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Cut southern yellow pine trees are stacked up
outside the first commercial cellulosic biorefinery, KiOR's plant in
Mississippi. The wood that once fed paper mills will be chipped up, as
seen below, and converted directly into gasoline and diesel fuel in a
process its advocates say will be more sustainable than corn ethanol.
Photograph courtesy KiOR
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Fred Cannon was working at a Dutch chemical company when he had a conversation with a chemist about the movie Back to the Future—in particular, the scene near the end in which Doc Brown refuels his time-travel car with household garbage.
Corn distilled into ethanol was touted as a way to reduce civilization's dependence upon fossil fuels, but it required different pipelines—and only a specially equipped car could run on a mix of fuels made mostly of ethanol.
Wouldn't it be better if you simply could take waste material, or biomass, and transform it into fuel?
Not quite a decade later, that fantasy may be starting to become reality. Cannon is now chief executive of the alternative energy start-up KiOR. A few weeks ago, the company produced and shipped what it says is the world's first commercial volume of cellulosic diesel fuel from its new biorefinery in Columbus, Mississippi. KiOR's product, made from pine wood chips, is chemically identical to the petroleum-based fuel it is designed to replace, the company says.
KiOR's breakthrough is one part of a wide-ranging effort by a number of companies and government-supported researchers to develop and perfect "drop-in" biofuels—fuels so similar to their petroleum-based counterparts that they could be pumped through the same pipelines and used to power the engines of cars and trucks without any modifications. Drop-in biofuels proponents say they could help free modern civilization from its dependence upon petroleum, without requiring extensive rebuilding of the fuel-supplying infrastructure or the junking of vast numbers of existing vehicles.
"Globally, we've invested trillions of dollars into our transportation infrastructure—our refineries, pipelines and distribution systems, our cars—so we need biofuel solutions that 'drop-in' to this infrastructure," Cannon said. "And today that infrastructure is made for hydrocarbon-based fuels. So what that means is that drop-in biofuel must be a hydrocarbon—molecularly indistinguishable from the gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel making the world mobile today."
Before drop-in biofuels become the transportation energy source of the future, there are still significant technological, economic, and environmental hurdles to overcome. Producers would need to be able to manufacture large quantities of drop-in biofuels at a cost that's competitive with gasoline and other petroleum products, and without expending excessive amounts of energy in the process. Some critics warn that drop-in biofuels would still release carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change; they argue that electric cars powered by renewable energy provide a cleaner path to alternative fuel for transportation.
But biofuel believers point out that as long as coal—the most carbon-intensive fuel—generates 40 percent of U.S. electricity, greenhouse gas emissions remain a problem for electric cars.
"One of the things we have to do is get real," said clean technology investor Vinod Khosla, whose Khosla Ventures is controlling shareholder of KiOR. "Biofuels . . . even with [today's] inefficient engines, can do something like an 80 to 85 percent reduction in carbon emissions with very little increase in cost. It's the cheapest way to get carbon reduction in transportation at scale.
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