Primafuel touts local approach to biofuel production

Biofuels seem to be demonised on an almost daily basis, but is there hope for this currently much maligned sector? Primafuel chief executive Rahul Iyer insists the industry still has a major role to play in the low carbon economy

BusinessGreen.com: How would you describe Primafuel?
Rahul Iyer: We are focused on providing the infrastructure that underpins the biofuels industry. There has been a huge amount of focus on the biofuels themselves and the various production processes being developed, but one of the major issues facing the industry is getting the infrastructure in place to effectively distribute biofuels. One of the initiatives we're involved in is an infrastructure project to connect biofuel suppliers in the mid west with consumers on the west coast.

How so?
Currently, regions like California, consume a large amount of ethanol blended with gasoline but there is a shortage of infrastructure to transport and store ethanol. We have a major biofuel project at the port of Sacramento underway, which will have a big impact on the local biofuel market from an infrastructure point of view, integrating the biofuel industry with the petroleum industry. We're also working on of developing smart infrastructure that allows us to track where biofuels are sourced. If biofuels are to be significant in the energy mix, we need to understand where they are manufactured and sourced - currently it's often impossible to identify different biofuels from different companies.

Are you also involved in biofuel production technologies?
On the technology side, we're very active in selling equipment to corn ethanol producers to boost their efficiency. The most common biofuel is corn ethanol in the US and biodiesel in the EU. There are great opportunities to boost economic and environmental performance and tremendous room to incorporate more waste streams into products, which helps address some of the concerns over the environmental sustainability of biofuels. With biodiesel you can also use waste streams to make higher value products- we're hoping to go to market with technologies in this area next year.

There are numerous technical challenges in generating biofuels from waste plant materials. How will Primafuel's technology work?
We're pursuing a thermal reaction approach rather than looking to use enzymes. This gives you greater feedstock flexibility as you tend to have to use specific enzymes for specific plant matter. If the process is feedstock specific we still have commodity market problems of demand and price. The feedstock you use really must be flexible.

Why are you looking to move towards using waste material for biofuels?
We believe in order to create sustainable biofuels, the focus has to be away from edible feedstock. Instead, we have to utilise waste streams from agriculture and sewage for example. Unfortunately, these materials have very low energy density per tonne so shipping this type of biofuel at the moment takes too much energy and makes no financial sense.

How do you get round this problem and deliver a commercial proposition?
The answer is appropriate localised scale operations. Thermo-chemical systems work much faster than enzymatic systems – a parallel can be drawn with burning and digesting material – and that speed means you can develop much smaller scale reactors. Then refinery modules could be dispatched to the location of feedstock making the whole process economically viable.

Biofuels are getting a lot of flak at the moment. How do you see the future of the industry developing?
I think we'll see a shift towards greater use of waste matter and perhaps algae, but not anytime soon. There are millions of species of algae out there, but the systems needed require much more than putting algae in a bucket and hoping it grows. You have to create a micro ecosystem – it's not really about finding a magical strain of algae. The engineering part presents the biggest challenge in terms of how much it will cost to develop and its lifespan. Turning algae into a useful economically viable biofuel would mean you'd have to produce many different types of product from one material, more like a bio-refinery. It will take years to develop.

What will be the most commercially viable biofuel?
It's way too premature to guess which will work best. You are getting a lot of competition in the industry as a result of that uncertainty, but that leads to more creativity and more investment. It is very difficult to predict the long term impact of biofuels based on today's technologies – just as it was impossible to imagine how the internet would take off based on one modem. As a result, it's important people take a broader approach than a simple for or against view at this stage of development. With the food versus fuel debate for example it is important to debate the issue but it is worth remembering things can change in a very short period of time at such an early stage of an industry's development.