'Sunshine into fuel'


Old candy wrappers, wheat straw and dead trees seem an unlikely defence against soaring gas prices, but the race is on to tap into the vast store of energy locked in municipal, agricultural and forest waste.



"With the amount of garbage we generate, the scale-up potential is huge," says Robert Gallant, president of Canada's leading biofuel company, who is now eyeing the trash. His firm, GreenField Ethanol, recently joined forces with a Quebec group that has come up with a way to turn municipal waste into biofuel.

"Every major city in the world would be interested in having the capability," Gallant says.

It would be messy. The trash has to be sorted to find energy-rich bits of paper, cloth and other material rich in oxygen, carbon and hydrogen.

But Gallant looks on the bright side. "You're transforming sunshine into transportation fuel," he says, referring to the way products, and trash, that come from trees and plants contain energy captured from the sun.

"Cellulosic ethanol," as this next generation biofuel is called, also sidesteps the escalating controversy over ethanol made from corn and wheat. Using food crops and agricultural land to make fuel could lead to a "global food catastrophe," federal New Democrats said this week.

Cellulosic ethanol has the distinct advantage of using leftovers - corncobs and wheat stalks, sawdust and tree branches, wrappers and organic waste chucked in the garbage. It is said to be more effective at reducing greenhouse gases than biofuels from grain, and has the potential to generate far more energy.

Cellulosic ethanol is also "a very democratizing transportation fuel," says Jeff Passmore, executive vice-president of

Iogen Corp., an Ottawa company turning straw to ethanol. He envisions even the poorest nations brewing up cellulosic biofuel and reducing the need for imported oil. "Every country in the world, practically, can grow grass," Passmore says.

Making fuel from wood and plants is, however, no easy feat.

Researchers have been working for decades to get around the tough molecules that give trees and plants their strength and lasting power, and also lock up their energy. They have devised several tactics to get at the energy.

GreenField and its Quebec partner Enerkem are banking on "gasification" - 700 degree Celsius heat, combined with low oxygen and catalysts to rearrange the molecules in biomass into synthetic gas that is then converted into ethanol. They are making plans to transform trash into fuel on a large commercial scale at two Canadian locations, which have yet to be disclosed.

In British Columbia, Lignol Energy Corp. is tapping into forest waste. This process starts by stripping away the tough, protective lignin molecules that wrap themselves around the cellulose in wood fibres. Once the lignin is removed, a mash of pure cellulose is left behind. Microbial enzymes are then added to turn the cellulose into sugars, which are then fermented into ethanol.

Lignol CEO Ross MacLachlan and his staff will start feeding sawdust and wood chips into a new $15-million plant in Burnaby, B.C., this summer. The company also has $30 million from the U.S. energy department to build an $88-million cellulosic ethanol plant in Colorado.

There is big interest in turning wood into fuel in B.C., which has been called the Saudi Arabia of biomass because so many trees have been killed by the mountain pine beetle. "Just two-10ths of one per cent" of the beetle-killed forest per year could produce enough ethanol to meet B.C.'s target of five per cent renewables in gasoline, MacLachlan says.

Passmore and his colleagues at Iogen are more interested in farm waste and have one of the most advanced cellulosic ethanol process in the world. Iogen's $40-million demonstration plant outside Ottawa converts wheat, oat and barley straw - and the odd field mouse caught in the bales - into ethanol.

Big money is pushing cellulosic ethanol. The U.S. government is pumping $1 billion into cellulosic ethanol research and projects. The Canadian government has $500 million in its NextGen Biofuel Fund, which aims to scale up production.

Iogen was recently short-listed for NextGen funding and hopes to begin construction on Canada's first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant in Saskatchewan next year. Hundreds of farmers have already agreed to supply the straw to the plant that aims to produce 90 million litres of ethanol a year.

"The fact we're now seeing $100-a-barrel oil is going to do nothing except make it a lot easier to get this technology deployed," MacLachlan says.


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