Forget Foreign Oil: Use Pallet Power

While Poet-Broin still has me cranky for co-opting the name of a noble profession to euphemize a big industrial operation, the ethanol company is making a good move toward local energy self-sufficiency. That Sioux Falls paper tells us that the Poet-Broin has struck a deal with Mueller Pallets of Tea to provide waste wood to power its ethanol plant in Chancellor. By next summer, Mueller Pallets will be hauling up to 350 tons of waste wood a day to the Chancellor ethanol plant. Poet-Broin will burn the pallets in a new solid waste fuel boiler that will produce more than half of the plant's power [Jennifer Jungwirth, "Poet Pact with Tea Firm Turns Waste Wood into Asset," that Sioux Falls paper, 2007.11.25].

The pluses to Poet-Broin's pallet power plan:

1. Poet-Broin burns less fossil fuel to produce ethanol.
2. Mueller creates a new slice of ethanol profit pie.
3. Ethanol gets cheaper: Mueller gets the wood for free!
   
4. Burning the wood keeps it out of landfills (20% decrease in incoming landfill volume).
5. A solid waste fuel boiler can burn more than wood: Northwest Missouri State University heats and cools its campus with a boiler that can burn wood chips, campus trash, and even hog and cow manure (now there's a resource South Dakota has plenty of!).
   
6. The ethanol industry becomes that much more locally self-sufficient: Iran and Saudi Arabia could shut off the oil spigot, and the folks in Chancellor could keep burning wood and pumping fuel and money into the South Dakota economy.

Now burning wood and other biomass produces a lot of particulate matter, and that can produce more health problems than chemical toxins. Poet-Broin will need good scrubbers on the smokestacks.

Burning pallets for power may lead Poet-Broin to realize it's in the wrong business. JCWinnie at After Gutenberg offers links to studies that show that turning biomass into electricity is "more efficient, cost-effective and environmentally sound" than converting biomass into liquid fuels (e.g., ethanol and biodiesel). As we get moving on plug-in hybrids and other electric cars, as we build our transmission infrastructure for wind power, Poet-Broin may realize that the real return on its investment, in dollars and energy, will lie not in distilling corn into ethanol, but burning corn, corncobs, pallets, poop, and whatever other biomass it can get its hands on to produce electricity. Instead of the slightly Rube-Goldbergian process of burning biomass to make elctricity which then powers the plant that makes ethanol, maybe Poet-Broin will simplify and market the biomass-generated electricity itself as an end-user fuel.