Assessment of Conversion Technologies for Bioalcohol Fuel ...

concerns. This evaluation determines if the deployment of the technology will be
acceptable to al interested parties such as government regulatory groups, NGO’s,
environmental groups, local and regional communities and other relevant
organizations.
SECTION 7 - 5E ASSESSMENT OF THERMOCHEMICAL AND
BIOCHEMICAL CONVERSION PROCESSES
This section summarizes some general results and conclusions from the 5E
assessments of thermochemical and biochemical processes for the conversion of
renewable biomass to alcohol fuels, with electricity as a secondary product.
Although this “5E”assessment process is described in qualitative and quantitative
terms, it is beyond the scope of this paper to apply this process for comparatively
ranking individual biomass conversion technology developers. Instead, this
approach was used to generally evaluate and compare some of the principal
bioalcohol production technologies under development using information compiled
from developers and from publicly available reports and publications.
The completeness of available data varies among the technology categories,
depending on the extent of actual development progress and the willingness of
developers to disclose information. Thus, a fairly complete assessment is possible
for some technologies, whereas more definitive data would be necessary to
adequately assess other technologies. For example, enough information was
gathered from several developers of a promising thermochemical technology (e.g.
pyrolysis/steam reforming) that it was possible to design a prototype plant and
develop “5E” data for a future 500 ton/day plant sited in Northern California.In
contrast, detailed data for biochemical technology involving acid hydrolysis was
found to be less accessible, despite the long history of development of this
approach.
With further refinement and application, and as more complete technology data
becomes available, the 5E approach can be routinely used as a tool by
government, private and academic organizations to evaluate the potential viability
of all under-development and emerging thermochemical and biochemical
conversion processes. This type of assessment methodology also has the value of
identifying potential problems with candidate technologies, and it will help point the
way to solving those problems.
Table 5 is a summary comparison of three different bioenergy technology
applications, applying some of the key parameters of the 5E assessment. The
three technologies compared are: (A) a thermochemical (pyrolysis/steam
reforming) facility producing mixed alcohol fuel and electricity; (B) a biochemical
(enzymatic hydrolysis) facility producing ethanol fuel and electricity and (C) for
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