This is an interesting press release about a government grant to NorAmera
BioEnergy of Weyburn Saskatchewan Canada. They are a small plant with 25M
litre/yr capacity from a retrofitted whiskey distillery. If commercial
scale stillage filtration technology proves feasible, it could make ethanol
fuel production economically viable, even in oil rich western Canada. The
old economics were such that heat distillation ethanol was about
$30-35/barrel of oil equivalent (based on the governments data and natural
gas prices). At that price ethanol would not displace oil in Canada without
government intervention. Extracting oil is simply less expensive. FYI
Brazilian sugar cane ethanol is about $15/barrel oil equivalent. American
corn ethanol is less than Canadian ethanol, but how much of that is due to
huge subsidies I don't know.
-JW
http://www.sccd.sk.ca/pdf/NewsletterNov2005.pdf
NorAmera BioEnergy Corporation
STREAMLINING ETHANOL PRODUCTION USING STILLAGE FILTRATION
Under the Business Development Activities program, CARDS provided
funding to the NorAmera BioEnergy Corporation to test a new
technology for producing ethanol using stillage filtration. Ethanol can be
made from various crops, and is being used in gasoline to produce a
cleaner burning fuel. The present evaporation process widely used in the
ethanol production industry is inefficient, using a great deal of energy.
The new process to be tested by NorAmera would use filter
technology instead of the evaporation process currently used in the
ethanol industry. The benefit of using the filter technology would be
increased efficiency in the form of reduced energy consumption,
increased reliability and improved water quality for reuse in the process.
CARDS funding has allowed us to properly test the equipment at
full scale capacity in real production conditions, says Brad Hill,
NorAmera President and Chief Operating Officer. Part of the reason this
technology is not yet widely used is because it is built for use on a small
scale. Our testing will ensure the equipment can be successfully scaled up
for larger production.
If their testing is successful, NorAmera will implement the filtration
technology on a full production scale, significantly improving the
efficiency of their small-scale plant.
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