The 4th Annual Commonwealth of Virginia Energy Symposium (COVES) will be held Oct. 7-8, 2009, at VMI in Lexington, VA. Check-in/Registration will be in Marshall Hall. Join energy professionals from the public and private sectors to exchange energy information and technologies and to build new and enhance existing partnerships.

VBEG & PPV will be hosting the Biomass Track at COVES, kicking off the festivities the evening before - Oct. 6 - with an informational session on forestry in Moody Hall: 7–8pm, Woody Biomass for Energy: Status of Emerging Issues
Dr. Janaki R.R. Alavalapati, Dept. Head, Forest Resources & Env’l Conservation, Virginia Tech

The biomass-centric programs are listed below:
Wed., Oct. 7
Session B 12:15 – 2:15 Technology: Maximizing the Impact of Available Resources

Moderator – John English, English Boilers; Presenters - Chris Lindsey, Antares, and Bradley Schneider, Biomass Gasificiation

Session C 4:00 – 5:15 pm Are Government Facilities in the Lead?

Moderator – Scott Klopfer, Virginia Tech; Presenters - Richard Bratcher, Longwood University, and Tom Inge, Ward Burton Foundation

Thurs., Oct. 8
Session D 10:30 – 11:45 am Financing Biomass Energy Today

Moderator – Dillon Franks, President, VBEG; Presenters - Brandon Ogilvie, Intrinergy, Inc., and Michael Schewel, McGuireWoods

For more details on these and other presentations at COVES, go to http://www.vmi.edu/show.aspx?tid=27297&id=40203&ekmensel=8f9c37c3_643_715_btnlink. You can register at that website.

Posted by Kim Swanson to the VBEG group, the following article provides a good overview of the two competing fuel products made from biomass — fuel and electricity. The full article is at http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22628/.

Technology Review
May 8, 2009

“A study published today in Science concludes that, on average, using biomass to produce electricity is 80 percent more efficient than transforming the biomass into biofuel. In addition, the electricity option would be twice as effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The results imply that investment in an ethanol infrastructure, even if based on more efficient cellulosic processes, may prove misguided. The study was done by a collaboration between researchers at Stanford University, the Carnegie Institute of Science, and the University of California, Merced.

“There’s also the potential, according to the study, of capturing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions from power plants that use switchgrass, wood chips, and other biomass materials as fuel–an option that doesn’t exist for burning ethanol. Biomass, even though it releases CO2 when burned, overall produces less carbon dioxide than do fossil fuels because plants grown to replenish the resource are assumed to reabsorb those emissions. Capture those combustion emissions instead and sequester them underground, and it would “result in a carbon-negative energy source that removes CO2 from the atmosphere,” according to the study.” … (click the above link to finish the article).

As UC Prof. Elliot Campell notes, most studies don’t even account for “heat as a [usable] by-product, which would make the electricity pathway even more advantageous.”

One of the issues Public Policy Virginia has been looking into is credit for the thermal energy created in biomass electricity generation. Unlike solar and wind, biomass combustion, like coal, creates both heat and hot water, both of which can be transmitted in district energy installations over varying distances (depending on the technology used) to reliably heat homes and provide instant hot water. Those services make biomass combustion capable of 80-90% efficiency, as opposed to the 30-35% one gets from straight electricity generation from either biomass or coal. Such methods would displace a proportionately larger amount of fossil fuel currently consumed for those uses alone.

From Feb. 19, 2009, Wall Street Journal.

In the interest of leading people to great places for news updates on biofuel feedstocks, I recommend the following article from the Scientific American, Jan. 2008 edition on switchgrass for ethanol: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn.