Fueling speculation | Solano County Renewable Energy
After sitting through the General Plan meetings, it’s nice to see that the Solano County’s General Plan update will include a lot of attention to renewable energy.
Corn is used for ethanol because it’s the overall price leader to process. Using stockpiled sugar is even more cost effective. Looking into the byproducts of sugar shows that molasses has the cheapest total cost aside from corn.
As we’ve been discussing, obtaining ethanol from molasses has several orders of magnitude greater return rather than just simply breaking down sugar beets, a Solano County crop staple for years which grows well in the sandy clay loam found throughout the county.
The biomass from the sugar refining process could also be used, similar to what Hawaii has done for years in generating electricity, or perhaps into biodiesel.
From the article in the Vacaville Reporter: Fueling speculation - The Reporter
“Every city has waste materials it doesn’t use, like brown oil, that can be used to make biodiesel,” said Pitts, 42, a married father of a 4-year-old son. “Material from the waste treatment plant is now broken down into methane, brown oil and other elements and mostly winds up in landfills or the ocean, but we can make fuel out of it.”
Pitts, a former Navy man and self-described “computer science guy,” said he hopes his firm, Go Green Biofuels, will be able to build a 40,000-square-foot facility on 25 acres. The plant will eventually produce 30 million gallons of clean-burning fuel annually, he said. And not only will the plant be self-powered, it will generate energy to “feed into the grid,” Pitts said.
The idea is to use special, self-re-generating algae oil to create fuel, which doesn’t impact food supplies the way ethanol does, Pitts said. And unlike traditional fuel refineries, Go Green’s process produces no toxic by-products or smell, he said.
What are the prospects for U.S. sugar co-ops?
The USDA’s Rural Development website talks about the US Sugar crop and its role in ethanol.
Regarding sugar beets and ethanol
Sugar beets are an annual crop grown in 11 states across a variety of climatic conditions, from the hot climate of the Imperial Valley of California to the colder climates of Montana and North Dakota.
Sugar beet byproducts include beet pulp, which can be sold for animal feed, and molasses, which is also sold for animal feed or further processed to extract more sugar.
Sugarcane is a perennial tropical crop produced in four states: Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana and Texas.
Byproducts of sugarcane processing include molasses and bagasse, the fibrous material that remains after sugar is pressed from the sugarcane.
Bagasse is often burned as fuel to help power the sugarcane mills.
Total U.S. sugar production fell by more than 20 percent from 2000 to 2006 due to low prices and structural changes in the industry. Production declined significantly or ceased altogether in five states.
Sugar beets have gained a greater share of U.S. sugar production over the past decade, now accounting for 58.8 percent of the nation’s sugar output while sugarcane fell to 41.2 percent.
Sugar producers and the members of farmer-owned cooperatives are increasingly interested in new technologies and product markets for their crops, including the growing ethanol market.
Bagasse is the word for biomass, I guess, which I reviewed in my initial research into the energy sector in 2003.