Facility Turning Wood Into Ethanol

By Dan Daly, Journal staff
Rapid City Journal
August 6, 2007

RAPID CITY - The newly built plant on the outskirts of Upton, Wyo., looks a little like a cross between a sawmill and an oil refinery. And, in a way, it is.

The plant recently began grinding up wood chips, sawdust and logging refuse, called slash, into ethanol fuel for automobiles.

Western Biomass Energy, operated by KL Process Design Group of Rapid City, operates the new wood-waste ethanol plant. It can produce about 1.5 million gallons of ethanol per year.

That's small by today's ethanol standards. Some of the new Midwestern corn-based ethanol plants are being built to produce 110 million gallons a year. But KL officials say the new plant shows their process for unlocking the sugars from cellulose, or plant fibers, can be viable.

And, as the development of biomass technology progresses, more types of plant-life - wood, sugar beets and switchgrass - could be converted to liquid fuel.

"Our internal goal is to improve our process," Dave Litzen, vice president of KL, said. "Our external goal is to present this as a flagship for marketing the technology."

Randy Kramer, KL's president, said there's been interest from some of the big lumber companies such as Louisiana Pacific and Weyerhaeuser.

For KL Process Design Group, the primary focus is ethanol technology, rather than ethanol production. The company designs, builds and does project management work for ethanol plants throughout the Midwest.

Ethanol is, simply put, old-fashioned grain alcohol - white lightning on a massive scale. Feedstock, usually corn, is ground up into mash, cooked, fermented and distilled into alcohol.

But with cellulose as a feedstock, the process is a little different. The polymers in the wood are broken down by an enzyme and turned into glucose, which can be fermented and refined.

The challenge for cellulose processing, Litzen said, is to find an efficient way to free up those fibers so the enzymes can do their job. "The way we grind the feedstock is what separates us from other cellulous plants," Litzen said.

One problem with corn, Kramer said, is that the ethanol producers are at the mercy of the Chicago Board of Trade and other markets that determine corn prices. But with cellulose, the feedstock is considered garbage. Transportation is the primary cost.

Litzen said their process uses pine cones, pine needles, bark and tree branches too small to be of interest to sawmills. Often loggers throw that slash into piles to be burned later on.

"We want those piles," Kramer said. As the technology improves, the potential for drawing more sugars - and energy - from slash piles will increase, Litzen said.

"The issue we will need to deal with is purely a transportation cost issue," Kramer said. He admits that the small scale of the Upton plant makes wood a less cost effective feedstock. "However, on a scaled-up version to 20 million gallons per year, the economics are certainly in favor of the wood waste as a feedstock."

And in this summer of forest fires, KL's partners point another potential side benefit of cellulosic ethanol production. It's a way to mitigate the fuel load - pine needles, dogwood pines and underbrush - in the forest.

Bill Baker of Baker Timber Products in Rockerville has agreed to be a supplier of wood waste for the new plant.

 "It's real exciting. I hope it works," Baker said. "This would be a win-win for everybody involved," Baker said.

The U.S. Forest Service and other Black Hills land managers want to thin the forest of its small-diameter trees and other low-value wood materials. A thinned forest is less susceptible to catastrophic fires. It's also less susceptible to pine beetle infestation.

Processing it into ethanol would provide a use other than simply piling it up and burning it, Baker said. Ethanol could also give the timber industry a new market, and American energy users would have a home-grown supply of fuel.

Western Biomass can use bark and other wood that particleboard manufacturers such as Merillat don't want, he said. 

But corn is in no danger of being replaced by pine cones in ethanol plants anytime soon. Corn plants are still the mainstay of the ethanol industry. KL operates its own corn plant near North Platte, Neb.

And the corn industry supports the cellulose-based refining, said Lisa Richardson of the South Dakota Corn Growers Council.

Anything that reduces America's dependence on foreign energy is good for the country, she said, and U.S. ethanol can be made from wheat, sugar beets, corn and wood chips and other sources. There's room in the market for feedstocks other than corn, she said.

"The world is going to be full of bio-refineries," Richardson said. "We are going to be critically short of energy in this world, and anything we can come up with to solve that problem as a country, I think, is important," Richardson said. "It would by hypocritical for us to say anything other than that."

And she said corn growers also have an interest in the cellulose-to-ethanol process. They could use it to turn cornstalks, corncobs or other agriculture byproducts into ethanol.

South Dakota, with 13 operating ethanol plants and five more under construction, is expected to be producing 1 billion gallons of ethanol annually by mid-2008.

Kramer is from Platte. He taught the ROTC program at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Kramer met Litzen when he was working with his hometown to establish some type of value-added agriculture production. Litzen, originally from Hoven, used to work for Shell Oil Co.

They formed KL in 2001, and began working on the ethanol process. By January 2006, KL Process Design Group consisted of Dave Litzen and Randy Kramer.

Today, the company has 55 employees. Once the Upton plan is in full operation, the new plant will have 13 workers.

KL also operates a corn plant near North Platte and the cellulose plant near Upton. It also sells promotes E85 - a fuel that burns 85 ethanol and 15 percent gasoline - through the Canyon Lake Drive gasoline station.

KL has an E85 booth at the Black Hills Harley-Davidson dealership during the Sturgis motorcycle rally. Motorcycles can be converted to burn E85.

Because of Upton's isolated location, Kramer said the cost-effectiveness of the new plant is marginal.

He hopes to build a plant someday on the eastern side of the Hills, perhaps in the Whitewood area. The KL partners chose the Upton site in part because of the state of Wyoming has a program to help fund this type of technology.

Litzen insists the process is energy efficient - an issued that has dogged the corn plants for years.

Corn-based ethanol, some critics argue, requires more fossil fuel energy - diesel for tractors and trucks, natural gas to cook the corn, etc. - than the energy in the ethanol is produces. The corn ethanol industry disputes these figures.

Litzen estimates that the process at the Upton plant requires less than 20,000 British thermal units to produce a gallon of ethanol, which has about 80,000 BTU of energy.