It was exciting to be mentioned in this article by Kandy Wong in the South China Morning Post (and sorry it is a locked site).

The premise of the article is that as much as cellulosic fuel would like to develop in China, it’s going to be a heck of a challenge because farms are so small, and there are so many stakeholders to deal with in collecting biomass for both bioelectricity and cellulosic ethanol.

Before Cofco could put its new plant on the right track, it must solve the collection problem, said William Kao, chief executive of Pro-Tek (Xiamen) Electroplating Development.

“There are just too many farmers owning plots that are too small, which means it is difficult to manage by machinery,” he said. “If much of the collection of biomass is done by hand, there is increasing handling and labour costs.

“The solution would be collective farming,” Kao said. “Put the lands together and form large uniform plots of over 1,000 mu, and work by machine.”

But collectivisation would not only be costly but also highly disruptive to family farmers, especially given the mainland’s bitter experience with forced collectivisation during the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in mass starvation.

In addition to the difficulty of collecting agricultural waste from so many small farms, there is competition for the material.

“Agricultural waste can be used by farmers for fertilising lands through burning,” said Robert Earley, the low-carbon transport programme manager for the American non-profit organisation, Innovation Centre for Energy and Transportation. “Besides, the raw material is often used to generate bioelectricity.”

Moreover, if Cofco’s plant was located too close to bioelectricity generators, there would be direct competition for sourcing raw materials, Earley said.

Before Cofco can efficiently collect enough agricultural waste, its first task must be to unite the farmers behind its project.

The company is still seeking advice from experts for the collection problem.

According to Novozymes, there are some big biomass collectors such as Shandong’s Dragon Power doing the job, and Cofco may have to co-operate with these firms to gain a steady supply.

Let’s hope that they can figure out some way to get that biomass collected.  Transporting biomass long distances to cellulosic ethanol plants doesn’t work from a lifecycle GHG emission perspective or an economic perspective — so the best case scenario for this kind of development is:  local feedstock, local production (and ideally…) local use.

iCET is currently working with Novozymes on a study to compare the relative benefits and drawbacks of different uses of cellulose material, including biomass electricity and cellulosic ethanol.  In many ways, biomass electricity is turning out to be a winning technology, but the fact is that vehicles in China still need liquid fuel to burn, and cellulosic ethanol is one of the best choices.  Results will be coming soon…

The Alberta government is trying desperately to make sure that oil sands oil doesn’t get blocked from the US market when new fuel policies come into effect.  As it stands, oil from Alberta’s oil sands will likely be blocked from California under the world-leading Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

In its efforts, the Government of Alberta commissioned two studies (TIAX – Executive Summary and Full Study -  and Jacobs - Executive Summary and Full Study) to analyse the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with various types of crude oil – including crude processed from Canadian oil sands.  They found that some oil sands oil has lifecycle emissions comparable to some conventional crude oil (although most oil sands results turned out to be considerably higher than most conventional crude oils).  The attached image, from the Jacobs consultancy report, summarizes the findings.  Note that 70 gCO2e/MJ gasoline, which make up the bulk of the emissions, are embodied in the actual fuel.  The variation seen in this image is attributed to different production life cycles.  “Thermal” and “mining” refer to different development styles for oil sands in Canada.

Now, these reports have come under considerable criticism from organizations who don’t want to see oil sands / tar sands oil flowing into the US anymore, such as the Natural Resource Defence Council’s blog on the issue.  Honestly, this isn’t the interesting discussion for me.

The interesting thing for me is that different conventional crude oils have different lifecycle GHG emissions, possibly differing up to 10%, such as in the case between Arab Medium and Bonny Light, as illustrated above.

This means that any transport sector GHG emission analyses that assume one value for crude oil WTW emissions might be off by several percentage points, depending on the difference between the assumed weighted average of crude oil LCA GHG emissions, and the actual weighted average.

I like advanced biofuels as a means of reducing lifecycle GHG emissions in the transport sector, but if significant emission reductions can be achieved by simply shifting sources of crude oil from one supplier to another, this is also an important consideration to make, given that advanced biofuel technology is not quite commercialized yet.

It would be incumbent on China energy analysts to understand the relative sources of crude oil to China, and to undertake LCAs on each of those sources so as to minimize GHG emissions from the transport sector during this time of transition to alternative sources of energy.  Similarly, analyses on different sources of coal should be undertaken in order to accomplish the same lower carbon shifting of conventional energy sources.

Since 2008, all companies which provide more than 450,000 litres of fossil fuels for UK road transport are required to mix a certain percentage of biofuels into their fuels.  In the 2008-09 season, the first year of the programme, the target was 2.5%.  For the 2009-10 season, a target of 3.25% has been decided upon.  In fact, in the first year of the policy, already 2.6% of fuels provided were biofuels.  With a reported 47% Greenhouse Gas savings in biofuel according to the data reported by fuel suppliers, the policy has already resulted in 1.2% GHG savings in the transport sector compared to if they had provided 100% fossil fuel.

China’s biofuels right now make up about 0.81% of the fuel supply, and they are made mostly from corn ethanol (about 1 million tons/year corn ethanol).  Based on international experience with corn-based ethanol that uses coal for its process heat, GHG savings of between 0 and 20% or so can be achieved compared to gasoline.  Based on this information, we can see that right now, as a very rough estimate, China’s biofuels are optimistically delivering a GHG savings of 0.16%.

Imagine if China developed a policy like California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which aims to reduce GHG emissions from fuel in the road transport sector by 10% by 2020?  Or the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive which aims to reduce fuel GHG emissions by 6% through biofuel use and refinery efficiencies?  Such policy would give real direction to China’s fuel producers, allowing them to understand their roles in the fight against climate change, and giving government a perspective from which to set policies on new fuel technologies.

I wrote a brief review on the RTFO policy and RFA’s annual report, which is posted at iCET’s website.   Check out the rest there!