renew- able identification number, according to Schubert. “The fuel will be shipped by rail to California, where it will be eligible for credits under California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS),” he said. “These credits are purchased from the producer to offset carbon emissions by the purchasers.”
And Strategic Biofuels’ work in Louisi- ana is only the start. “Over the next 10 to 12 years, the company expects to increase production capacity to about 160 million gallons per year from plants in Caldwell Parish, with additional plants to be built where plantation pine forests abound, including Georgia,” Schubert said.
These factories have the potential to do more than just generate fuel. “Histori- cally, forest residuals have been a disposal challenge,” said Julie Tucker, national wood innovations program manager of bioenergy, biofuels and bioproducts at the U.S. Forest Service, said last year in a press release. “The Renewable Fuel Standard helps change that by giving
the renewable energy sector a financial incentive to convert these unwanted forest residuals to high-value biofuels and renewable electricity.”
Lignin-Based
Batteries
In basic terms, based on a dry ton basis, a tree is 50% cellulose and 50% lignin. In most cases, the lignin from the tree is a waste product that is often destroyed. But some European companies have found a way to use it to make the anodes in batteries that can store energy.
Helsinki, Finland-based manufacturer of pulp, paper and other forest products Stora Enso built a production facility to create “renewable bio-based carbon by turning trees into batteries,” according to the euronews.green website.
With its Lignode product, Stora Enso is replacing graphite in batteries with a lig- nin-based hard carbon. Graphite can be difficult to charge and hard to find. The
8 | GEORGIA FORESTRY
Biomass doesn’t just have the potential to generate fuels to eventually power things like airlines. After biomass is converted into heat, electricity, liquid or gas fuels, the carbon emissions from the conversion can be captured and stored, in a process known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
“The whole idea is that you sustainably harvest biofuel,” said Brian Higgins, director of advanced technologies at Akron, OH-based Babcock & Wilcox. “You use that to produce steam and electricity. You capture the CO2 and sequester it underground.”
Strategic Biofuels CEO Dr. Paul F. Schubert explained: “The greenhouse gases from the fuel and power production will be captured and permanently stored about a mile underground where they will be held permanently by the same forces that have held oil and gas underground for millions of years.”
BECCS can be a negative emissions technology when it is implemented well. “The reason why this is huge is that it’s carbon negative,” Higgins said. “The growing process extracts CO2 from the air, and that carbon ends up underground. There just aren’t many carbon-negative technologies.”
Higgins thinks BECCS may ultimately be a bridge to solar and wind technol- ogies, mainly reducing the need for fossil fuels. But that future is still far off.
“In the meantime, there are going to be a lot of other transitional technologies,” Higgins said. “There are some really smart people arguing that biofuels and BECCS can be a bridge. So in the energy transition, the ability to take CO2 out of the air and sequester underground will make sustainable forestry very attractive to many end users.”
BIOENERGY WITH CARBON CAPTURE & STORAGE