[Bioconversion] Grass Pellets

[MMBTUPR at aol.com]

          to     Bioconversion    List          from    Lewis L Smith

Ref Roger Samson's latest posting.

Roger may be right, but as an energy economist who has done a lot of project 
evaluations ["feasibility studies"] I am leery of such generalizations. The 
attractiveness  of many options in the biomass-energy field is often highly site 
sensitive. 

For example, pelletizing for co-firing   with coal may justify both the 
pelletizing and a fairly long haul to the boiler. Pelletizing for decentralized 
["distributed"] gasification is probably too expensive, in terms of the 
incremental improvement in the combustion properties of the feedstock. Again this will 
depend on what is in the soil and how much of the noxious materials are picked 
up by the plant in growing and in harvesting respectively. In this engineers 
should remember that the field and transport aspects of biomass energy never 
have been, are not now and never will be "in the six sigma" world.

Ethanol is often a coproduct of processes where important costs are both 
joint and variable. In such cases, the economic feasibility of the process depends 
on all  coproduct prices and volumes, not just   on those for ethanol. Under 
such conditions, ethanol cannot be considered in isolation, no matter how 
sophisticated the cost-allocation techniques which the accountants come up with. 
Such techniques may be fine for preparing tax returns, valuing inventories and 
valuing "in house" consumption of output, but they are no good   for doing the 
economics of such a project. [If anyone wants a paper on the subject, post me 
a "snail mail" address.]

And so on.

Perhaps some graduate student somewhere could be persuaded to compile a list 
of operating projects, whether commercial scale or not, along with estimates 
of their life-cycle costs. There is a lot of evidence out there but at the 
level of the Internet, most of it is anecdotal and/or widely scattered.

One generalization that may prove useful is to give priority to feedstocks 
which do not get us into horrendous food-vs-fuel arguments, such as those which 
helped to kill "energy cane" in Puerto Rico and which are now entangling the 
use of soy beans for energy in the US Midwest. 

Cordially. End of message.