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“I believe the future of biofuel is to make it from sustainable crops to avoid competition with food stocks.”
Corn, sugar beets, rapeseed, and sugarcane are just a few of the possible feedstocks for biofuels—those oil alternatives that have been touted as the answer to slowing global warming and keeping Big Ben from turning into beachfront property. That was until bio-economists started calculating the petrochemical and deforestation costs required to run our SUVs on Mazola. Lately, it has become increasingly clear that converting food crops to fuel is a dubious bet.
Which led a group of European biotech investors to explore a range of existing or low-cost cellular sources that neither require high chemical field investment nor compete with food usage—as corn, cane, rapeseed, and sugar beets all do. Their first target: cotton.
French biotech entrepreneur Yves Speeckaert and his Luxembourg-based Agritec group have teamed up with Brazilian ag co-op Allcotton and a new Brazilian bio-diesel firm AllBio to rustle up some €35 million ($51 million) to build a series of conversion and refinery plants to turn cottonseed waste into biodiesel. The group is also getting funding from Brussels-based industrial group Alcotra Bioenergy and the Brazilian government.
“I believe the future of biofuel is to make it from sustainable crops to avoid competition with food stocks,” says Speeckaert. He notes that corn and food commodity prices increased sharply in 2007, with the rise due increasingly to their use in biofuels.
There’s actually nothing very green about cotton production. Protecting cotton plants from fungi, viruses, and weevils requires lots of fertilizers and pesticides. And nearly half the weight of each harvested cotton ball is husks and seeds.
Yet on the plus side, more than 20 percent of the weight of each seed is recoverable oil. Usually, cottonseed oil goes into deep-fry fat for making potato chips. Except in Brazil. There, the national food oil market is dominated by soy producers. Result: most Brazilian cottonseed is left to rot or is burned, contributing to more atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Agritec’s new venture aims for an ultra-green strategy and it says using unwanted cottonseed gives it three distinct advantages over other current biofuel strategies. Buying up this plant waste cheaply will not only cut fuel production costs, it will also avoid taking land out of other crop production. What’s more, there’s no additional petrochemical expense involved in making the fuel, as those costs were covered in producing the cotton.
Based in Goias state about 130 miles southwest of Brasilia, Allbio hopes to go into production by the spring of 2009, yielding two products from the cotton waste: the oil at the heart of the seed and the fibrous envelope on the outside of the seed, which will be converted into a protein-rich cattle feed. Speeckaert reckons that he can sell the meal to the ranchers for $125 a ton, offsetting the $140 Allbio will pay to buy and crush the cottonseed.
The oil then has to be refined in a second chemical plant through a condensation reaction known as esterification. Then it will be blended with diesel to produce a “sustainable” biofuel. Allbio is not the only company to use cottonseed oil as feedstock—several refineries in the United States are already using it—but it could help spur a market for it in Latin America.
Compared to sugarcane or rapeseed, cottonseed is a low performer in turning the sun’s energy into fuel. It yields 35 gallons of oil per acre, or a little less than one-third the yield of rapeseed. Still, it’s double that of corn. And, as Michael O’Hare, a national biofuels specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, points out, “If nobody else is using the seed and they can’t find a market for it otherwise, it seems like esterifizing it into fuel is a pretty good idea.”
Speeckaert doesn’t expect cottonseed to replace other biofuel sources on a global scale. Most of the 18 million gallons annually of biodiesel Allbio expects to produce will go directly to local farm cooperatives in a deal worked out by the Brazilian government. But Speeckaert does see cottonseed as a lucrative niche solution in the emerging biofuels market, and one he thinks will perform handsomely for the investors. Cottonseed may be just the beginning, he adds. Agritec is also eyeing a hardy shrub called jatropha and other cellular wastes—all of which could put a lid on food crop biofuels.
