Several Organizations have been awarded Colorado’s Renewable Energy (ACRE) grants of $200,000 for ethanol-related projects by Colorado Agricultural Value Added Development Board of the Colorado Department of Agriculture
Feedlot Biofuel LLC of Wichita, Kan has received a grant of $25,000 to assess the feasibility of establishing ethanol plants at feedlots in east-central and southeastern Colorado. Manager of Feedlot Biofuel, Bowe Wingerd, said that the company has designed an ethanol plant optimized to produce wet distillers grains with solubles addressing the nutritional needs of cattle.
“It's a unique design and it produces higher-quality distillers grain while using less energy and reduced capital costs,” Wingerd said. “It's designed to be located near cattle feedlots. There are some great synergies between ethanol production and cattle feeding.” He added that Feedlot Biofuel plans to build smaller ethanol plants adjacent to feedlots instead of building a large ethanol plant near its corn feedstock and then shipping large quantities of distillers dried grains with soluble elsewhere, . “We’re taking a different approach,” he said. “It's a paradigm shift.” A typical corn-fed and grain sorghum-fed feedlot ethanol plant might produce 20 MMgy of ethanol. He expects the feasibility study will be completed by this fall.
KL Process Design Group LLC of Rapid City, S.D. is awarded another $25,000 grant to study the feasibility of collocating a 5 MMgy cellulosic ethanol plant with the Confluence Energy wood pellet production facility in Kremmling, Colo., which came on line in April 2008. KL Energy and Confluence Energy will be partner owners in the venture. The facility manufactures pellets from beetle-killed Ponderosa pine. The ethanol plant is expected to come on line by the spring of 2010, according to Aaron Broten, project manager for KL Energy Corp.
Broten said the ethanol plant will also use beetle-killed timber as its feedstock for the process of cellulosic ethanol production that uses a thermo-mechanical pretreatment followed by enzymatic hydrolysis to prepare the woody biomass for fermentation. Broten said the process results in a clean lignin byproduct since the process doesn’t use a harsh acid pretreatment. This product will then be mixed with additional unprocessed beetle-killed timber wood chips for pelletizing. The resulting plant will produce ethanol and also wood pellets having 20 to 30 percent more British thermal units per pound than wood pellets without the added lignin.
The Colorado Corn Growers Association based in Greeley, Colo., received a $100,000 project participation grant to assist in developing an E85 flexible fuel pump infrastructure in rural Colorado. Katrina Davis, spokesperson for the CCGA said that a feasibility study has already been completed to identify the locations for the retail fuel pumps. She said the grant will help the retailers to pay for installing the E85 pumps.The pumps are expected to be installed at three to five new fueling stations during 2009 under the program.
Colorado State University Golden Plains Area Extension Service has been awardede a $50,000 research grant to evaluate how energy crops should be rotated on northeastern Colorado dryland farms.
“What we're trying to do is take the potential renewable energy crops—whether its biodiesel, ethanol, or cellulosic sources—and see how they fit into a cropping sequence,” said Alan Helm, area extension agent for CSU. “Which crops follow which best? Which crops don't follow? If we start growing some of these alternative-type crops… where do they fit into our cropping systems?”
In order to determine how well the crops grow in sequence, the dryland corn, grain sorghum, forage sorghums, and winter wheat will be rotated with canola, camelina, sunflower, and other crops at the Central Great Plains Research Station. “Every crop will be planted into every residue,” he said. Helm said the ACRE grant covers the first two years of the project, but additional grants will be sought to extend the project for an additional three to four years.
