The forest biorefinery: an update in an era of Net Zero

Recently the Finnish forest products giant UPM announced the building of a forest biorefinery at the chemical park in Leuna, near Leipzig in the former East Germany (1). The plant, with a capital cost of €550 million, will produce 220 kT per year of bioproducts from beechwood through an enzymatic hydrolysis process: mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) and mono-propylene glycol (MPG) will come from the cellulose component, and a carbon black substitute for use in rubber will be produced from the lignin. This follows on the development and commercialization of the BioVerno renewable diesel process at UPM's Kaukas mill in Lappeenranta, Finland (2). There are some lessons to be learned here.

Research is key. And expensive. And time-consuming.

Yes, research costs money. As a newly minted research manager back in 2001, I arranged a tour of research labs around the world to meet my new peers. This trip included the UPM-Kymmene labs at the Kaukas mill in Lappeenranta. These labs were very well staffed, with about 100 researchers.

Labs are expensive to operate. Wet labs are very expensive to operate. And pilot plants, with high headroom space you can back a truck into, cranes for moving heavy bits around, and high load-bearing floors, are extraordinarily expensive. Add on conventional overhead (IT, HR, payroll, etc.), $100k/y to support university work, travel to mills and conferences, and laptops and cell phones for everyone, and a typical research team, consisting of a senior scientist, a junior scientist and two or maybe three lab technicians or pilot plant operators, costs at least $1M/y before building anything in the pilot plant or paying for maintenance and operation of gas chromatographs or scanning electron microscopes. Capital equipment in the lab or pilot plant is additional.

And it's not enough to set it all up -- you have to persevere. In the mid-2000's, UPM got serious about the BioVerno renewable diesel process. They expanded the labs at Kaukas, hiring new staff and buying new equipment. (They also stopped letting Canadian research managers drop in for a chat and a look-see). The result, after about a decade of research investment at the $25M/y scale and some significant capital expenditures, was a commercial-scale biofuels plant. Call it a round billion dollars, more or less, over a decade, more or less, before the first commercial litre was pumped into a tanker. Another decade at the same investment level has led to the Leuna plant.

Location matters

Following the 2009 Nordic Wood Biorefinery Conference in Helsinki, I visited Leuna (3). Liepzig is an hour from Frankfurt by air, with Leuna another 30 minutes by car, so I made a quick one-day detour on my way home. Commissioned in 1917, and located so as to be beyond the reach of French bombers (!), it was thoroughly rebuilt after German reunification, and is today one of the most modern chemical parks in the world. Infra-Leuna manages the site, and rents space along with access to pipe racks carrying water, steam, naphtha, ethylene and so on. At the time, attracted by the beechwood common in the area, Fraunhofer (Germany's equivalent to Canada's National Research Council) was preparing to build the Chemical and Biotechnology Research Centre onsite, with a focus on enzymatic hydrolysis of hardwoods and other processes.The initial investment was €25M in capital, with another €25M for the operating costs in the first few years. Now UPM is building a full-scale plant there. 

So why build a full-scale plant in Leuna, and not Lappeenranta? First is the availability of beechwood in reasonable quantities and within reasonable haul distances; second is the existence of a well-funded research laboratory onsite. But that is not the whole story, because Lappeenranta also features both hardwood supplies and R&D labs.

The key is that Leuna has a range of tenants. At the time I visited, this included Total (which operated a large refinery) as well as several major chemical companies attracted by easy access to the naphtha left over from Total's gasoline and diesel production. So it is likely that all the products proposed by UPM will find buyers onsite. But if any buyers are further afield, Leuna, located in the centre of Europe, is well served by rail if not canals. 

Implications for the Canadian forest sector

I don't want to minimise the success of Canadian efforts in lignin, in cellulose nano-crystals, in cellulose filaments and in other areas such as tall wood buildings. But the world is going to need large-scale pathways to non-fossil products in a big hurry, and existing successes are, arguably, in niche markets. Profitable niches, yes, but their impact on global challenges is small.

The common theme here is the requirement for a world-scale, consistent, reliable, long-term commitment to innovation. Innovation, which starts with university research but which must progress through the pilot plant stage before commercialization, is time-consuming and expensive, and cannot be judged quarterly on benefits delivered. Canadian forests represent a world-class resource, in terms of both volumes and quality; furthermore our forests are largely harvested according to sustainability metrics set out by a range of arm's length organisations such as the Forest Stewardship Council. 

At a very rough scale, UPM has been spending of the order of FPInnovations' entire annual budget, on bio-products alone, for close to two decades now. They have also invested in full-scale commercial plants once the research results have warranted it. This corporate investment is above and beyond publicly funded research at VTT or in various Finnish universities. Finally UPM is not alone in this; Stora Enso and Metsä have followed similar paths. 

The Canadian forest sector and governments at all levels (recalling that forestry is a provincial responsibility) can't rely on a few million dollars here and there, with budget cuts (and associated loss of highly qualified personnel) every few years when things are a bit lean, if there is any hope of taking advantage of our world-class, sustainably-harvested, non-food, forest-based biomass to compete in the coming world bio-economy. Arguably, we should have been investing at this level a decade or more ago, because, as the IPCC has stated recently, it's getting a bit late to start.

Notes

1. https://www.upmbiochemicals.com/about-upm-biochemicals/biorefinery-leuna/ 

2. https://www.upmbiofuels.com/traffic-fuels/upm-bioverno-diesel-for-fuels/

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuna_works

 

Distributed power generation in urban areas

An interesting article in today's Washington Post newsletter talked about the issues around getting power from wind farms in rural areas to electric car charging stations in urban areas over existing grids. (Click here to see the article). The article mentions a study showing that the US will need to invest $125 billion into the grid by 2030 to meet the need for electric car recharging. 

This got me to thinking about distributed power generation in urban areas. After all, this is where the majority of cars are located today, and where the power will be needed tomorrow. I live in a dense urban neighbourhood characterised by 100-year old row houses with flat roofs, all fronting on narrow streets. The image shows the area as seen by Google Maps.

My house has a surface area of 1100 sq. ft, on a lot 25' by 100'. If I include the total distance from the middle of my street to the middle of the alley in back, I get a total depth of 125'. (Street centrelines are 250' apart.) So 1100 sq. ft., divided by the total urban area attributable to my property (25' x 125'), gives 35% of the urban area taken up by flat roofs when extrapolated to the larger neighbourhood. 

A quick check of the Interweb gives a year-round average solar power generation capacity of about 4 kWh per square metre, per day, for solar panels located along the border between New York state and Quebec. (Click here for the maps.) Assuming this is representative of Montreal, about 100 km north of the border, that works out to an average of 165 Watts per square metre, again on an annual basis -- it will be much lower in winter months, of course. Still, 1100 sq. ft. equals 100 square metres, so this is a year round potential average power generating capacity of 16.5 kW using solar panels with tracking systems to keep them aimed directly at the sun. Regular readers will know I've been tracking my own power use for Hydro Quebec over the last two winters, and I know that my peak power use in a cold snap on turning up the heat immediately after a Hydro-mandated pricing event was never more than 8 kW. Winter average power use this year was closer to 4 or 5 kW, even with a fairly cold January, helped by the fact that as the resident of a ground floor flat surrounded by other buildings, I have very few exposed outside walls. So in theory 100 square metres of solar panels on the roof would provide me with excess capacity, especially in those really cold but bright sunny winter days. 

I extended the analysis to the entire borough, which has a total area of 8.1 square kilometres. I suspect potential usable area of 35% of this is a large number; to start with, there are wider streets as well as parks and other areas where solar panels could not be mounted. But assuming 15% of the borough were covered with panels, the neighbourhood could make, on average, 200 MW. While this is only 0.5% of the 40 GW peaks Hydro hit last winter, it is still requires only 8 square kilometers of urban area, and no need for extended transmission lines. As well it would go a long way towards recharging a local electric vehicle fleet, especially if augmented by storage systems of some kind such as masses of parked electric car batteries all plugged into the grid. (Most cars sit 90% of the time).

I haven't taken the time to go through the economics, but one online source suggested costs of $3 per installed Watt in Ontario. Covering my roof would thus cost close to $50,000, which I wouldn't want to do on my own without serious subsidies; but the neighbourhood could make 200 MW for $600 million. And $3 per W is about 5 times cheaper than Site C in BC ($16B for 1.1 GW), without the need for long-distance transmission lines. 

In Quebec the main issue will be Hydro Quebec's mandate, which does not encourage small-scale or distributed generation unless it is off-grid, but I assume that could be changed by an act of Parliament. But I've met people in Alberta who have put solar panels on the roof of the garage to charge the Tesla; the open-access grid there allows excess power (when the owner of the car is at work on a sunny day, for instance)  to be trickled back into the grid for a credit.

Food for thought.