Leslie Ovard, Idaho National Laboratory
Hi. We want to welcome you to the Women in Bioenergy Research webinar series. This webinar is brought to you by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office, which is also known by the acronym B-E-T-O, or “BETO.” This event is being hosted through Operation BioenergizeME, the base camp for BETO’s workforce development resources.
00:40
Today we’re joined by doctors Nicole Fitzgerald, Mariefel Olarte, and Kim Magrini. Nicole serves as the BETO technology manager in Golden, Colorado. Mariefel is a researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, or PNNL, in Richland, Washington. Kim is a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, in Golden, Colorado. I’d like to introduce Mollie Putzig who will be moderating this webinar. Before we begin, Mollie will go over a few housekeeping items, including how you can participate or how we will handle any questions that you have. Mollie?
Molly Putzig, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Thank-you, Leslie. For everyone joining us on today’s webinar, you’re listening in using your computer’s speaker system by default. If you would prefer to join over the phone, just select telephone in the audio pane of your control panel and the dial in information will be displayed. If you have any questions for today’s presenters, Leslie and my contact information will be displayed toward the end of the webinar and you should see those in the chat box now. You can submit any questions to us by email, and we will follow up with you after today’s presentation. We are recording today’s webinar and will follow up with a link to view that recording when it’s ready. Now, I’ll turn it back over to Leslie to introduce you to our first speaker.
Leslie Ovard
Thank-you, Mollie. That is great guidance how we participate in this webinar so I appreciate that very much.
02:19
I would first like to introduce Dr. Nichole Fitzgerald. Nichole is a BETO technology manager for the U.S. Department of Energy. She manages research and development projects in BETO’s conversion program. Conversion is where they convert the biomass into an end product. Her work ranges from catalytic upgrading of biologically derived chemicals to electrochemical processes for upgrading biorefinery intermediates. We should understand better what that is throughout her presentation. One of the things I love about Nichole is that she is passionate about finding ways to get renewable carbon into the materials we use every day and has pioneered several bioproducts and functional replacement initiatives for BETO. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Nichole Fitzgerald. Nichole.
Nichole Fitzgerald, Bioenergy Technologies Office
Thanks, Leslie for that kind introduction.
03:20
I’m really excited to be here and sharing some information about myself and my office, the Bioenergy Technologies Office. I’m going to give a really high-level introduction to renewable fuels and renewable energy, and Mariefel and Kim are going to give a little bit of a deeper dive into what they work on.
03:43
What is renewable energy? When we think of renewable energy we often think of solar power and wind power. These are the most popular forms of renewable energy, and they’re a source of electricity. As you know, electricity is used to power many things, like homes and buildings.
04:03
In my office we study a different type of renewable energy: biofuels and bioenergy. Solar, wind, and water power are used to make electricity, but biofuels are unique because they are a liquid fuel. Liquid fuels are very important for the transportation sector. We use fuel like gasoline to provide energy for our cars but most people don’t pour gasoline into their houses. So it’s a very special type of energy that is unique to the transportation sector and is best solved with biofuels. As you know, some cars are charged with electricity—perhaps in the future all cars will be electric—but it’s very difficult to electrify heavy-duty trucks and airplanes, both of which will need fuels.
04:48
When we talk about renewable fuels, we mean a resource that can be replenished frequently. The difference between renewable and nonrenewable is really a question of time scale. I think it’s really important to make sure that everybody knows what a fossil fuel is and how it is made.
A fossil fuel is a general term for varied deposits of organic materials formed from decayed plants and animals that were subjected to heat and pressure over hundreds of millions of years. As organic materials get buried deeper into the Earth’s crust, they decay, and because there isn’t as much oxygen underneath the Earth’s crust, it decays in a process called anaerobic decomposition. Over time, that organic material forms black tar or coal or gas. The one quality of fossil fuels that makes them very useful as an energy source is that, unlike plants or other organic matter on the Earth’s surface, fossil fuels have no oxygen and have a lot of carbon and hydrogen.
When you hear the term “hydrocarbon fuel” that means it’s a fuel made of hydrogen and carbon—“hydrocarbon”. Biofuels, at least the ones that we focus on in our office, are also hydrocarbons, so what’s the difference between a biofuel and a fossil fuel? Well, instead of waiting hundreds of millions of years to let organic waste decay, we try to develop technologies that could do it very quickly, like in the course of a day. Biofuels can be made from waste materials like algae or leftover plant materials. Fossil fuels were also made from the same starting materials. The only difference between a hydrocarbon biofuel and a hydrocarbon that’s a fossil fuel is that we are trying to rush the process to access those fuels.
06:36
The interesting thing here is that biofuels are the only infrastructure-compatible renewable fuel source for the transportation sector. There’s a lot of transportation infrastructure that already exists: we have gas stations everywhere, we have oil pipelines that transport oil all over the nation, car companies and engine manufacturers, all sorts of companies revolve around the concept of the internal-combustion-engine-powered cars and diesel-powered trucks. People are accustomed to driving long distances in their personal vehicles, so a sudden change to this paradigm would cause massive disruption. We’re interested in biofuels because it’s a way of providing renewable energy to the transportation sector without actually changing much. So gas stations would still exist. Engine manufacturers would still exist. A lot of people like biofuels because they are infrastructure compatible.
Another thing that’s very cool about biomass is that it’s highly versatile. It can be made into fuels, which I’ve already talked about, and it can be made into power (you’ve probably made power from biomass if you’ve ever gone camping and had a campfire), and it can also be made into chemicals and products. Making chemicals from biomass is very interesting to me—like how you turn a plant into a bottle—that’s a very cool topic, and I’ll get to that more in a minute.
07: 57
When making biofuels, we don’t want to use plant materials that people would eat. We want to convert things that are generally thought of as waste materials. The feedstocks that we study in our office include agricultural residues, which are the materials that remain in the field after a harvest; forest residues, which are essentially dead trees; dedicated energy crops, which include certain types of grasses that grow very, very fast; or algae or other wastes that we throw out. We use these resources because there aren’t other uses for them and they’re cheaper. This makes economic sense.
(You wouldn’t go to Whole Foods and buy some really expensive organic arugula to try to convert that to fuel that you would just burn. So the concept here is “how can we find a feedstock that doesn’t have other uses, something that you wouldn’t eat, and something that’s very cheap so we can make a cost-competitive biofuel?”)
08:54
Like Leslie said, I work in the Bioenergy Technologies Office, and our office has a vision of a thriving and sustainable bioeconomy fueled by innovative technologies. Our mission is to develop transformative and revolutionary sustainable bioenergy and bioproducts technologies for a prosperous nation. The way that we do this is we establish public-private partnerships by funding research to achieve these goals. Within our office, we do not commercialize technologies, but our goal is to fund the research to reduce uncertainty, particularly technology uncertainty, and to enable affordability. We primarily fund R&D across the nation.
09:40
As I mentioned, the transportation sector is very important to this. Transportation accounts for 67 percent of petroleum consumption. The opportunity that we see is that our analysis shows that we have more than one billion tons of nonedible biomass. That could be converted into biofuels and products and could displace a significant amount of the petroleum that we use annually and can keep revenues and jobs in the U.S.
10:28
Our office is organized into five teams or programs, and it’s organized based on the supply chain. There’s a lot of complicated questions that need to be answered to make the bioeconomy or bioenergy a reality, like how you access these feedstocks—like I said, we have analysis that shows that there’s a billion tons available in the U.S. today, but how do you get that to a place where you can process it? How do you study the variability in those feedstocks across the nation? What does a feedstock in Georgia look and perform versus one in California?
We also look at advanced algal systems. Algae is really popular idea for making biofuels because it can be produced very quickly on non-arable land, and we have a whole team of people that work on figuring out advanced algal systems. I personally sit in our conversion team, and we look at developing technologies to convert nonfood feedstocks into biofuels products and power. There is a lot of the chemistry that needs to happen to convert a plant into a fuel product.
On the far end, we have our advanced development and optimization team. They’re interested in helping make biofuels a reality [and focus on questions like,] “how do you distribute it, how do you get it to the end users, and how do you get people interested in using bioenergy. And we have a cross-cutting sustainability and strategic analysis team that asks important questions like “the biofuel that you’re making with this conversion process and this feedstock, is this actually a sustainable process” and ““are you actually improving the life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions and other qualities to make an improved fuel over a petroleum-derived counterpart?” They help us ask important questions as we’re developing these technologies.
12:44
Why is this interesting to me? I’m a chemist and my specialty is in synthetic organic chemistry, which means that I like to synthesize things or make things out of carbon. In my training, I was trained to think about how to use fossil resources and turn them into products, so starting with biomass instead of fossil resources poses a lot of unique chemistry challenges that are fun to think about. These little wheels on the slide around the arrows kind of represent different steps to convert the resource into a product, and which steps can we use for both feedstocks? What new technologies do we have to invent when we start moving to a biomass feedstock? I really like to think about how you can rearrange chemical components of waste and turn them into something useful like fuels and products.
13:31
I was asked to talk a little bit about my career path. I guess I’ve always been pretty interested in chemistry. (That’s not a picture of me on the bottom left but I was always interested in it as a kid.) I would go into my mom’s medicine cabinet and try to make new and improved lotions or other beauty supply products for her by doing a lot of creative mixing. That was when I started realizing maybe this is something that I was interested in. I studied chemistry in high school, but, frankly, it was never too interesting. The part that I found really interesting was a one-week segment on organic chemistry that we did in AP chemistry, and I realized that that was the field for me.
I studied chemistry at the college of William and Mary. That’s a liberal arts school, and I was able to study a lot of other things. I’ve always had a big interest in art history and writing and math, and that was a great opportunity to have a lot of different interests. I got to work at a royal research institute in Bangkok, Thailand, because the princess was also an organic chemist and she had a research institute there. I also got to study French gothic cathedrals in France for several weeks as part of my undergraduate work. I was able to do a lot of different things as an undergraduate.
From there, I got a Ph.D. from Stanford in synthetic organic chemistry, which was a very focused time in my life just on organic chemistry. I pursued a post-doctoral fellowship first at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne and then at University of California-Berkley in organic metallic chemistry. After that I was very lucky to have the opportunity to pursue an AAAS fellowship at the U.S. Department of Energy. AAAS is a scientific group that publishes the Journal of Science. They have a program where they put Ph.D. scientists into the federal government. That was a really interesting opportunity for me to pursue science management but also a lot of the other things that I have always had interest in, like politics, or writing and climate change. That was a fascinating and really valuable experience and what got me to my current position as a technology manager within the Bioenergy Technologies Office.
16:20
Within BETO, I currently work to assess the state of R&D in bioenergy. We are constantly asking ourselves what needs to be done and what types of R&D should we fund. I work on evaluating proposals and evaluating work in progress. I take it very seriously to help my funding recipients navigate internal hurdles and bureaucratic difficulties. I have several initiatives that I’ve been working on, including ChemCatBio and our separations consortium and our performance advantaged bioproduct work.
16:57
This is the research priorities that are currently in our office, just a snapshot of them and these are all things that are being pursued, and like I mentioned, ChemCatBio and the bio processing separations consortium are things that I’m really interested in.
17:15
I want to leave with one slide on future directions. One thing that I think is a really exciting area for bioenergy to be moving into is using a different waste than we usually use (which is plastic) and thinking about this massive plastics problem that we have plaguing the globe. How we come up with either new bio-based plastics that can help or plastics that can be more easily recycled? How can we use biological methods to enable improved recycling of diverse polymers? We’re really excited about this as a new area, and with that, I’m going to conclude and turn it back to Leslie.
18:01
Leslie Ovard
Thank-you, Nichole. I never get tired of hearing about what you’re working on and your history and some of your stories, so thank you for sharing those with us. I would next like to introduce Dr. Mariefel Olarte. She joined PNNL in 2011 after completing graduate studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has experience related to the catalytic conversion of biomass to renewable fuels and chemicals, which I’m sure we will learn more about during her presentation. I was very impressed as we practiced earlier that she brought some of the women who have inspired her, into her presentation, and I think that’s great for Women’s History Month. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Mariefel Olarte.
Mariefel Olarte, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Thank-you, Leslie, for the kind introduction. And I thank you all for attending this webinar and I’m very excited.
19:03
I’m pretty honored to be included in this group. Nichole is one of our bosses at BETO and Kim is a colleague at NREL.
19:14
I would like to start my presentation with an anecdote, an origin story, to borrow the phrase from the Spiderverse. It is one of my first experiences when I came to the U.S. in 2004. I had a mechanical engineering background, majored in pulp and paper technology, from the Philippines and then decided to pursue grad studies in the U.S. after teaching for three years.
The first time that I ever flew on an airplane was the first time I left the country. It was quite an experience. I missed my connecting flight though—and without a cell phone, without credit cards—I had to figure out what to do in a foreign country. Thankfully, the Delta representative was very helpful. She quickly booked me to a connecting flight and we ran across Los Angeles airline terminals to get to the flight.
I wanted to start with this because this is kind of new life for me coming from the Philippines to the U.S., and the moral of the story for me at that time was every time I have life issues later on, I think of that day. Anything that could happen is just a piece of cake, and I’m very grateful.
20:36
Speaking of always being grateful, as Leslie mentioned, I would like to have a shout out to my early inspirations since it is Women’s History Month. I am talking about two of my grandparents, both my maternal and my paternal grandmas. They are inspirations to me because of their diverse backgrounds and their unique stories. My maternal grandma inspired me to love science. She was a World War II veteran and taught grade six science. She also finished her M.S. degree, which was pretty rare for her generation. My paternal grandma inspired me with her life. She was married at 12, pretty young, but she actually reared 14 adult kids. That would have taken strength to do that. These two different women each inspired me uniquely with their own lives.
21:39
Why did I become interested in the environment or converting biomass into bioproducts? This actually started with my background in the Philippines. The Philippines is a tropical country, and we have gorgeous tracks of rainforests. As we all know, we can convert them into products. One example I show hereis lumber, but there are also other products, as you can guess, from wood. Wood is required for our needs for shelter; however, without proper management, tree cutting could lead to denuded forest. This further became problematic, so I asked these questions: (1) “Can forest utilization not lead to denuded or eroded mountain areas?” and (2) “can there be renewable technologies that can be used so that we could provide for our needs” and (3) “are there other technologies that needs to be developed?” With these questions, I am very much interested in utilizing our resources sustainably.
22:51
As has been mentioned, my work is in biomass conversion to produce energy. Nichole highlighted why this is important, but I would like to talk a little bit about the processes themselves.
We start with wood, which is a solid biomass, but it’s not only wood, as Nichole mentioned. Agricultural waste and other types of wastes could be used, but to produce liquid transportation fuels, we need to convert the solid into liquid through a process called liquefaction.
There can be two processes to do this: (1) we have biochemical conversion, which uses bugs, or enzymes, and even includes acid hydrolysis, and (2) the other liquefaction technology that I am most involved with is thermochemical conversion of biomass. This requires high-temperature, high-pressure catalysts to convert biomass into liquefied products.
And lastly, as Nichole also mentioned, the liquids that are produced in this first step usually have a lot of oxygen, which makes this intermediate liquid not compatible with our infrastructure. So we need to have catalytic upgrading to remove the oxygen and other [inaudible] atoms that are present in the biomass. This is usually done through catalytic upgrading. I will be talking a little bit more about these processes in my later slides.
2:30
Since joining PNNL in 2011, I had a chance to work in various projects related to converting biomass into fuels. I am involved in projects also that convert biomass into products. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, or PNNL, where I work, is one of the 17 DOE labs across the country, and we are very much as a lab interested in working towards creating solutions for our nation’s problems. In this light, I’ve listed the various groups of projects that I was lucky to participate in since I joined PNNL. I will talk briefly about each of the slides and each of the projects in my next slides. Some of these projects actually started at PNNL even before I was born, so that tells you that some of these problems are quite challenging.
The reason why converting biomass is challenging starts with its structure. On the left side, you can see a biomass structure. It’s representative of the structures in biomass that you cannot see. You can see that it becomes more complicated as it becomes smaller. These structures we see from the cell wall are composed of three macro molecules. We call them “cellulose,” “hemicellulose,” and “lignin,” and these are all intertwined to make the plant cell wall. Because of this complicated structure, and the complicated interaction between these natural polymers and other polymers and components in the plant, it becomes quite challenging to break them apart to produce fuels and products from biomass.
26:42
Let’s start with the project on hydrocarbons to fuels. As Nichole mentioned, we will still need liquid transportation fuels even though we are doing some electrification for some of our automobiles. As I mentioned before, we would need to do liquefaction to convert the biomass into a liquid intermediate that also produces some gas and solids. However, our focus for our product for this technology is the liquid component. There are two main pathways under liquefaction. We have fast pyrolysis, which is a quick cooking or heating of small particles of biomass (these are like sawdust particles). The heating is done around two seconds at 400 to 550 degrees Celsius at close to atmospheric pressure, to produce vapors that are subsequently quenched and condensed into pyrolysis oils.
If we add catalysts, or compounds of chemicals that make processes much faster, and insert them before the condensation of the vapors, then that process becomes catalytic fast pyrolysis.
Another process that produces intermediate liquid is called “hydrothermal liquefaction.” If fast pyrolysis is a quick cook, hydrothermal liquefaction could be similar to pressure cooking. Basically we treat dry and wet biomass in the slurry, and this is done at high temperatures, around 250 degrees Celsius, and then at high pressure about 2,800 to 3,000 [pounds per square-inch gauge (psig)]. Both fast pyrolysis and hydrothermal liquefaction produce organic liquid that could then be converted into fuel products or hydrocarbons. As I mentioned before, we need to remove oxygen and other atoms from this intermediate liquid through catalytic hydrotreating or hydro processing, and this technology requires high temperatures (around 400 degrees Celsius) and high pressure (about 2,000 psig) under hydrogen. So there are some safety considerations when we are looking at these transformations.
29:08
When I joined PNNL, I was introduced to the real bio-oil. I call it “the real bio-oil” because when I was in grad school, I was working on surrogate or model compounds such as phenols to remove oxygen; however, real bio-oil is really complicated. As you could see in the mass spectra that’s on this slide, it could be composed of hundreds of components. Each of the vertical lines represent one compound, and all of this needs to be converted into hydrocarbons. On the left side, the picture shows pyrolysis oil, which is a goo. It’s a mesh of lignin and cellulose and hemicellulose.
Through catalytic processes, we could convert it into hydrocarbon. On the right-hand side is a representative of the products that we get from that. In bioenergy that’s a mixture of the hydrotreated oil, but we need to distill them or fashion them into different boiling point cuts, so we have gasoline, diesel, and heavy boiling-point range products.
30:30
Part of developing the technology is also de-risking the technology for industry. We’re working on small-scale systems. During grad school, we were working in a one milliliter volume of catalyst, but since I joined PNNL, I became exposed and trained on operating large-scale catalyst beds. The workhorse that we were using before is the 400-milliliter catalyst bed reactor. It’s a continuous flow reactor, and if we look at the size, it’s about 32-inches by 1-inch inside diameter. We’ve used this to produce hydrocarbons from fast pyrolysis as well as hydrothermal liquefaction oils. I was also fortunate enough to participate in commissioning a 20-milliliter reactor (that’s quite a scale up) to do the same process: hydrotreating. In this effort, the importance of safety in operations was regarded as high priority. I also get to wear a hard hat during operation.
31:53
Aside from process development, we also work on catalyst development. I mentioned earlier that catalysts are chemicals that make the reaction faster. As Nichole pointed out before, what we try to do here is to mimic what Mother Nature is doing in billions of years into processes that could be done in a matter of days, so we need to be able to develop catalysts that are robust and active for the various technologies that we are working on. What I’m showing here on slide is 24 well reactors. This is a high-throughput system wherein it allows us to test multiple reactions at the same time. I also put in there some of the in-situ model compounds that we test. Sometimes it becomes tricky to use actual bio-oil in these systems, but we are able to benchmark them using aqueous model compounds.
32:59
Developing products or developing fuel requires chemical analysis because we need to know what our starting material is and our final product. In dealing with bio-oils, that is a little bit tricky because it is a complicated mixture, but at the same time, there are not much analytical methods for this type of oil, and very little of these methods are standardized. Standardized methods are important because these help in commodifying bio-oil in such that it will help producers and users ascertain the quality of the bio-oil that’s being treated. With colleagues from NREL and ORNL, we recently had ASTM E3146 passed, and this is the first ASTM method in chemical characterization of pyrolysis bio-oils. We were pretty excited when this went through ASTM.
34:07
Another project that I am involved in is the production of products from lignin. As I mentioned earlier, lignin is one of the macro polymers that is found in biomass. It’s effective and efficient utilization is very important to allow the hydrocarbon-to-fuel pathway to achieve its fuel cost target. As was mentioned before, when we develop technologies, the cost is also considered. We need to have both the carbohydrate component of biomass and the lignin component of biomass effectively utilized so that the whole technology will be cost effective. The project that I’m working on right now is in collaboration with Washington State University.
The lignin oxidation process that we use utilizes niobium-based catalysts and peracetic acid as oxidants. The challenge for us is to find the cheaper oxidant and more active catalysts that increase the [methyl p-hydroxycinnamate (MPC)] yield. So far, we were able to identify process conditions and catalyst combinations that can reduce the initial base case cost by 30 percent. That is encouraging, but that is not where we want to be, so we keep on doing our research.
35:27
And lastly, but not the least, I’m also involved in a project that aims to produce renewable methane and clean water. Methane is used as an energy source in industries. If we can produce renewable methane, then companies could generate RINS, or tax credits, in some states. We know that clean water is a necessity in our lives, so by using catalytic hydrothermal gasification, we could produce both methane and clean water. Catalytic hydrothermal gasification is similar in hydrothermal liquefaction in that we also use 350-degree Celsius and about 2,800 to 3,000 psig of pressure.
However, the difference is we have a catalyst that is embedded in the reactor that converts the organics into methane. This is important because thermochemical processes do produce an aqueous phase. In the filter that I have on the slide, we see the hydrothermal liquefaction process. About 36 percent of the incoming carbon actually goes into the aqueous product. We cannot just throw that into fresh water or air, so we need to remove the organics, but if we could convert it into renewable fuel and at the same time produce clean water, then that is our goal.
37:12
This slide lists my education. As I mentioned, I came from the Philippines. I have a major in pulp and paper technology [(PPT)] from the University of Philippines-Los Banos. PPT is under chemical engineering so I have training in chemical engineering. I went to Georgia Tech to do paper science engineering (also under chemical engineering) and then finished my Ph.D. in chemical engineering. I worked on catalysis and was able to work on biomass conversion during my stay at Georgia Tech.
I had experience also in going into industry for an internship. I considered this to be a very good experience to get that perspective on how industries are being run, at least on the small scale. This has been a great but sometimes challenging time working in biomass conversion just because of the nature of the starting material. However, it is very fulfilling for me to know that our teams are helping to solve problems that will impact our future. And with that, I want to thank you again for your time. Leslie?
38:38
Leslie Ovard
Thank-you. That was incredible. There is an enormous amount of complexity for people who are addressing problems on the other side of the gasoline pump, which is what we normally think of. (As long as it comes out of there that everything is fine.) So thank-you, Mariefel.
As our last presenter, I would like to introduce Kim Magrini, who is a principal research scientist and group manager at NREL in the National Bioenergy Center. She manages NREL’s catalysis and thermochemical sciences group. This group focuses on the development of catalytic approaches to biofuels production from “syngas” and “pyrolysis.” These are words that we have heard from the two prior presentations, and obviously they connect across the country. As a result of this webinar, I hope we understand more about catalysts and syngas and pyrolysis. Please welcome Dr. Kim Magrini. Kim?
39:52
Kim Magrini, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Thank-you for the introduction, Leslie. Appreciated. Hi, everyone. As Leslie said, I work in catalysis and also thermochemical conversion.
40:07
(I’m the anchorwoman for this webinar.) It’s my pleasure to work with Mariefel technically, and I actually work for Nichole. It’s fun to get all of us in the same room together even though we’re spread across the country usually.
With respect to a career in bioenergy research and development, following Mariefel’s lead, I can tell you a little bit about how I got to where I am. I’ve got a doctorate in physical chemistry, chemical engineering, from the University of Colorado at Boulder [(UC-Boulder)]. I did a masters at Youngstown State University in physical chemistry, and I have a B.S. in chemistry and math from the University of Nevada at Reno.
And so if you follow the logos across, I think the logos got better as I finally got a Ph.D. (I prefer being a buffalo rather than a penguin.) Along the way, I minored in skiing when I was in Nevada, and that’s a picture of skiing at Lake Tahoe. I also picked up a pilot’s license because my father was a pilot and he taught me how in high school. That’s actually a picture of the same kind of airplane that I own now and operate when I’m not working, which isn’t very often. With respect to pre-NREL work experience, I made a living as an analytical chemist for steel corporations. I’m from Youngstown, Ohio, which is known as Steel City, USA (or it used to be). There I learned that analytical chemistry is important with respect to materials development.
If you look at the picture on the left, that’s actually molten steel being dumped out of a furnace (that’s 100 tons of steel, by the way) at more than 330-degrees Fahrenheit. (I learned how to make steel and how to analyze steel.) If you look at the middle picture, that’s a micrograph of a steel crystal structure from a sample. What I learned there is that structural properties are really dependent on that microstructure. If you look off to the right, when I was at UC-Boulder, I worked on catalyst development in a specialized way in that we could actually do reactions and then directly look at the catalyst surface using ultra high vacuum equipment. It’s kind of Star Trek-y, and I thought that was really cool and I spent five years doing that.
42:16
I want to give you a feel for some of the programs I’ve worked in while I’ve been here at NREL. I post doc’ed at NREL after UC-Boulder. I wanted to go to NASA, but my husband was a physician here in Denver, and I was lucky enough to post doc at NREL and then stay here for my career. I started off by working in solar thermal energy, which Nichole touched on a little bit. It’s a diversion from biomass conversion, but I think it’s interesting to look at because it also involves catalysts.
Over a six-year period of time, we looked at developing catalysts like titanium dioxide. We can see that pretty white powder. We actually had to transport that to do some work across the country. It’s a pretty white powder. (I wouldn’t tell anyone to take that in their suitcase these days, but it is titanium dioxide paint pigment essentially.) Paint breaks down on your houses pretty regularly with exposure to sunlight. That same process is responsible for breaking up organics in water and airstreams to more benign species like CO2, carbon monoxide, and water.
What we did was develop various systems using both ambient sunlight as it would hit your skin as opposed to concentrating that sunlight. If you look at the lower left, it’s being concentrated by a parabolic trough to get more sunlight into these air and water streams that need cleaned up. All the way over to the right, you’re looking at the solar power tower in California. If anybody is flying to San Diego, about half an hour east of San Diego sometimes you can see this lit up. That’s another way to use and harness renewable energy with respect to sunlight to generate electricity.
43:59
That’s kind of aside from what we’re talking about, but it was pretty interesting work in that we got to take this technology to various military bases to clean up their waste as a demonstration.
If you look at the upper left in that round red circle, we located a trough system on the upper right. Their groundwater that was contaminated with both fuels and lubricants that had gotten spilled on the ground. Overall, we were able to show (with respect to benzine at least) if you look at the lower bottom plot, that’s how benzine is destroyed as a function of concentration in water and illumination time. The process worked, and we were able to clean up at least that small groundwater spill using this new technology.
The middle picture shows a tank at Fort Carson base. It’s an army base that is south of Denver. What happens there is military vehicles have to be often repainted for where they’re going to be deployed. Those paints generate a lot of toxic organic species in air. We use the same technology as well there to clean up the organics in the air stream, so those are military applications that in some respects are used today in different forms. (If you look at the lower left, one of the perks of being at McLellan Airforce Base was getting to see a U2 fly plane take off. (That was really awesome that we got to do that.)
I’ve also listed skills required to do this type of work and especially for deploying developing technologies to various sites to assess how they’re going to work. This particular project really required project management skills, field engineering skills, and, believe it or not, logistics. Packing up our system here at NREL, which is fairly large, and getting it to California, was quite a challenge. We happen to have a project manager here who came from the military, and that was their specialty. That was a lot of fun to learn how to do that as well.
45:49
Switching gears, I want to now start moving into biomass: both low-temperature and high-temperature biomass processing. At NREL and at the other national labs, we have a program that develops new projects. It’s competitive, and you have new ideas that are sometimes what we call “outside the box.” One of the ideas we had was that (and you saw from Mariefel’s work) when you thermally convert biomass to liquid, you also get a solid leftover, which is called char. If you look at the pan on the right-hand side that’s char. You’re familiar with charcoal, if anybody does any grilling. This is a little bit different in that it’s a byproduct of thermal conversion of biomass to vapors and liquids.
We found out was that char is really a good soil amendment, and it does a couple of things: primarily it stores carbon in soil. So everybody’s certainly heard of climate change and the additional CO2 that’s being added to the atmosphere at an alarming rate, causing fluctuations in weather. If you put this char in soil, it actually stores carbon in the soil, and it does something else that’s important; it promotes plant growth both above ground and below ground.
If you look at the sequence of pictures on the right, you can see that potting soil—which had Miracle Grow in it because we wanted to bias this test against seeing a real response—grows nice roots for corn plants. You’re looking at corn plants that were harvested, I think, at six weeks of growth. In the middle, we added even more fertilizer, and you can see better root growth than with just the baseline potting soil. On the bottom we added five percent char to the soil, and you can really see incredible root growth. It was also mirrored with much bigger cornstalk height and plant height. The moral of this story is if we can take something that we consider a byproduct, which is the char from any of the biomass thermal conversion processes, and actually put it back in the soil to store carbon, we can promote plant growth.
We’d like to take credit for all of this, but this all happened naturally in the Amazon in South America. In the Brazilian Amazon, the Indians there knew about this. They used to burn their soil, and they would put the char back in the soil and see enhanced plant growth. We were able to get some of those samples out of the Amazon, and that’s why we thought we might be able to amend the char to look like those samples. We did and it worked; there are several companies now that do this. Primary application at the moment is golf courses because they pay the most for this type of char, but it can be used on agricultural soils as well and degraded soils.
48:36
Along with being able to put stuff in the soil via char that makes plants grow well, we needed to measure the amount of carbon that went into the soil and what it was doing to the soil in terms of chemistry. Without going into a huge amount of detail, if you look at the photograph on the right, that’s actually a core of soil taken down to a meter. You can see the different colors. It’s black on the left and it gets lighter towards that tan color on the right. That’s correlated with the amount of soil carbon content as a function of depth, a known property, but it’s difficult to measure. You take these samples into a lab. It can take days to weeks to measure the amount of carbon—not the amount of carbon but the actual chemistry of that carbon that’s in that soil.
It’s important because we’re going to start storing carbon in soil. We need to know how long it stays there and how much is there and what its chemical composition is because it has the possibility of disrupting the microbial and the fungal processes that are going on in the soil. So without going into a huge amount of detail, we have a technique here at NREL called mass spectrometry. (If you want to know the gritty details, it’s pyrolysis molecular beam mass spectrometry.) It allows us to rapidly analysis soil samples in three minutes and get a chemical fingerprint. We took that information in a project that we had with the USDA (the United States Department of Agriculture).
50:08
Measuring soil carbon using that technique gives us information that looks like what you see on the upper left-hand plot. Mariefel already showed you a mass spectrum. This is similar to what she showed you, but this is the actual soil. If you notice this big peak at 256, that is actually a biomarker for palmitic acid. It’s really cool because that is directly related to microbial content in the soil, so the soil health is related to how much carbon we’re putting in there.
What that meant was developing this technique so that we might have something in terms of a small system we could take out in the field and in three minutes get a measurement of the [small molecule biomarker core biomarker. That could tell us about soil health in a three-minute assay, which currently can, as I said, take weeks if you have to take samples and get them back to a laboratory. So that was really cool.
You can do something more. Without going into the tortuous details of statistical analysis (because I know everyone loves statistics, including myself) you can actually take all of that data. If you have samples of known microbial biomass content in an unknown sample, do multivariate analysis on the spectra on the upper left, you actually can develop a correlation that you can predict just from a three-minute analysis of soil (what you might have in terms of the microbial carbon content). We did that with the USDA. Sadly, it’s not adopted yet for use across the world (I wish it was), but we do have that technology available and we are working on it to deploy it. Anyway, the type of skills required to do this work is analytical chemistry, and the field sampling and the soil science aspect of it came with our partners at the USDA. We did a lot of multivariate statistical analysis of the data to get these correlations. It’s the first time it’s been done, and we think it’s really cool and ready to be developed further for field use.
52:13
Moving into the topic I’m working on now (along with Mariefel) that’s transportation fuels from biomass. If you look at this screen, we have a capability at NREL, and PNNL does as well, where we have a type of funnel in terms of how we look at developing fuels from biomass. In order to conserve resources and not do large-scale work until we really know we have promising catalysts, we start at micro scale. If you look all the way at the left and in the middle of this plot, you can see the amount of catalyst and the amount of biomass that we’re using in each of these reactor scales. The n number refers to the amount of samples you can do in a day.
In a micro-scale reactor, we do a lot of screening of the biomass type that Nichole told you about. It could be forest resides, ag residues, etcetera, along with catalysts that are specifically converting this biomass to the fuels and products that we want.
Moving all the way across to the right, we can go up to 100 kilograms of biomass and catalyst being fed in a day to really dial in at a large scale what these processes are going to look like if they’re deployed to industry. If you look at the red highlighted box, that’s where I spend the majority of my time at the moment. We have a small pilot-scale reactor that is taking biomass via thermal conversion to a vapor, and then we take that vapor through a refinery-compatible reaction system that takes that vapor to bio-oil.
Sometimes there are liquids that can be either upgraded to fuels by hydrotreating. (I’ll show you some data in the next slide where Mariefel took our pyrolysis oils that have been catalytically treated and hydrotreated them to gasoline components.) Or you can take those liquids, those bio-oils, and cofeed them with existing petroleum products to make biogenic gasoline that has about five weight percent of biogenic carbon in that gasoline. That’s an early adoption of biofuels by the refineries because we’re not changing anything in terms of how this cofeeding process makes gasoline for them. It takes advantage of already-existing infrastructure. We just have to produce the bio-oils. They can cofeed them with current petroleum feedstocks, and then we get about one-to-five weight percent of that biogenic carbon in the finished gasoline that can go directly into your gas tank. This is really cool that we have these different scales to work at, to take transportation fuels from biomass all the way up to refineries.
54:47
This is the unit that we use. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, but in the yellow box on the left, that’s where we thermally convert the biomass to vapors, and the unit on the right is where we take those vapors and either make bio-oils by themselves or we can take those vapors and co-process them with petroleum feedstock. Or we can take liquids from the bio or bio-oil liquids and convert them to fuels with the gasoline feedstocks. We had to do a lot of work to make the system do this, so we’re really proud of that. We currently have both Exxon and Chevron wanting to work with us on coprocessing, so I think that’s the proof of the concept in that we have the oil refineries wanting to assess this technology with us, as we speak.
55:34
I promised I would show you what the actual oils look like. If you look on the bottom left, that’s bio-oil. It’s a brown, fairly complex chemistry. If we hydrotreat it at PNNL, we get an oil that’s yellow (in the middle.) That is a gasoline precursor. If you distil that oil you get about 46 percent gasoline and 39 percent diesel, and you can see the components over on the right. What I want to point out is it is gasoline, but it’s not terrific gasoline. We have to work at improving the octane number for gasoline and the cetane number for diesel. However, we’re going to do that through catalysis, and that’s work that we’re directly involved in as we speak.
56:16
I want to review what we have talked about. I think bioenergy has many and varied career opportunities. We talked a little bit about biomass, mostly about biomass-to-fuels and -chemicals, a little bit about waste treatment from solar thermal processing, and then an offshoot of biomass thermal conversion, which is developing the chars for carbon sequestration. The theme for all of this is “analytical chemistry is key.” You’ve got to understand the changes that you’re making. I can’t stress enough that you really need to understand analytical chemistry as it pertains to your process.
Also, develop multidisciplinary skills whenever possible, because we all have to do many things and wear many hats, and the more that you can wear really helps you work in the skill. Finally, I want to leave you with the message that it’s been a great ride. I’m still having a huge amount of fun doing this, and I hope you guys listening will have fun working in this area and stay safe while you’re doing it. Thanks for your attention, and it was a real pleasure to be able to present this work to you.
57:17
Leslie Ovard
Thank-you, Kim. One thing that Kim brought up was how many different partnerships or people are on the team and how many different disciplines are required to produce these changes. So I really, really appreciate that.
57:43
I wanted to thank all of our presenters. You are great examples of women who work daily for the benefit of the future, and I’m so pleased to get to showcase you and the work that you do for Women’s History Month. So thank you very much.
57:58
If there’s something about bioenergy development that you’re interested in, there are many different skills needed, as we have just heard. There’s agriculture and research sciences, engineering and manufacturing, education, communications and outreach, operations management, and business, as well as infrastructure (and, as was mentioned in our presentations, even logistics.)
58:28
The Bioenergy Technologies Office, or BETO, has a website that is a great resource, and this is the career map. It explains the different types of careers that are required for bioenergy to be a significant part of our nation’s energy portfolio. I encourage all of you to explore that as you go to the right side of that map. Each of those dots represents a different expertise that’s needed, and you can learn about how to get education, and what that job looks like. Spend a little bit of time in there. With that, then we will leave you.
59:18
Thank you all for attending this webinar with us and celebrating Women’s History Month. We hope you’re excited about the career opportunities that bioenergy provides. Mollie, do you have any final words?
59:29
Mollie Putzig
Thank-you, everyone, for joining us today. We’ll follow up in a few weeks when we get that recording all set for you guys. Thanks.
Leslie Ovard
Thank-you again for taking your time from your day to celebrate with us and learn more about bioenergy. Have a great Thursday!
59:56