If switchgrass has piqued your interest of late as a crop to grow on your farm for grazing, hay and fuel, you'll also find interest in the recent announcement from the National Biomass Producers Association (NBPA), a Missouri-based organization of farmers and investors interested in producing fuel from cellulosic feedstocks, such as switchgrass.
The NBPA confirmed it is partnering with Renewable Oil International, LLC (ROI) to convert biomass into fuel for transportation and power production and will soon have a portable unit to demonstrate throughout the country.
“We’re excited to announce Phillip Badger’s ROI as a technology partner,” said Ed Cahoj, president of NBPA, “Badger’s expertise brings tremendous credibility to our initiatives and is a signal that NBPA is a player in the developing biofuels industry.”
ROI’s process is an environmentally friendly, portable, decentralized thermochemical process that turns virtually any organic matter into a liquid fuel. ROI has operated a five-dry ton per day pilot plant in northwest Alabama intermittently for the last three years.
ROI’s process can use virtually any organic material, from wood products to grasses, hay, straw, paper, cardboard, manures, even organic municipal solid waste. The ROI patent-pending technology is based on innovations to the fast pyrolysis distillation process in which biomass is placed in an enclosed container (to exclude air) and rapidly heated to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The process produces a liquid fuel called bio-oil, which can be used in space heaters, furnaces and boilers. It can operate some combustion turbines and internal combustion engines. Slow- or medium-speed diesel engines can use it with minor modification.
ROI has recently received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to upgrade bio-oil into a transportation fuel. DOE also has recently completed a study that found current petroleum refineries could upgrade bio-oil cost-effectively without subsidies under current market conditions.
The ROI processor can be hauled on a truck or trailer to a farmer’s field to process biomass into bio-oil on site. “This mitigates transportation of low-density feedstocks and allows each ROI plant to become a renewable oil well,” Badger said. “Fuel can be readily produced locally. … Once started up and depending on feedstock moisture content, an ROI plant can potentially be energy self-sufficient.”
“Eventually a farmer would be able to harvest his switchgrass, produce fuel for his farming operations and sell the excess to the local utility or another user,” said Cahoj, who actively encourages Ozarks farmers to explore the technology and consider growing switchgrass as a fuel crop. NBPA has focused on switchgrass because it is a hardy native grass that grows in nearly all areas of the U.S.
Should the sources of biomass disappear or become too expensive,” Badger explained, “the plant can switch to processing other feedstocks locally available or the plant can be picked up and moved to another location with minimal financial loss.”
