California company to make bio-ammonia fertilizer from corn cobs

[JohnWxy]

http://magissues.farmprogress.com/WAL/WF05May09/wal017.pdf

A CALIFORNIA company, SynGest, has announced that it will make anhydrous ammonia fertilizer
from corncobs and other biomass at a factory the firm plans to build on 75 acres near Menlo in central Iowa. The
$80 million plant will be the first of its kind in the United States to convert biomass into fertilizer, says company CEO
Jack Oswald. The process will burn cobs at high temperatures to produce vapor that is liquefied into ammonia, he says. That
would be unique because today most chemical ammonia fertilizers are made from a process that takes nitrogen from
the air by using natural gas.

The SynGest plant will use 150,000 tons of locally supplied corncobs to make 50,000 tons of bioammonia annually,
enough to fertilize 500,000 acres of Iowa corn. Oswald adds, “We plan to make an announcement soon of a partnership
with a major agribusiness firm that will work with farmers to buy their corncobs for use in the plant.”

The SynGest venture, if realized, will be Iowa’s second major cellulosic energy project. Poet, a major producer of ethanol
from corn grain, plans to build a cellulosic ethanol production facility at Emmetsburg that would use corncobs
as fuel. The Poet plant is scheduled to begin construction in 2010. One acre of corn production generates
about 1 ton of corncobs, notes Oswald, and only about a third of those cobs would be needed to make enough
ammonia to fertilize an acre of corn production. He says cobs will likely bring $30 to $50 per ton when sold as feedstock
for either fertilizer manufacturing or ethanol production.

SynGest hopes to make ammonia fertilizer that could be sold for $600 per ton or less. Farmers have had to pay
skyrocketing fertilizer costs caused by volatility in the natural gas market in recent years. The price of nitrogen fertilizer
rose from $200 a ton five years ago to more than $1,000 last summer.

Much of the ammonia used in theUnited States is imported, mainly from Russia and Trinidad. The U.S. uses 18
million tons of ammonia per year.

[silverweb]

1. And the heat from burning the cobs?

I hope they find a way to use the heat from burning the cobs to generate electricity or perform some other energy-intensive task. There's absolutely no reason to waste all that heat.

[JohnWxy]

2. I agree. My guess is to be competitive they will have to be very efficient and that would mean

minimizing waste. They would have to be more efficient than the natural gas fueled nitrogen fertilizer production process they are competing with. THey say they think they can produce their product quite a bit cheaper than the competition. As article says a lot of the fertilizer is imported from Russia and Trinidad. I wonder how those operations are in terms of efficiency and emissions.

They should use Combined Heat and Power design in their plants to be really efficient.

[NNadir]

3. Which part of a sugar molecule from cellulose do you think contains nitrogen?

For years, in the mid part of the 20th century, using chemistry developed by the Quaker Oats corporation, the glutaric acid portion of certain nylons, and the adipic acid portion as well was produced via furfural made from corn cobs. (For adipic acid this was via the dinitrile.)

Later it was replaced by butadiene, "oxo" chemistry from dangerous fossil fuels. It was cheaper, and probably less nasty chemistry involving less, um, cyanide.

The amount of nitrogen in glutaric acid and furfural, by the way, is roughly zero.

[kristopher]

4. This is describing a by-product of any syngas operation

They are using a biomass stream for energy.



I have no idea how it might compare to alternative approaches using noncarbon sources of energy.