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Frontline ready to sell renewable energy product

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Ames – The Iowa Power Fund recently rejected General Mills Operations Inc.’s proposal to install a clean biomass gasification system in one of its Iowa plants, with notes that referred to the system as a biomass boiler.

“A biomass fire boiler is a very different approach than what we’re doing,” said John Reardon, research and development manager and co-founder of Frontline BioEnergy LLC, which would have installed the system for General Mills.

The situation is an example of how the new technology is just reaching the public realm, creating some misunderstanding.

After nearly five years of developing new biomass gasification technology, Frontline is just now starting to market and sell its gasification and integrated multigas combustion systems.

Since November 2005, it has been working with Chippewa Valley Ethanol Co. (CVEC) in Benson, Minn., to install a 75-ton-per-day biomass gasification system under a three-year, $15 million development contract. When complete, the system will replace more than 90 percent of the plant’s natural gas energy inputs with biomass power.

Frontline expects the first phase to be up and running by April. Reardon believes seeing the first system in operation will be a key step in attracting more buyers.

Under its agreement with CVEC, Frontline also could begin selling its gasification and combustion systems commercially as of the first of this year. So far, it has been in discussions with a handful of companies in various industries, but no additional deals have been finalized.

With the biomass gasification system costing more than $20 million for a 200 million British thermal units per hour output, the process of selling those systems is slow, Reardon said. But because it can integrate with existing natural-gas-fired appliances, the system saves on capital costs. “We’re pretty early in our commercialization,” Reardon said, but added that the company has sufficient funds to continue operating in the near future.

“Once we start selling systems,” Reardon said, “it’s possible we could double” from its 13 employees now. Frontline’s headquarters are currently tucked way in a strip center near U.S. Highway 30 in Ames.

With the ethanol industry especially coming under criticism for use of natural gas and coal to power the distillation plants, the biomass gasification system has the potential to “revolutionize the ethanol industry,” Reardon said.

The system uses biomass (agricultural residue, sawdust, switchgrass, paper residues, etc.) for fuel, rather than natural gas or coal. It can reduce fossil CO2 emissions by as much as 90 percent in the production process compared with natural gas and even more compared with coal.

Under current pricing, it also has the potential to save an ethanol plant as much as one-third of its annual fuel operating costs (including capital recovery) if it currently uses natural gas.

“That’s a significant reduction in fossil CO2 emissions by using biomass,” Reardon said. The purchase of biomass, he added, puts money back in rural economies, rather than sending it overseas to buy oil.

The gasification system also has the potential to save other manufacturing industries money on energy costs. A paper manufacturer has shown interest.

Reardon would not comment on whether General Mills would still purchase a system but said companies could become even more interested if legislation puts greater restrictions on their CO2 emissions.

The biomass gasification system works by adding biomass to a hot reaction vessel, which releases a combustible gas called “producer gas” that is composed of hydrogen, methane and other fuels derived from the biomass chemical energy. The producer gas is then cooled using a heat-recovery process and filtered using a high-efficiency particle filter. As a result of the heat-recovery systems, the gasifier system is able to output 92 to 95 percent of the input biomass energy to productive end uses.

The gas is then cleaned and conditioned in a filter before being used in a multi-fuel burner to fuel water-tube boilers or gas-fired dryers, and it even has the potential to be used in engine-generators or gas turbines.

Frontline has trademarked its gasification system as CLEANGAS technology because of its unique filtration process. It allows a cleaner and lower-tar gas product to be piped to various conventional gas-fired appliances without having to clean the gas after combustion, which often requires a larger filtration and emission-control system.

The flexibility of the burners allows natural gas to be a backup source of power at the facility as well.

“That actually makes our product much more economically competitive than having to put in a completely new biomass boiler, which the Power Fund thought we were doing,” Reardon said.

Frontline’s gasification technology also is capable of being modified to produce syngas from biomass feedstock. The syngas can then be converted into ethanol, hydrogen, anhydrous ammonia fertilizer and other renewable products.

Through funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it is researching pyrolysis technology, where biomass would be converted into a condensed liquid resembling crude oil, which can be further processed to manufacture gasoline, diesel and jet fuels.

“People have known gasification for a long time; it’s just that we’re working on solving the challenges that have existed in the past that haven’t been overcome before,” Reardon said, “like demonstrating the ability to clean the gas.”