Cool Planet’s Wood Waste to Fuel Project

Biofuels Digest has an article on a new biochar / pyrolysis project being proposed for Louisiana – Cool Planet to invest $168M in Louisiana – stealthy biotechnology heads for scale. The updated program looks to be using wood waste rather than miscanthus.

In Louisiana, Cool Planet Energy Systems CEO Howard Janzen, flanked by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, announced the company will build three bio-refineries in Louisiana with a capital investment of $168 million. The project will consist of modular biomass-to-gasoline refineries in Alexandria, Natchitoches and a site to be determined. …Its not hard to see why everyone has been excited — sometimes laced with skepticism — about Cool Planet. With claimed operating costs of $1.00 to $1.15 per gallon, and adding another 13 cents or so for the capital costs (amortized over 15 years) – well, you get the picture. It’s drop-in, renewable gasoline, in prospect, for about half the price of the incumbent fossil fuels.

Now those claims were built around – to some extent, an emerging feedstock, miscanthus. That was the secret sauce in reports of 4,000 gallons per acre yields for production of renewable gasoline, Ahem, there’s been a change.

Now, Cool Planet will harvest wood waste and forest byproducts to make gasoline at its initial commercial-scale facilities in Louisiana. Each bio-refinery will be capable of producing 10 million gallons of high-octane, low-vapor pressure gasoline for strategic distribution through existing market channels and for blending at Louisiana refineries.

5 Comments on "Cool Planet’s Wood Waste to Fuel Project"

rollin on Sun, 1st Sep 2013 12:14 pm 



Nothing about the energy input to form the fuel. Are they burning wood to do the conversion or is it just magic? Wonder what the efficiency is. The burning of wood products breaks the cyclic system, the ash never gets back to the forest it came from.

This whole concept needs to leap forward to extracting fuel directly from CO2 and not involving the biosphere. A few years ago scientific papers were published on this direct process to produce methanol using low temperature organic catalysts. No further word since then.

BillT on Sun, 1st Sep 2013 12:42 pm 



Actually there is no such thing as ‘wood waste’. Wood is meant to be returned to the soil from where it came, and not turned into fuel. Without it soil becomes sand and desert. Exactly where we are headed. This is another techie ‘Wrong Turn’ that will lead us farther down the path to extinction. All for profit, of course.

No mention, but I bet it will be done with loans backed up by the taxpayer. Bend over … it won’t hurt … much.

peakyeast on Sun, 1st Sep 2013 3:40 pm 



I completely agree with BillT here. There is no such thing as organic waste that should not be returned to the soil we exploit. This is just a hyped way of humanitys “scorched earth” policy.

GregT on Sun, 1st Sep 2013 5:20 pm 



Anything that we do to put even more CO2 into the environment, is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

DC on Mon, 2nd Sep 2013 3:11 am 



None of these schemes are net energy positive, not one. Which dooms not only the individual projects themselves. If they cant make energy at a profit, then they wont be dollar profitable either no matter how much in subsidies the USgov doles out.

Reliance on projects like these to ‘save’ the drive-shop-consume society everyone is so concerned about, also dooms industrial civilization itself, since net energy losers are not the stuff waste addicted infinite growth economies are made of. The only way these schemes are viable now, is because there is still net energy(mainly from oil) in the system floating around to invest in such things. The fact that most of these bio-fool plants are losers now, even with subsidies, handouts and semi-decent amount of net energy still around, means none of them have much hope of operating in the future.

The failure is not in the concept per se, you can in fact make ‘fuel’ from bio-whatever. The kicker is, you have to be willing to ‘lose’ energy somewhere else to make it happen. So these plants will strip the area of what little biodiversity the amerikans haven’t destroyed already, to turn into fuel for SUVs that haul soccer moms around in 3 ton trash cans going no place important.

Meanwhile, like BillT and peakyeast say, the land is slowly being converted to a desert, one SUV trip at a time….