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Timing and transportation
The most expensive part of transforming agricultural wastes, such as corn stalks and wheat straw, into ethanol is the cost of transporting the residue to the plant.
“Biomass residues are highly combustible, deteriorate fast, and contain a lot of moisture and soil,” says Klein Ileleji, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering. “Stalks and straw are not primary products, and right now there is no incentive to collect them.”
That's why they usually stay on the ground or get plowed under.
Ileleji has a vision of how to integrate the processing of these waste products into the current agricultural stream. “We already have a system for transporting agricultural commodities,” he says. “It makes sense to use the existing expertise and add value to the current system rather than incur huge costs creating something new.”
Ileleji and Purdue graduate students are creating a model that could be used as a decision-making tool to determine the logistics of transporting corn stalks to an ethanol plant. But it's not as easy as shoveling stalks onto a truck and hauling the residue away. “The stalks have to be dried and then stored and shipped just in time,” he says. “Farmers don't want to wait six hours for a truck to be unloaded, so the model has to predetermine bottlenecks and come up with the most logical pathway to the plant.”
Ileleji hopes the food system will eventually integrate the processing of many agricultural wastes. For instance, he says manure from a livestock operation could generate power that runs an ethanol plant that processes corn and then sends the leftover fiber back to the livestock operation for animal feed.
“It's a symbiotic system that makes sense,” he says.
Fueling the economy
Increasingly, homegrown alternative fuels are making sense for the economy and the consumer. “There will be great economic opportunities for communities as we attract biofuel facilities to Indiana,” says Skillman. State officials hope to have at least 40 E85 pumps located throughout the state by the end of this year. Fittingly, Biotown will be the site of the first gas station to have both E85 and biodiesel pumps. If efforts like Biotown succeed, it will be thanks, in part, to Purdue researchers who are fueling the resurgence of renewable power.
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Soybeans get alternative fuels off the ground
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