6th World Congress on Biofuels and Bioenergy Sep 5-6, 2017 London, UK

Biography:

Janea A. Scott was appointed to the California Energy Commission by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. in February 2013 and reappointed in January 2016. She is the Energy Commission’s public member, and is the lead commissioner on transportation and western regional planning. Scott also leads adoption of recommendations by the Energy Commission’s SB 350 Barriers Study to expand access to the benefits of clean energy and transportation for low-income Californians, including those in disadvantaged communities—as well as small businesses in disadvantaged communities. Before joining the Energy Commission, Scott worked at the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of the Secretary as deputy counselor for renewable energy. She also worked as a senior attorney in the Environmental Defense Fund’s climate and air program.

Abstract:

In September 2016 California put into law statewide goals to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions including 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.  To help achieve these goals California has a number of policy initiatives including the Short-Lived Climate Pollutant (SLCP) Reduction Strategy and the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). The SLCP Reduction Strategy identifies a range of options for accelerating short-lived climate emission reductions including regulation, incentives, and other market supporting activities.  The SLCP Reduction Strategy was approved in March 2017 with implementation beginning in January 2018.  The LCFS which has been in place since 2009 is designed to encourage the use of cleaner low-carbon fuels by creating market incentives for near-term GHG reductions, and has a goal of reducing the overall carbon intensity of fuel within the transportation sector 10 percent by 2020. With California’s transportation sector accounting for 37 percent of the State’s overall GHG emissions, achieving California’s climate goals will require significant technological and market changes within the transportation sector. To help transform California’s transportation market, the California Energy Commission administers the Alternative and Renewable Fuel and Vehicle Technology Program (ARFVTP) which provides up to $100 million annually to develop and deploy a portfolio of alternative fuel and advanced vehicle technologies, including the production of biofuels. Biofuels including gasoline substitutes, diesel substitutes, and biomethane are anticipated to provide immediate and long-term opportunities to reduce both GHG emissions and petroleum use. Through the ARFVTP the Energy Commission has awarded $167 million to 59 biofuel projects, ranging from bench-scale to commercial production, with the goal of expanding the production of low-carbon, economically competitive biofuels from waste-based and renewable feedstocks in California.

Examples of funded projects:

CR&R: Anaerobic digestion of source separated municipal solid waste into biomethane that will be cleaned to pipeline quality and injected into the natural gas pipeline.

G4 Insights: Testing and refining an advanced thermochemical process capable of converting forest biomass to biomethane for transportation end uses. 

Pixley Biogas: Anaerobic digestion facility producing biomethane from dairy waste that replaces the natural gas used as a process fuel at a nearby ethanol production facility. 

CleanWorld: Anaerobic digestion of 40,000 tons of local food waste into biomethane displacing 700,000 gallons of diesel annually. 

Crimson Renewable Energy: Biodiesel production facility with annual output of 17 million gallons of low-carbon biodiesel sourced from waste feedstocks including used cooking oil, animal fats, and waste corn oil.

Figure: CleanWorld’s anaerobic digester biorefinery which processes 40,000 tons of food waste annually for the production of biomethane for transportation applications

Biography:

Dr Goetz Richter holds degrees in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and has established himself as agricultural systems modeller with track records in climate change impact assessment, CC adaptation and mitigation using arable and perennial crops. Funded by Defra, the European Commission and RCUK, his group develops models for Soil-Plant-Atmosphere interactions at various scales, as tools for breeders to improve perennial biomass crops. For industry and policy-makers he provides agricultural feedstock maps for the bio-economy, used in the whole system optimization, e.g. for the Biomass /Energy Value Chain Models, initially funded by The Energy Technologies Institute and since 2013 by EPSRC. He optimizes process models using a Bayesian approach to improve our understanding of the Gene x Environment x Management interaction. He recently won an Innovate-UK project “Advancing Earth Observation Applications in Agriculture” which will enable to validate yield forecasts and assess the yield gap at the landscape scale.

Abstract:

Multiple and increasing demands for renewable resources affect the bio-economy as a whole but escalate in particular around bioenergy and biofuel. For many reasons, perennial crops, like short-rotation coppice (SRC), Miscanthus [1, 2] and grassland are attractive choices. The purpose of this talk is to illustrate in three examples the use of advanced mathematical optimization tools to increase the production and performance of whole systems exploiting synergies and calculating trade-offs. Methodology: (1) A process-based model (PBM) for simulating trait and environmental effects on plant growth is to optimize G x E solutions for low-input SRC [3]. (2) Up-scaled PBMs using scenario simulations for different crop systems were used [4] to estimate available biomass resources and the yield gap resulting from fertilizer and livestock reduction. (3) A whole systems optimization framework, the Bioenergy Value Chain Model (BVCM) [5] is presented that allows evaluating the biomass flow through the value chain under market and ecosystem constraints. Findings: The PBM for SRC-willow identified a limited number of robust trait-related parameters that can be used to accelerate the selection and breeding process. An environmental (pedo-climatic) scenario analysis enabled us to ascertain the best variety for droughty environments with the highest water use efficiency and least impact on water resources. For UK grassland system we estimated a yield gap of 6 to 20 million tons of exploitable biomass when recommended N-fertilizer would be applied. Extending these results to the BVCM additional biogas from grassland biomass trade-offs from increased nitrous oxide emissions are calculated. Conclusion: PBM for plant growth will be extended to optimize SRC traits for the industrial scale land reclamation of heavy metal contamination. Recommendations for best combinations of genotype x environment x management can be derived from these simulations and scaled up to optimize land use between bioenergy, food and other ecosystem services.

Fig: Modelling tool cascade.

Recent Publications:

1. Agostini F, Gregory AS and Richter GM, (2015). Carbon Sequestration by Perennial Energy Crops: Is the Jury Still Out? Bioenergy Research 8(3):1057-80.
2. McCalmont J, Hastings A, McNamara N, Richter G, Robson P, Donnison I, et al., (2016). Environmental costs and benefits of growing Miscanthus for bioenergy in the UK. Global Change Biology-Bioenergy online.
3. Cerasuolo M, Richter GM, Richard B, Cunniff J, Girbau S, Shield I, et al., (2016). Development of a sink-source interaction model for the growth of short-rotation coppice willow and in silico exploration of genotype x environment effects. J of Exp. Botany 67(3):961-77.
4. Qi A, Murray P and Richter GM, (2017) Modelling productivity and resource use efficiency for grassland ecosystems in the UK. Eur J Agronomy (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eja.2017.05.002).
5. Guo M, Richter GM, Holland RA, Eigenbrod F, Taylor G and Shah N, (2016). Implementing land-use and ecosystem service effects into an integrated bioenergy value chain optimisation framework. Computers & Chemical Engineering 91:392-406.

Biography:

Markus Brautsch is Full Professor for Thermodynamics, Energy Technology and Renewable Energies at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Amberg-Weiden since 1998. He is the founder of the Institute of Energy Technology and the Bavarian Center of Excellence for Combined Heat and Power Generation. In 2014 he was appointed Guest Professor at the Jiangsu University of Science and Technology in China. He is guest lecturer at the Renewable Energy Center in Mithradam (India) and the University of Santa Caterina (Brazil).

Abstract:

The CO₂ balances of Biomass CHP systems are decisively influenced by the supply chains of fuels as well as a plant's efficiency [1]. Another important influencing factor are the N₂O and CH₄ emissions which enter the exhaust gas due to incomplete combustion.  According to [2] and [3] it is necessary to record the emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, which are produced during the combustion. For the purpose of calculating CO₂ equivalent emissions, the recommended factors of 298 for N₂O and 23 for CH₄ are taken into account according to [4]. Against this background, the λ values of the different combustion processes and the exhaust gas fractions of N₂O and CH₄ are measured. The C, H, N, O mass fractions of the respective biogenic fuel mixes are calculated by the measured volume quantities, which can be converted into specific mass fractions by the standard densities and the molar masses. The comparison shows that N₂O emissions have negligible influence. The emission value of CH₄ depends on the combustion process, the gas-fuel ratio and the compression rate. The lowest CH₄ emissions of 6.38 - 27.23 g/h are shown by liquid fuel operation, regardless of the used fuel (biodiesel, rapeseed oil, palm oil, soy bean oil). The highest emission levels show up in the dual fuel operation with bio-methane with maximum gas ratios in low-load operation with 5561.79 g/h - 6505.08 g/h, because of unburned fuel fractions. The combustion of wood gas in Gas-Otto operation shows comparatively low emissions at 28.6 g/h.

Figure : The mass flow of N₂O and CH₄ in dependence of the electrical power for a MAN D 26 common rail CHP system (compression rate 16:1) with dual fuel operation