The Environmental Protection Agency predicted it might take six months to do an initial evaluation of “energy beets” for its environmental footprint as a feedstock for biofuels.
Six years—not months—later, the agency has given a thumbs-up to energy beets as a feedstock—rating it for greenhouse gases and other environmental issues. Proponents say it’s the first of three hurdles in making it accepted as a viable biofuel.
Dave Ripplinger, a North Dakota State University bioenergy specialist, and Maynard Helgaas, an agricultural businessman who has been pushing the idea for eight years, say they’re grateful for a positive report, despite the time lag, and look forward to the next phases that could finally create an industry that qualifies for the highest subsidies.
“This is a milestone in the commercialization of energy beets,” Ripplinger says of the EPA’s recent report.
The EPA decided to change the Renewable Fuels Standard in 2015, which reduced the momentum for advanced biofuel and cellulosic ethanol fuel. Every gallon of biofuel is given a 38-digit “RIN number,” which is used to track the use of the fuels. Petroleum fuel marketers must blend biofuel ethanol into their fuel or buy the RINs.
High RIN Goals
Standard corn ethanol recently has an 80- to 85-cent-per- gallon RIN value, while advanced biofuels are around $1.10 per gallon, says Kyle Althoff, president of Equinox LLC, a biofuels and agribusiness consultant in Fargo, N.D. Cellulosic ethanol is more than $2 per gallon.
Helgaas, 82, of West Fargo, is president of the Green Vision Group, which has been studying the energy beet concept for eight years. The CVG closely studied 10 communities where a plant might be located. Energy beets produce C5 and C6 ethanol feedstock, which in turn produces aviation fuel and other products, including pharmaceuticals.
Blaine Schatz, director of the NDSU Carrington Research and Extension Center, has worked with demonstration and testing plots in nine communities around the state, accumulating eight years of plot data. Besides the feedstock, the beets also have benefits for helping rehabilitate soils that have become unproductive due to salts that have risen during high-water years.
Ripplinger was philosophical about the EPA delays. The agency received more applications than it expected, and it took more computer modeling to complete the process, he says. He thinks it’s just a coincidence that the energy beet proponents got an unofficial word that the initial process was completed in the first few weeks of the Trump administration.
Although North Dakota was an early proponent, Ripplinger says other energy beet projects across the country may be built first to begin, noting California and Maryland projects have been proposed.
Helgaas says that in Europe, 15 percent of biofuels are from sugarbeets, generally with significantly different breeding than for human consumption sugar. Syngenta and Betaseed are two breeding companies that have already developed seed for industrial beet breeding stock.
Source: WDAY-TV