The Good, The Bad, and The Possible: Generating Products from Above-Ground Carbon

Dr. Josh Schaidle is the Laboratory Program Manager for Carbon Management at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. According to Schaidle, there are all sorts of untapped opportunities in above-ground carbon, found in biomass such as plants and trees and also in carbon dioxide emissions from factory smokestacks or in the air. During his presentation, Schaidle plans to describe the different ways we can access these carbon sources and convert troublesome greenhouse gases into the fuels and products that we use in our everyday lives. Veteran broadcast journalists George Lewis and Judy Muller are the hosts for this series of podcasts.

Transcript

Science Straight Up

Season 6, Episode 4

“The Good, The Bad, and The Possible: Generating Products from Above-Ground Carbon”

Dr Josh Schaidle, National Renewable Energy Lab, Golden, Colorado

Moderators: Judy Muller and George Lewis

(theme music)

JUDY: From Telluride Science, it’s Science Straight Up

GEORGE: And this time around…

JOSH: If we look at all the products we can produce from CO two, it's actually a trillion-dollar market opportunity.

JUDY: Dr. Josh Schaidle is with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, commonly known as NREL. He’s the laboratory program manager for carbon management. He and his team are researching ways to recycle carbon that’s in the air and in certain crops and use it to make synthetic fuels and products.

GEORGE: The goal is to reduce the total amount of carbon that’s in our atmosphere and create new industries and lots of additional jobs. If we can find a way past the big hurdle of cost.

JUDY: Every year, Telluride Science brings together groups of leading scientists from around the world for a series of workshops…where they exchange ideas, argue, debate, and learn from one another. Once a week, they present something called a Town Talk, giving the local community a glimpse into their cutting-edge science. Dr Schaidle spoke at the Telluride Mountain Village Conference Center.

JOSH: What I'd like to talk with you about is the good, the opportunity space, the bad, some of the challenges and the barriers that face us, and then the possible, what is out there that we can achieve and do that specifically for how we can produce products, fuels that we use every day, chemicals and materials. How can we produce those from above ground, carbon. And the reason we're talking about carbon is it's the basis of life and our global economy. If you think about the fuels you put in your car, gasoline, diesel, that goes into heavy duty trucks, rail, jet fuel that goes into airplanes that fly around the world, all of those are carbon-based fuels. They're hydrocarbons, they're liquid fuels, energy dense fuels, they're all carbon based. And in the United States, of our total energy that we consume, 83% of that energy comes from fossil fuels. So that's carbon that's below the ground. So that's for fuels. What if we talk about products? Think about all the plastics we use in our daily lives, things that are plastic bags, things that are plastic containers, even the cell phone cases that we have, we use a significant amount of plastic that is also carbon based. And in the US, we produce annually, 130 billion pounds of plastic resin every year, predominantly polyethylene based, that is 99% made from fossil fuels, again, underground. And so the question is, what can we do about approaching and trying to produce these same fuels and these same products from above ground carbon? 

JUDY: He divides above-ground carbon into two categories.

(SOUND: Car starting)

JUDY: We’re all familiar with the CO2 emissions from our cars and things like factory smokestacks. There are some big technical hills to climb, but that carbon can be recycled.

GEORGE: The second is biomass, plants and trees. They’re useful in a couple of ways. First, they absorb CO2 out of the atmosphere, and then they can be turned into things like fuels and plastics, cutting down our reliance on oil and natural gas.

JOSH: So these are the two main sources of above ground carbon I'm going to talk about. And I want to emphasize that between these two, you can produce almost every one of the fuels and chemicals we talked about andwe use in our everyday life.  I'll start on the biomass side. In the United States, we have the potential to produce more than a billion tons of biomass per year. Today, right now, we're using this bottom part. We were using about 350 million tons of biomass, predominantly for energy production. But if you project out into the future, out to 2050 there's this huge growth potential in the US. Some of this comes from using waste. So thinking about when we harvest corn as an example, the corn stover leftover afterwards is an agricultural waste we can utilize. 

GEORGE: Since I’m from California rather than Iowa, I had to Google corn stover. It’s the husks, leaves, stalks and cobs remaining after the harvest. There are more leftovers on Josh Schaidle’s energy plate.

JOSH: Think about when you harvest trees out of the forest and to take them to the sawmill. There's leftover residues from doing that, we can utilize that. 

JUDY: Then, there are energy crops. Plants grown with the specific goal of producing fuels and other materials.

JOSH: Those are things like switchgrass, like hybrid poplar. These are fast growing plants and trees that we plant specifically for energy use. And so the potential in the US is massive for our growth of further biomass. What does that mean? More broadly, though, if I have a billion tons of biomass, how does that help us? Well, we can produce with that biomass on the order of 60 billion gallons of fuel. That's a substantial portion of what we utilize in total in the United States. Or we could produce 200 million tons of chemicals and materials that's enough to meet that plastics demand, that production in the US and in doing so, we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and we can produce additional jobs in the US.   Now, what about carbon dioxide? There's been a recent study that has shown that if we take carbon dioxide and make products, and if we look at all the products we can produce from CO two, it's actually a trillion-dollar market opportunity. So there's a significant growth opportunity here as well.

(sound—jet aircraft taking off)

GEORGE: Josh Schaidle says he sees a lot of opportunity in aviation. Producing jet fuel from recycled carbon, not adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.

JOSH: Jet fuel, this is something you burn. It's a fuel you burn. It goes back into CO two. So you use CO two to make it, you burn it. It's just a cycle. However, it's one of the highest market value points you have in making CO two. There's a huge economic opportunity space.

JUDY: He speaks of another opportunity in aggregates. The crushed stone, sand and gravel that are mixed into concrete.  There’s research going on to find ways of pulling stray CO2 out of the atmosphere and pumping it into these aggregates, turning it from greenhouse gas into construction material.

JOSH: 60 to 70% of concrete is aggregate, just rocks that go into this rocks, gravel, other materials you can sequester CO two into those rocks and embed that into the concrete.

GEORGE:  Now, here’s the challenge.  How do you do all those nifty things Josh Schaidle envisions and make them cost-effective—competitive with burning oil and natural gas? Continuing research is the way to answer that, but at a time of cutbacks in government research funds, is it going to be possible? 

JOSH: And what I ask to you is, Well, should we? Right? Should we utilize above ground carbon? Should we continue research in these areas to continue to drive down that cost curve so that, hopefully it's more affordable for all of us to make decisions that might be more sustainable in the long term and have a greater, you know, positive impact on us. I think that's a question that we all have to consider and think about, and I'll pose that to all of you. 

JUDY:  Josh Schaidle’s wife and three small children were in the audience and he acknowledged them.

JOSH:  And they are very much my inspiration. As much as I try to inspire them, I think they are very much my inspiration. We need people to be courageous right now. And it can be hard. It's it's little steps, right take little steps to be more courageous. So thank you very much. I'm happy to take any questions.

(applause) 

GEORGE: Schaidle’s children may well be into adulthood by the time the using biomass and recycling carbon dioxide are in general use.

GEORGE FROM TALK: Do you think of them, trying to build a better future for them?

JUDY: My question. Right out of the box..

GEORGE: Aaaah sorry!

JOSH:  Absolutely, and I hopefully that was somewhat clear from the presentation, right? I mean, it's thinking the things we do today, and this is important, right? Some of the these technologies are heavy capital expenditures that take long periods of time to bring to fruition. And so when a technology is initially discovered, the timeline to get it into the market and deployed is often 15 years or more. And so things that we discover right now in the lab might not have an impact for another 15 years. And so very much so the things we're doing today are really paying it forward to the future.

JUDY: Right? You mentioned 2050. Oh, that'll be nice, but for them especially. But I listen to this, and I think this is such a no brainer. I mean, it seems to me Yes, obviously you should be working towards this end game, both for the planet and for our ease of use and everything, and yet, then you get to the cost, which is so big. And how optimistic are you that you can bring that down? What would it take?

JOSH: I think there are some inherent limitations of how far you can go, right? There's some thermodynamic limitations of how far you can push, because of the processing cost, because of the energy that you have to add into the material. So there are some limitations, but in many of these cases, it's technology curves that haven't been scaled yet. I'll also say that, you know, on the energy advancement side, right, we've seen cost curves on solar and wind power and others drop rapidly over time on the cost of producing that energy. So that is now a lower cost can be a lower cost input than it has in the past. And so that's another advantage that you can get for all these technologies, is sort of the energy input reduction. 

JUDY: Again, looking at that 2050, date you threw out possible and a future for your kids, future, I'm trying to go out how the world would look differently. Can you just tell me how our day to day lives would be different if we could stop taking oil from the ground and go with this?

JOSH: I think on the deployment side, you have a lot more distributed processing in smaller facilities. So especially with carbon dioxide, the same is true if you're trying to pull CO two out of the atmosphere. Your scale is never going to be as large as a giant petroleum refinery. It's unlikely to be as large. We should never, say never, because I can't predict the future as well as anybody else, but it's unlikely those facilities to be large. You'd have more distributed, smaller factories spread all around, which I think, hopefully provides an avenue to for communities to have more ownership in those facilities compared to kind of the way we've done things in the past, and I think in terms of our lifestyle and how that impacts it, in most cases, with biomass, with CO two, we're largely trying to make many of the same products we use today. So we're not trying to change. Are you utilizing fuel, gasoline or diesel? We're not trying to change. Are you utilizing plastics? We're trying to change the source where they come from, so that ultimately our emissions are lower of greenhouse gasses because of that process, and if so, hopefully there's a positive impact on sort of our future.

GEORGE: During the US Senate confirmation hearings for Energy Secretary, President Trump’s pick for the post, Chris Wright was asked about the role of alternate fuels in curbing carbon emissions and helping curb climate change. This is what he had to say.

CHRIS WRIGHT: I've studied, and followed the data and the evolution of climate change, for at least 20 years now. It is a global issue. It is a real issue. It's it's a challenging issue, and the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system.

GEORGE: Josh Schaidle’s lab is funded by the Department of Energy.  I asked him if he felt supported by the administration in spite of government budget cuts and layoffs.

JOSH: Yes, I feel that our work is supported. I would say that, and I'll highlight this, you know, as a national lab. For those who are not familiar, I work at NREL. It's a Department of Energy National Lab. There's 17 of us across the country. We are intended to support sort of national objectives, national priorities, and do so in an unbiased way. We are not an entity that. Lobbies and advocates for policy. We are an entity that does R and D, does research and development, does analysis and provides that in an unbiased manner so others can interpret it, can evaluate it, and make decisions around where should we go in the future? What policies do we need to put into place? And so yes, our work, I do feel is supported. What I the sense I get and Iis that there is a balance that we all have to evaluate for ourselves and for the country, that there are tradeoffs. There's a tradeoff between, can I afford my energy today, right, the affordability of these things versus the long term impact, and are we thinking here and now, and how much challenges are we going to face with higher costs if we go to some of these technologies that aren't there yet to compete on cost, that requires more expense and that can impact people now, the tradeoff is, what impact does that have in the long run, if we can't make those changes? And so that's the tradeoff that I think we're constantly balancing, and that I think we've heard from the energy secretary is balancing is trying to understand, how do we think about both recognizing the impacts of climate change in the future while also acknowledging the impacts of energy costs today on everyday life.

 JUDY: When you are talking about biomass in this presentation, you really focused on trees, poplar trees and grass and the waste from we consider it waste now, but it could be rich. But I kept thinking, there's a pony in there somewhere. The old standard, you know, is animal waste part of this?

JOSH:  Yes, we do a lot of consideration of anaerobic digestion waste. So waste that comes from, often from cities, that can be, you know, human waste can be animal waste that's digested, and you can control that process. So depending upon how much oxygen is present, when organic matter, when biomass breaks down, it can break down where it produces a lot of carbon dioxide and methane. It can break down where it produces more methane. You can actually what we call arrest that process, so you can avoid it going all the way to producing CO two and methane, and you can actually produce, and I should say, methane is just natural gas, and you can avoid that and actually go to make specific molecules, acids and others that you can use as a better precursor to make fuels. So waste is 100% in the story and a part of the consideration. And even, how do you engineer it further? So the waste is more useful to us, so absolutely, it's across the board, included.

GEORGE: When it came time for questions from the audience, one man wanted to know more about recycling CO2 from the atmosphere. As Schaidle explained, right now that process is energy-intensive and therefore not very efficient.

JOSH: You're using large fans. You're blowing air over a contactor. So a solid material contactor, that material binds your CO two and holds on to it once it is saturated. So you fill it up slowly, you fill up the entire material, then you have to regenerate. And this is when you kick off the CO two by adding energy. You often do that by adding steam. And the steam at about 100 degrees Celsius, will kick off the CO two. So now you have CO two and water in a stream coming out. You'll pull vacuum on that process. So these you have a fans, you have a contactor, you have steam generation. You have on the back end, the condensation, so you knock out the water, and then you have this CO two stream that's 90% or so concentrated CO two.

JUDY: What researchers are trying to do now is simplify that process using fewer steps and far less energy, perhaps employing materials that would use an electric current to turn the CO two into fuel without all the heat and the steam and the other stuff.

JOSH: You could add electric current through that material, if it's conductive and it will activate the CO two and add hydrogen, you can immediately, instead of just desorbing and making CO two, you actually react it to make methanol, or you react it to make a hydrocarbon product.

GEORGE: As a rule, scientists don’t really want to get into the political implications of their research, but one questioner asked about potential push-back from the fossil fuel lobby in opposition to the development of alternate fuels using recycled carbon.

QUESTION: I can see where biomass might be some kind of threat to the energy traditional, you know, oil and gas companies, how have the lobbyists approached or supported, or not supported the development of biomass?

JOSH: I'm not sure I'm in a good place to answer that question, because I can't say that. I can speak for have had much engagement on the lobbyist side. So I honestly, I try to think, if I have a way to frame that for you, I would not say that I can speak on the lobbyist side. I can say that biomass is a domestic resource that we have in the US. It's a resource that can potentially be expanded and grown, as I showed, further to a billion tons. It's a resource that impacts strongly rural parts of the country. Is highly distributed in different areas. And so I think when you think about stakeholder support, I think there is an aspect that it touches many parts of different people's lives, and you could see how there could be strong basis of support for utilizing biomass. On the other hand, I acknowledge your point, right? We have an established supply chain. We have established ways that we produce our fuels today. And in any case, this would be a disruption in some way, or could be complementary in some cases. And in any case, this would be a disruption in some way, or could be complementary in some cases. And so yes, I would just say I see both sides of that argument that you're raising, and I'm not sure I can speak for the lobbyists. 

JUDY: The ide a of taking biomass and turning it into fuels that are then burned left one man in the audience wondering whether we’re really helping the environment in the end.

QUESTION: I'm a little confused. Clearly, there's some economic and political obstacles that were have been alluded to, and you alluded to them yourself. And the obvious benefit of recycling carbon dioxide that's been produced from burning fuels. You, as you alluded briefly, to the sustainability issue with biomass, but my understanding, I may be completely off base here. That's that biomass is carbon that's been sequestered in the ground, in the trees, in the soil. If you take it out and then put it back in play. Aren't you adding to the problem?

JOSH: Let's talk about that 60 billion gallons number that we could potentially produce from biomass, right? You could either, if we need that tomorrow, we need to burn it in a plane. You can either produce that gallon from a fossil fuel, or you can produce that gallon from biomass. If I produce that from a fossil fuel, I'm taking carbon that's currently underground, and I'm burning it and putting it up into the atmosphere. If I take biomass, I'm taking carbon that has already been pulled out of the air, and I'm burning it and I'm sending it right back in the air. I'm not in any way arguing that biomass to fuels is net negative. I'm not making that argument. I'm making it that it's a cycle, meaning, across that cycle, the emissions might be 10 to 20% 30% 40% of what the emissions are if I use a fossil fuel. So it's a reduction in the emissions.

JUDY:  So, we have one here…

QUESTION: Talk to us about ethanol in gasoline fuel. Does this make any ecological and economic sense? So if it does, why are we doing a lot more of it? We have a lot of land in the Midwest lying fallow at this point where corn could easily be produced.

JOSH: So the there's, there's, I guess, two aspects to consider. There's sort of the end fuel performance, and then there is the emissions associated with producing the ethanol that we add in. So on one side, with fuel performance, ethanol is less dense than gasoline from an energy density standpoint. And so if you combine ten percent Ethanol and the rest with gasoline. And you assume that is one gallon per volume, that one gallon has a little bit lower energy total with that ethanol added than it does straight if it was 100% gasoline. So that is one limitation, is you're getting a tiny reduction with a 10% blend, small reduction in that total energy in a gallon. On the other hand, when you talk about emissions, when we produce that from corn, and so this is the predominant way we produce ethanol, 15 billion gallons a year in the US, roughly when we produce that from corn, from starch, and produce the ethanol, that emissions profile is not significantly, is not like a 90% reduction compared to fossil it's more in this 10, 20, 30% range emissions reduction. So you're gaining a bit on the emissions reduction side while losing a bit on the actual energy density of your fuel.

GEORGE: Better fuels, he says, might be made out of plant materials like cellulose and lignin, byproducts of the wood and paper pulp industries.  Which led to this question:

QUESTION: Think about plants. Can, you know, take carbon dioxide out of the air and so, like, do we really want to be eliminating them to use as a biomass. How about bacteria making cellulose? How would, how could that play into this process in a way that would be eliminating carbon or providing fuels without getting rid of our, you know, our plant biomass that we maybe we want to keep around to help us remove carbon dioxide.

JOSH: I will acknowledge that by saying we have research that's focused specifically on that at NREL for that exact reason. Right? How can we take carbon dioxide and instead of routing it through biomass, which was targeted at producing plants with a certain structure and certain features that allowed them to survive where they live, why don't we actually convert it in such a way that it still okay? Why don't we convert it in such a way that it's more useful in the product we're trying to make, which I think is your point. And so, yes, there are, for those not familiar, there's work of taking CO two and converting it into proteins. So you can actually make food proteins for, you know, when you think about the Impossible Burger that you eat, you can take CO two and make some of those same proteins. You could make proteins for animals, for fish food, for a whole variety of examples. The same is true where you could engineer a better way through bacteria, for microbes and others to produce,  convert CO two into very targeted molecules, like cellulose, like others that are easier for us to convert, and sugars, because we know how to handle sugars really well. Is a very logical target for that. Because, like I said, I mean, sugars is how we move, produce all of our corn ethanol today, right? It's sugar fermentation.

JUDY: I don't handle sugar very well, but that's a different question (laughter)

GEORGE With that CO two burger,

JOSH: One day, one day.

JUDY: We have time for one more question..

QUESTION: Where does octane come into the distribution of CO two and so on, with the idea that more and more vehicles need higher octane, and do you just eliminate those vehicles and make the engines more efficient and so on.

JOSH: Yeah, I think first I will say that I think there is a recognition that electrification of light duty vehicles is, you know, at least, moving fairly quickly. And that, I would say, because of that, you have seen less of a focus on these technologies, of CO two and biomass. You've seen less people focused on making gasoline, and you've seen more people focused on making energy dense fuels that are harder to electrify. So thinking about airplanes, right? It's harder to electrify an airplane because of the battery weight and the sort of amount of energy that would be required. There are absolutely companies working on that, but it's a it's a challenge, and so people generally are thinking we're going to need energy dense liquid fuels for longer in airplanes and aviation fuel than we are for light duty vehicles and gasoline. And so that is, I think, just one thing, in terms of where a lot of the research is going, is more towards energy dense fuels. To your point about octane rating, that's one of those specification requirements. And we have done some work previously at NREL that was targeted at producing a high octane hydrocarbon.

JUDY: That’s all the time we have this evening. Thanks to all of you for coming. Thanks to Telluride science for making these town talks possible. 

GEORGE: Let's have a big hand for Dr Josh Schaidle. 

JOSH: Thank you. (applause)

(theme music) 

JUDY: And a big thank you to our sponsors, Alpine Bank and the Telluride Mountain Village Owners’ Association.  Our presentation was recorded at the Telluride Mountain Village Conference Center and Tuck Gillett was our audio engineer.

GEORGE: Mark Kozak is Executive Director and CEO of Telluride Science, Cindy Fusting is Managing Director and CFO. Sara Friedberg is Lodging and Operations Manager and Annie Carlson is Director of Donor Relations.

JUDY: If YOU want to donate to the cause, go to Telluride Science-dot-ORG. That’s also where you can find our podcasts. And on your podcast apps like Spotify or Apple, look for “Science Straight up.” I’m Judy Muller.

GEORGE: And I’m George Lewis, inviting you to join us next time, right here on “Science Straight Up.”

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