 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to this session on bioenergy. We have three great speakers coming up and this is an area that needs a lot of discussion. There are endless opportunities to really talk about this. We only have half an about well less than half an hour to really talk about all of this but I hope that you will follow up with our speakers afterwards and in terms of going to their booths and everything it's a very exciting area and of course bioenergy can be used for and biomass can be used for so many things throughout our economy. So our first speaker is going to be Steve Schmelly who is a research assistant professor at the University of Tennessee and he is part of the southeastern partnership for integrated biomass supply systems. He is substituting for Tom Royals who is the director of that but he is but Steve is very very much involved in that Steve. So thank you very much. Yeah so Tim is actually a Crosstown at a DOE panel right now so he couldn't be here so hopefully I'll be able to talk to you a little bit about IBIS and what we do and and the research that's ongoing. So the southeastern partnership for integrated biomass supply systems or IBIS is a USDA funded coordinated agricultural project. There's a number of members and I didn't want to leave any of them out so I will just tell you that universities like Auburn, North Carolina State, University of Georgia and University of Tennessee as well as Arbor Gen series Oak Ridge National Lab are all sort of working together there's 40 some principal investigators of which I am one of them to deploy the bio refining industry in the southeast United States. So as we all know the renewable fuel standard has said that some 16 billion gallons of advanced biofuels will be delivered by 2022 and by some estimates the southeast region will produce up to 50 percent of those crops that are needed to produce those biofuels. So what IBIS has been charged with doing we're entering the fourth year of a five-year project and it's a few things. Number one is feedstock development. So whereas the petroleum refining industry has had 150 some years to sort of perfect turning petroleum into fuels and products and chemicals the the bio refining industry is still new at this and so there's a lot of factors that need to be considered to actually turn what we consider biomass into biofuels and products and power and so so one of the the major issues is is the actual term biomass itself right you know there's there's lots of different things that can be considered biomass in the southeast we focus on short rotation woody crops as well as warm season perennial grasses like switch grass and those things are all chemically and anatomically different and so based on what you want to get at the end of the process you might have to have different process considerations or different pre-treatment considerations so we really want to number one focus on feedstock development switch grass is different than pine it's different than eucalyptus and it's different than any of the other feedstocks and so one of the things that we we try to focus on is is looking at the feedstock and working with farmers and landowners to help them to produce a quality feedstock that can be used in a number of processes whether it's to produce fuels or chemicals or power another sort of focus of ibis is is technology development to do these to to affect these conversions whether it's to fuels or chemicals so so a lot of the the conversions are dependent as I said on the actual feedstock and it's and it's it's content not only it's carbon content but also it's inorganic content a lot of these technologies that convert biomass into other products require the use of catalysts and there are parts of a biomass feedstock primarily inorganic constituents of biomass that are very detrimental to catalysts and so we look at trying to understand the compass not only the composition of the biomass but also how its composition affects these catalytic transformations downstream in these in these processes so we look a little bit at technology development primarily high temperature conversion technologies like pyrolysis catalytic fast pyrolysis gasification things of this nature some some biological conversions as well which are perhaps less sensitive to say inorganic composition than are the the chemical catalytic transformations sort of the last focus that ibis has that's that that is kind of part of my focus is is the workforce development the education the outreach and the extension efforts so not only do we do we actually do the scientific and engineering research but also have a pretty substantial outreach program where we try to reach out to stakeholders in the southeast which are landowners farmers industry partners and so what we try to do is is sort of transfer the the knowledge that we are researching to those those stakeholders whether it be through K through 12 STEM education whether it's to workforce training safety training and in a plant things like this so kind of this multifaceted approach so so I guess I'll just try to be brief wrap it up there but I hope you guys can can stop by our booth we're more than happy to answer any questions that you have and we haven't answered any questions that you have at the end of the discussion great thanks Steve and if we have any extra time hopefully we will wheel we will definitely take your questions we're now going to turn to Terry nip who is the executive director for the Sun Grant initiative for another look at all of the interesting both collaboration and technologies that are underway through work being done by a number of universities in a in a cooperative venture thank you Carol I mean as she said I'm the executive director for something called the Sun Grant Association and that's a collaboration of all the nation's land grant colleges and universities primarily made up of the agricultural colleges there's one in every state it also includes the environment and natural resource colleges and the engineering colleges and the food safety and the food processing and depends on on the mix of each institution we started as an effort back around the year 2000 where the leadership of the universities were getting together and started talking about how do we get ready for the next wave of concerns about renewable energy the presumption was that there would be another wave some of you may remember more likely have read about the early 1980s when those efforts got underway and as you know there was a great deal of concern at that time about developing renewable bio-based energy resources and as price of gas came back down concerns ebbed and and we lost an awful lot of that early work so the thought was someday it will come again and let's get ready and so we organize the nation's universities into five biogeographical regions with the thought that biomass production the development of plants for other uses and food really needs to be organized at a regional scale because what goes on in the southeast is ever so different from what goes on in the northwest if you're going trees it's different from if you're going wheat or switchgrass so we organized that way and each of those regions selected a center of excellence to serve as the lead university within that region not to act alone but to collaborate with all the other institutions within their regions we got ourselves authorized as an amendment to the 2002 farm bill our structure and our mission was first specified there some of you who are well versed in the way politics work and how legislation gets drafted would be most amused at how that particular amendment took place two years after the bill had been passed but that's the story for another time we were then subsequently authorized in the 2008 and 2014 farm bills we've also been authorized through the department of transportation highway bill turning back in 2005 so by way of a synopsis over the course of the last six seven eight years we've collaborated with the department of transportation department of agriculture the department of energy we've received somewhere over 70 million dollars over that time we've implemented that in collaboration with all the universities we have over 200 projects on the ground we have collaborators in about 95% of the states our focus similar to what Steve was just talking about is is first a biomass production what is it we need to grow where can we grow it how much can we grow how much of a contribution can we make along the way of course it's critical issues have come up and we've worked on it quite extensively not only can you grow up but can you grow out without disrupting the economics of the food supply can you grow it in a way that benefits wildlife and benefits environment or not what are the things you have to do in order to do it and not only an economically sustainable way but an environmentally sustainable way we've also through these years worked on the full supply chain so while we are focused a lot of us are agricultural is to start with while we start with biomass production we also work on the logistics how do you prepare this material how do you get it ready and then how do you convert it to one oil or power source or another transportation fuels or other forms of energy and of course what we found through the years is as you perfect one part of that process you also have to work on others and you have to try to optimize the chain as a whole from production to final product it's been an awful lot of fun we've weathered I think the ups and downs of this last cycle we're looking forward to the next several years ahead or can we're continuing to work with the Department of Transportation Department of Energy and of course the Department of Agriculture we have lots of handouts so should you find yourself going back to the other room and going through please stop by please take some of these and look at them critically because we are academics and we just love to talk about things in an academic way we struggle to communicate them in a way that's useful to anyone other than ourselves so if you would please take a look and say wow I understand all the words but they don't add up to anything tell us tell me we're still trying to figure out how to communicate better than what we know how to do I have three minutes left can you imagine and I'm actually from inside the beltway so that's phenomenal I'm going to donate the balance of my time back to well there he's he's yielding can you believe this folks and from an academic let's hear it for Terry right but but that said there there are all sorts of fascinating projects that are underway and again as he said in terms of all of the land grants being involved and so it's really important to look at what makes sense across the country using locally available feedstocks and to do this and so it's it's a wonderful enterprise and and all of our folks are sort of connected to all of that so we're not going to turn to Morgan Pitts who is the public relations and communications manager for a company called and Viva and they are operating in a number of states this is a really growing industry in terms of looking at the whole role of wood pellets and and being done in a very sustainable way Morgan thank you very much Carol and I'm certainly thank you for having me today my name is Morgan Pitts I'm the communications manager for in Viva and in Viva is a company that's been around for about 10 years now and has been struggling I think on the ground with how do you actually build a truly sustainable biomass fuel supply chain that is large enough that it can have a meaningful impact on fossil fuel usage but appropriately scaled so that it is sustainable we were founded in 2004 is a different company as a under a different name rather same company but company that operated CHP and a variety of different power applications in 2009 in Viva was born when we realized that the fuel supply was really the biggest bottleneck to you know confronting fossil fuel usage I mentioned already that you know the key is to do it in an appropriate scale to actually meaningfully impact fossil fuel usage but also being scaled appropriately so when we look at that we have to look to make sure that there is a sustainable source of feedstock something that's been been touched on so the feedstocks that we use to make manufacture wood pellets and I'm sorry I didn't bring a little jar of them with me actually if you guys stop by our booth later we have jars of wood pellets so you can see what I'm actually talking about but the feedstocks we use are primarily off cuts from existing timber industries so we take things like the tops and the limbs of trees where the trunk goes to be made into saw timber plywood other high-value wood products also off of tracks of land that are harvested in the course of these sawmill operations we'll take low grade wood fiber essentially low grade round wood these are basically smaller trees that are rotten pest infested they really don't have much other use and generally absent to the market like bioenergy would be left on the ground we also take in woods chips which are made from down woody debris and then we take sawmill debris like sawdust shavings from furniture manufacturers and things like that and we found over the years through both our own operations and through a lot of research that has been done outside of our company so it's not just our word that you have to take for it that there are huge environmental benefits to using this resource in a way again that is scaled appropriately such as to be sustainable you know our customers are energy utilities around the world so we do supply one American utility when we supply several in Europe and we have also sent shipments to Asia as well and these utilities are interested in using our fuels because it effectively is a drop in replacement for coal wood pellets use a lot of very similar infrastructure very similar processing but at the point of combustion they're substantially cleaner you reduce or eliminate emissions of mercury arsenic and lead just on day one you dramatically improve the life cycle carbon profile you can look at reductions from 80 to 90% in your life cycle carbon emissions so using existing assets and existing infrastructure you're able to dramatically improve the environmental and a profile of energy generation but what actually personally is exciting for me I've been working in sustainability sustainable development for about 10 years now myself not all within Viva and my personal passion is sustainable economic development and how you actually deliver that and that's one of the great things that I think that the not just in Viva not just the pellet industry but that bioenergy has the potential for us to deliver amazing economic and environmental benefits to rural parts of the United States and you know what we've seen is that basically we don't drive harvests but we do improve the landowner value proposition so in other words it makes more sense to own forest land and to maintain your land as forest than say to convert to agriculture or even to sell to development if there is a strong market for wood fiber so by increasing by essentially icing the cake that is timberland for private landowners we are able to incent continued sustainable management of forest land you know tied on to that of course is what does that management look like and Viva has very strict sustainability guidelines in our sourcing we're certified to FSC, SFI and PEFC and then including SFI fiber sourcing which addresses non certified lands so we're very concerned with not only having a positive impact just on an economic standpoint making sure that that economic impact is also incentivizing positive land or good sustainable land management so as I mentioned a lot of our customers are abroad and that is something that hopefully over the next few years will change and we'll start seeing more and more interest in the U.S. and I think that's something certainly that we're all discussing today and I've heard lots of questions about the U.S. is a very rapidly moving target on the carbon front these days especially when it comes to power generation so I'm glad to be here and I look forward to discussing in Viva further. Great thanks a lot Morgan and one would think that there would also be a lot of interest now with all of the discussion and the public hearings going on with regard to the clean plower plan the proposed situation as you said where it can be used as a drop-in to provide at least some substitution so we have a few minutes and let's if does anyone have any questions this is your big chance okay right here two questions right here. Suburbs we have hedge clippings long clippings leaves a lot of biological material is that a practical source either from the nature of it or the quantity of it collecting it for biomass. I think it absolutely is a very interesting source for us specifically the issue you get into really comes into the life cycle carbon footprint so our facilities are by and large located in areas with a lot of timber operations which are not usually close to the suburbs so the challenge is actually gathering and transporting the material. Now there are other types of bioenergy applications I mean traditional biomass base load plants in the U.S. by and large do use wood chips and waste wood materials so that could be an option that's not something that Enviva specifically works on. Okay there's another question here okay and then we'll get you in the back okay. I have seen from EIA tables that biofuels make up a very small percentage of electricity generation I'm hoping that that will grow but what are the technological sort of difficulties that you're dealing with. Thank you. I think you're quite right we're at a very low percentage of for both bio power and bio base transportation fuels and other forms of energy. At the same time we're seeing that grow rather dramatically. I think most people in the field at least from the research side feel like a lot of the major technical issues are reaching a point of resolution or at least we have a pretty good grasp of what's ahead of us and I think an awful lot of the barriers at this point in time are probably ramping up the physical infrastructure to be able to to produce using these alternatives. It's also true and especially I know in the transportation fuel side that we are progressively becoming cost-effective right now just in the course of the last year three major prototype almost full scale the step before is full scale biofuel production plants are going in across the country so most people I think in this arena feel like you know the joke is it'll be here in five years we always say it's going to be here in five years we think we're getting down to a point where that's actually a true statement and we see not incremental change but we see the potential for dramatic change just in the next several years yeah and I would just add to that that there have have been a lot of changes that you because you're talking about advanced biofuel technologies as opposed to more conventional which obviously is a very robust and mature technology and production and actually we're planning to do a couple briefings in September looking at the state of specifically of technologies and feed stocks in terms of the advanced space as well as looking at the overall life cycle analysis new information that has been developed by by other academics Terry right coming from probably working with it coming from land grants that's right with regard to looking at the whole carbon footprint and again what a dramatic decrease there is in terms of carbon and the huge efficiency gains in terms of even conventional biofuels production let alone what's happening with regard to all the advanced which is now going into commercial production this year any other questions there's a question in the back okay couple of questions about pellets on the supply side is there a sense that project finance lenders are getting more comfortable with the economics of running a pellet plant and specifically the level of certainty they need on things like price of price of biomass or raw material and on the demand side is there reason for optimism that the US utilities are going to get anywhere near the level of the European facilities utilities for example with regard to co-firing wood instead of coal you know there are a bunch of Texas utility coal plants shut in that come to mind for example thank you very much for your questions I think I can hopefully I can answer both of them adequately as far as the the funding for the supply side and the necessary investment that that's certainly one of the biggest challenges to building any industry and the wood pellet industry was a very different industry ten years ago and certainly was not at the industrial level scale that it is today but I think we have certainly seen you know the financial sector becoming much more comfortable with with the pellet industry and Viva was actually the first pellet manufacturer to close on a conventional debt facility led by a consortium of banks which are you can find out more about on our website because I don't want to make the mistake of leaving one out or misquoting one but major financial institutions so I think that's certainly a strong show of support and confidence from the financial sector with regard to the demand side I think in the US it'll depend how the current currently evolving state-level plans for addressing reductions in carbon emissions to shake out I think there is definitely reason for optimism we have a lot of states especially look at the upper Midwest where there's a lot of existing coal infrastructure it's very coal dependent and so that certainly in many regards is actually a huge opportunity when you think about it from a pellet bio and biomass perspective because it is a drop in replacement it makes a lot of sense to very quickly improve the emissions profile but I don't think that we have enough certainty on any of the policies today to quote comments specifically on what the potential is okay great and of course the EPA is taking comments they've talked about how they've already received more than 300,000 and that comment period is open through October 16th so get those views in folks okay question here I was just wondering if all three of you could talk about the I guess maybe the current biggest challenge you see in terms of getting biomass into the supply system and having a significant enough impact on the economy where you know more and more people start to sign on to this as an actual fuel source that they're going to depend on yeah so so from a research perspective there are a number of challenges if we talk specifically about feedstock it's probably probably one of the biggest challenges is feedstock quality and and making sure you know when you think of the petroleum refining industry you dig petroleum out of the ground and has particular properties and petroleum refining industry knows what those properties are and with biomass it's it's it's biological material and it and it has some natural diversity and so one of the challenges that we face as researchers is being able to categorize those differences either between different feedstocks or even in the same feedstock at different points in time during harvest beginning or the end and then being able to report those differences to a stakeholder a bio refinery telling them okay this these are the components that are in the biomass and this is how it's going to affect the process that you're going to put it into so I would say that coming up with a homogenous feedstock or at least one whose properties we know pretty well is is a big research challenge for us currently there's been a workshop over the last several days of across town biomass 2014 supported and by the Department of Energy a lot of folks there from the industry that are doing this production who are poised as it were to take those next steps and I think you would hear consistently from industry that the most critical thing from them right now is is a clear market signal that they're going to be able to get a minimum price for the products that are out there and for most folks in this process then they look at the renewable fuel standard and then they look at the requirements that that puts out there and the price incentives and the price guarantees and the management of risk that that hasn't bodied in it and I think there's a great deal of apprehension at the moment given the signals from EPA that they might modify rather dramatically what those what the renewable fuel standard requirements will be so if this is an issue that you play with I think folks in industry would across the board say get the word the EPA to to hold the course at least a little bit longer I would say the second thing and this is the appropriate place to say this is politics of there was great bipartisan support for these efforts several years ago I know in the our own efforts and across the country Republican Democrat whatever your flavor there was great support for this for for very good substantive reasons both for economic development for protecting the environment and so on there were an appropriate ripple of concerns about the impact of this on food production cost I think those issues can be addressed there's been concerns about the net benefits to the environment I think that has to be addressed carefully but also in balance against the alternative and that the uncertainty from those issues I think it's caused folks who would be strong supporters to pause and there's been a strong pushback of how do I say this from from an established industry that would really rather not see this get off the ground and we're right at the point of getting off the ground so the pushback has been intense and it's it's just politics I think that was well said I wanted to say did you want to add anything I would mostly be the echoing things that that have been already said being part of an industry that has grown so quickly it's certainly been a steep learning curve for us on a lot of those issues that they've they've touched on and you know I'd be happy to discuss further after great and so we're sort of at the closing point but I just want to come back and pick up on a couple things here in that it there are so many I think there's been so much discussion with regard to bioenergy and biofuels and what we've heard throughout today and what we've heard consistently to is how important it is for there to be consistent certain market signals that that is the most important thing for industry we think that there's been a lot of misinformation that has been put out with regard to biomass and I think that any of us would be happy to talk to any of you further about that because it is really important that as we look at renewable energy energy efficiency technologies to make sure that we're getting the facts straight and really looking at the enormous potentials that that exist and that are very very sustainable and that make a great make great sense economically and from a public health standpoint from a security standpoint and and from a local economic development standpoint because in terms of thinking about some of the points that Morgan was making this also deals with a lot of very very local resources making those dollars stay in those communities and so that's something to also really think about as we look at all of these issues so thank you all very very much for coming be sure to follow up with our wonderful panel and they've all got a wealth of information and please see their booths thank you very very much for being here and we'll start our next panel in just a couple minutes thank you