It will probably be a few years before your car is powered by E-85 ethanol and even longer before it runs on a hydrogen fuel cell.
The same goes for powering your home with energy captured by the sun or generated by an agricultural fuel.
But these possibilities are all a few steps closer to reality in the Tampa Bay area as a result of investments and research being done locally in both the public and private sectors.
At a time when it is politically expedient to make noises about alternative energy R&D, the bay area boasts a combination of ongoing demonstration projects, university-funded research and bona fide production facilities in the pipeline. And as the topic goes beyond the ethereal rhetoric of the day and into the realm of legitimate projects, West Central Florida has the potential to be ahead of the curve:
• Florida Power & Light will build a solar array in Sarasota capable of producing 250 kilowatts of energy.
• Progress Energy Florida has contracted to buy energy from a biomass plant now in development.
• US EnviroFuels will build ethanol production plants at Port Sutton and Port Manatee.
• Dr. Yogi Goswami has energy research projects underway at the University of South Florida in a variety of fields, including photocatalytic solar energy conversion and hydrogen fuel cells.
“It’s imperative that the State of Florida and the nation do what they can,” says Susan Glickman, a Clearwater-based environmental activist and watchdog with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. Glickman, who is also Florida policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, follows developments in both industry and state government. “There is some hope from this. I am a tiny bit hopeful. But I also know how resilient the fossil fuel, electric and automaker industries are.”
Glickman would like to see a somewhat equal emphasis put on both the development of new energy technology and efficiency, especially in light of recent political decisions to open the Gulf of Mexico to more drilling for oil resources.
“We need to be more efficient in our use of energy, such as raising auto standards,” she says. “Everyone knows we can run cars at 40 mph; there is a hybrid Lexus that gets 40 mph. We need a combination of efficiency and society wanting it. The amount of oil in the Gulf that we need could be negated by raising car standards to 40 mph. At the same time, we also need to move to develop alternative fuels, including ethanol. Florida’s only existing biodiesel plant is in Lakeland. That’s promising. It’s a good step in the right direction. My ultimate premise is that we fundamentally change how we create and consume electricity in this state. There is no single bullet. There will be a lot of pieces to the puzzle.”
She also appreciates economic motivation.
“While I’m not in favor of high gas prices,” Glickman says, “it does create an environment where alternative fuels make more sense. At $3 per gallon, the price of a hybrid car is a wash. If you paid the true cost of the gasoline, it makes more sense to invest in public transportation. It’s getting to a point where people are having a hard time ignoring it any more. I think we’re past the tipping point.”
• • •
Is the construction of a 50-million gallon ethanol production facility on 22 acres at Tampa’s Port Sutton significant? Or is it just the political logrolling of the day?
Bradley Krohn, president of U.S. EnviroFuels LLC, says that if you look beyond the fast plant and consider the multitude that will follow it, the project now under way is truly worth the buildup.
“Florida is the third largest consumer of gasoline in this country, behind only California and Texas,” he says. “We use 8.4 billion gallons of gasoline a year. And gasoline consumption is increasing by 300 million gallons a year in the state. Nine-nine percent of it enters through the seaport system by ocean vessel. There are no pipelines that deliver gasoline to Florida and no refineries. The state is highly susceptible and highly dependent on imported gasoline.
“What the local production of ethanol will do,” he continues, “is help diversify the state’s fuel infrastructure and reduce the state’s dependence on imported gasoline. It’s not the only answer but it’s one piece of the big puzzle. It’s the best current alternative to displacing imported oil.”
Port Sutton – which is part of the Port of Tampa – is one of two Tampa Bay area sites already approved for an ethanol plant. The other will be at Port Manatee, once land-lease issues are settled.
“Manatee hasn’t progressed as fast but we’re still committed to it,” Krohn says. “It will be a similar scale.”
Why locate at ports?
“When you’re going to be the first to build a plant, it’s tough to go inland because you cannot be wholly dependent on local growers,” according to Krohn, a University of Florida graduate who worked at Monsanto for 12 years, most recently as technology director for Monsanto’s bioenergy plant. “We have to bring in feedstock from the Midwest. So our model is flexible transport; it allows us to bring feedstock by ocean vessel or rail. The ports also have infrastructure to support a plant. And it allows us to leverage the global supply chain if, for example, we want to export distillers dried grains.”
In addition, U.S. EnviroFuels is co-locating with the gasoline tank farms at Port Sutton, making the blending of 10 percent ethanol with gasoline more convenient for everyone. (Port Manatee doesn’t receive gasoline but it is close to Port Sutton.).
The attraction of producing ethanol is that it is a byproduct of something the United States is expert at producing above the ground: corn. There are currently 97 ethanol plants in operation, primarily in the Midwest; all use corn.
You could argue that in Florida, U.S. EnviroFuels is merely replacing one import, gasoline, with another, corn. Where’s the upside?
“The plant design is a flexible feedstock process design,” Krohn says. “Corn will always be the primary feedstock. However. if we have a problem, we can use grain sorghum. It will also use clean sugar streams. That could be similar to cane syrup to reduce its corn requirement.”
And in the event of a severe U.S. market price spike in corn, being at the port gives us the ethanol producer the ability to leverage the global supply chain: there’s lots of corn in South America as well as North.
Another plus for Florida in this particular plant: it will produce not one but three byproducts:
• Ethanol;
• Distillers dry grains (a high quality animal feed);
• And beverage-grade liquid carbon dioxide.
So what? Well, none of those three products are currently produced in Florida although they are all consumed here. DDGs are brought in from the Corn Belt; liquid CO2 is trucked in from up north. All ethanol plants produce ethanol and DDGs. Some capture CO2; some don’t – it depends on whether they have a market for it. “We happen to have an excellent market for CO2 and DDGs,” Krohn says. “Having the market for all three finished products is important to our model. And we have already executed marketing agreements for all three products.”
The major product, of course, will be ethanol. And while the public isn’t entirely clear on which vehicles can run on ethanol, by the time the Port Sutton plant opens, the answer will be a lot clearer thanks to intensive advertising campaigns already underway by automakers such as Ford and gasoline producers such as BP, among others.
“This year,” Krohn says, “five billion gallons of ethanol will be used in the United States. Ninety-nine percent is used for up to a 10 percent blend with gasoline. That’s E-10. Any car today can run on E-10. All the auto manufacturers warranty their automobiles to run on gasoline with 10 percent blended ethanol. Some recommend running their automobiles with 10 percent; ethanol helps gasoline combust more cleanly, thereby reducing deposit build-ups in the engine.”
The future for ethanol mass production, however, lies in the growth and acceptance of vehicles running on E-85, which is 85 percent ethanol and just 15 percent gasoline.
“E-85 is very popular in the Midwest, where there are hundreds of E-85 pumps,” Krohn says. “Those pumps are starting to appear outside the Corn Belt. You have to have a flexible fuel vehicle (FFV) to burn E-85. FFVs can use E-85 or regular gasoline or any mix in between. There are 5 million FFVs on the road today.”
Initially, all of the ethanol produced at Port Sutton will be sold for the E-10 market. But Krohn sees his company facilitating an E-85 distribution structure in Florida with U.S. EnviroFuels supplying E-85 to those pumps. “This gives consumers a tremendous choice,” he says. “For people who have a personal passion to reduce our reliance on gasoline, they’ll have an option.”
Not coincidentally, this ethanol-centric supply chain feeds into U.S. EnviroFuels intention of building plants across the state.
“The level of interest from independent retailers is excellent,” Krohn says. “We’ve got interested retailing parties all over the state who want to install E-85 pumps.”
Will the current producers of automotive fuels sit back as ethanol producers slowly eat away at their market share? Not likely. One way to view it is that BP, Texaco and Shell are the big city National Football League teams and the ethanol producers are the owners of Arena Football League franchises. When the Arena league matured into a significant business design, many NFL team owners swooped in and bought them for both revenue and player development purposes. Expect something similar to start happening between Big Oil and the ethanol producers.
“I think it’s a great analogy,” Krohn says. “People are talking about it – when will the big oil companies start acquiring the ethanol factories? Some oil companies are more proactive and progressive on renewable fuels. They will probably step to the plate first. If supplies tighten, you’ll see oil companies look for alternative fuel supplies to meet demand. Our industry will probably build another 50 plants and get to 10 billion gallons annually in three to five years – or less.”
How will U.S. EnviroFuels ultimately gauge success once its first plant opens in October 2007? The same way every business does: size.
“Some people build just one of these plants,” Krohn says. “Our vision is to build multiple plants for the state of Florida. However, when we start building additional facilities, we will be studying the feasibility of Florida-grown crops. The corn model establishes us in Florida. Corn is proven technology. But going forward, we’ll evaluate other feedstocks, which could be sugar-based or biomass. We’re highly committed to working with local growers. It’s a win for us, for Florida growers and for Florida.”
• • •
Krohn will probably keep an eye on another alternative fuel production facility in development, the Biomass Investment Group (BIG) plan for building an environmentally friendly, 12-megawatt power plant in Central Florida using a crop known as E-Grass. It could generate about 130,000 kilowatts, enough to power 83,000 homes.
Progress Energy Florida has signed a long-term contract to buy power from the plant when it is built and online.
“When you look at it, this is a good example of a viable alternative energy,” says John Masiello, manager of Demand Side Management and Alternative Energy Strategies for Progress Energy Florida. “It’s become very attractive. The Southeast has been considered the Saudi Arabia of biomass. We don’t have a lot of hydro. We don’t have wind. What do we have? A very favorable climate to grow crops. So biomass holds great potential.”
BIG’s engineers determined that their 12-megawatt plant will need 15,000 acres of farmland to grow its energy crop on an annual basis. BIG is currently searching for a site where it can co-locate the production facility and grow the crop.
“We will harvest the entire stalk – the leaves and the stalk,” says Allen Sharpe, president of Gulf Breeze-based BIG. “Unlike corn, we plant it one time. This cuts down energy usage. We don’t have to plow it while it’s growing. And the yield per acre is four to five times that of corn. So ours is very efficient compared to converting corn to ethanol.
“E-Grass is a plant that basically grows wild,” Sharpe says. “It’s agriculturally improved. It’s a form of grass but it looks like bamboo when it’s growing. It produces a stalk about an inch in diameter and grows 12 to 15 feet tall. We spent two to three years trying to identify an ideal energy crop. We evaluated several different species. This one appeared to have more of the characteristics of an ideal energy crop than any other species we looked at.”
Sharpe expects his plant will be online by the end of 2007.
“We think we have access to enough land to do five or six projects in Florida,” he says. “But we can’t do 20 because there is just not enough land. There is probably a greater opportunity doing what we’re doing in other countries than in the U.S. We are in negotiations in Mexico, Jamaica and the Pacific Rim.”
• • •
One of the University of South Florida’s greatest coups in recent years was attracting Dr. Yogi Goswami, a prominent alternative energy researcher and professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, to relocate 130 miles south to Tampa.
Goswami’s main work for the past 25 years has been in solar energy – photocatalytic technology – for various applications.
“We use light and a catalyst to break up toxic compounds and produce heating, cooling, electrical power, and environmental applications,” he says. “For the past seven years, we have been involved in solar desalination. Water will be a big problem in the world and we need to desalinate the seawater in a manner people can afford.”
Goswami joined USF’s Clean Energy Research Center, which explores the science of energy conversion, such as converting sunlight to electrical energy using photovoltaic solar panels.
“Another way,” he says, “is to convert sunlight to heat first, and use that heat to create steam and run turbines and then you get electricity. That is similar to how we create electricity in thermal power plants. Whether coal, nuclear or gas, all they do is produce heat, then you convert it to mechanical and electrical power.
“Ordinarily, to create high temperatures from sunlight, you concentrate heat,” he continues. “That technology is already available. The only problem is that it is still very expensive; that’s why you don’t see widespread use of it. If you built a coal plant, your capital investment would be $1,500 to $2,000 per kilowatt of output. If you were to build a power plant based on solar, the capital cost would be about $3,000 a kilowatt. So people find it cheaper to build other types of plants. A natural gas plant, for example, is less than $1,000 a kilowatt.”
The challenge for Goswami, who applies a capitalist’s eye to his research, is to reduce the solar production cost by 50 percent.
But how?
“I felt I needed to go back to fundamentals,” he says. “If you have mass production of components, cost will go down. But to go down by 50 percent, you need to do more than mass-produce. That’s where I developed a thermodynamic cycle that will reduce costs more than 50 percent. It will work on much lower temperatures than an ordinary thermo plant. And then we can work with cheaper solar collectors.”
Any child with a magnifying glass knows that sunlight is a powerful form of energy. But engineers need special equipment to convert it to useful industrial forms. And if that equipment is expensive, the whole system is expensive.
“Eventually, a time will come when solar systems are affordable,” Goswami says. “We want to make it cost-effective now.”
Goswami says there are three strong advantages to solar power:
• No fuel is needed except for backup purposes;
• It creates zero environmental problems;
• And it creates independence from other sources of fuel.
“An additional benefit of this new thermodynamic cycle we developed is that we can produce power and cooling in the same cycle,” according to Goswami. “That cooling can be used for refrigeration or air conditioning.”
The cooling aspect was a surprise or, as the professor puts it, “not the intended benefit when we started. We have two outputs now, electrical power and refrigeration, which makes the cycle even more useful.”
A commercial company has already expressed interested in developing a product from this aspect of Goswami’s work. “We’re maybe two to three years away from actually commercializing it,” he says. “All the research I do is done such that we come up with a practical product out of it. I decided a long time ago that I would not just do theoretical research. It wouldn’t motivate me and I thought it wouldn’t motivate students either. So all of our research develops actual products. We always have this end result in mind.”
The real energy hot button these days is hydrogen. Some think hydrogen will do to oil in the 21st century what the Internet did to traditional media at the end of the 20th century.
And Goswami is on the hydrogen research frontier, too.
“We all know that dependence on foreign oil isn’t helping our country,” he says, “whether it’s for money going out of the country or our security problems. And eventually, that it will run out. We need solutions. We’re reliant almost 100 percent for oil products for our transportation. Since we are dependant on oil, we can’t do anything. We have to continue to import oil and spend lots of money to secure oil supplies. We need to find alternatives to oil for transportation.
“There are biofuels we need to develop to make those things cost-effective. But I think we will still need more.
“Hydrogen is one way of replacing oil use for transportation,” Goswami says. “And once you have hydrogen, you can use it to produce electrical power also. And hydrogen will not cause environmental problems as long as you produce it in a clean way. If you produce hydrogen using coal, it won’t give you any environmental advantage.”
The challenge for researchers such as Goswami is to first be able to produce hydrogen energy in a clean, cost-effective way. Goswami and is research students are working on two hydrogen projects.
“One is to produce hydrogen from biomass – waste biomass and hazardous biomass – that we couldn’t use for other purposes. That would be the fastest way. You heat it to a very high temperature until it all gasifies. That gas has hydrogen and other elements in it.
“But to really make something practical out of it we need to do more research.”
Goswami is looking at ways of increasing hydrogen production, looking for ways of separating it from other elements in an easy and cost-effective manner.
The other tact he is taking is splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, not via hydrolysis but by using sunlight or nuclear, both as heat.
“Our research is into the method of splitting water,” Goswami says. “At this point it doesn’t matter which. The objective of my group is always to use sunlight. We think that is the cleanest and it is available to use for free. We do that through a thermo-chemical cycle in which the things that go into it are water and heat and what comes out are hydrogen and oxygen. In between, a number of chemical reactions take place. The end result is that water gets split.”
The temperatures needed are high, on the order of 800 to 1000 degrees Celsius. That requires a lot of research.
“It will take us anywhere from five to 10 years before we see cost-effective methods developed to create hydrogen,” Goswami says. “And we also need to develop other things to convert hydrogen to different forms, for example, fuel cells. We can make fuel cells – we did it for the space program – but they’re expensive. And their cyclic lifetime is not that high. For them to be useful for terrestrial purposes, we need to improve the lifetime and reduce the costs. That’s simply said, but it requires a lot of research from people in different disciplines.”
So Goswami is also doing research on hydrogen fuel cells.
“You can’t be working on everything,” he says, even if it seems like he is. “In fuel cells we’re working to develop better membranes to go inside the cell, to allow movement of hydrogen through it, but not other things. Hydrogen is a small molecule. Fuel cell research will require a lot of people working in a lot of places on various aspects.”
• • •
Nowhere in the Tampa Bay area is there a community with a greater commitment to changing its energy appetite and consumption than Sarasota.
Sarasota County was designated this year as the first “Renewable Community” demonstration project in the nation by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy. By the government’s definition, a Renewable Community integrates a renewable energy based energy system for both transportation and residential/commercial buildings. Examples of this activity include plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, zero-energy homes, and the use of solar energy.
And it is in Sarasota that Florida Power & Light plans to build a 250-kilowatt solar array. The new facility in Rothenbach Park, a former Bee Ridge Road landfill site on the east side of I-75, will be the largest solar array in Florida and one of the largest in the Southeast.
“FPL put an insert in with bills telling residential customers that for $9.75 a month, it would commit to building 1,000 kilowatt hours to be generated on each customer’s behalf. People responded unbelievably,” according to Gary Patton, energy coordinator for Sarasota County Government’s Department of Public Works.
And Sarasota had the perfect site to offer.
“Rothenbach Park is a closed landfill. It’s like a brownfield for us; not much else we can do with it, so we made it available,” Patton says. “We wanted to be part of the program. At the end of the eight-year contract, we can purchase the array or buy electricity from the site.”
The contract between the city and FPL was signed in May and requires the array to be operational within one year.
Getting the solar array built represents a change in the status quo prompted by citizens who feel they can finally do something, however small, about energy generation.
“FPL has a program called Sunshine Energy that promotes renewable energy and renewable sources,” says program manager David Bates. “One of the promises of the program is to help build solar in Florida. We’ve had great participation from residents of Sarasota County, and the organization Sustainable Sarasota has also been very helpful. For every 10,000 participants in our renewable program, there is a promise to build 150 kilowatts of solar power generation. As participation grows we’ll continue to build more solar throughout the state.”
Solar arrays are most commonly found on roofs and with the equivalent of a half a football field needed to produce 250 kilowatts, it might seem like large, existing commercial, industrial and retail rooftops would be ideal places for future energy farms.
Except, perhaps, in windswept Florida. FPL was originally going to test the array on existing buildings in Miami.
“One of the concerns about putting it on the roof is windloading for hurricane purposes. If you mount on the ground, you don’t have to worry,” Bates says.
Bates does say solar arrays could work on new commercial construction if roofs are engineered properly. Patton says Sarasota is actively working towards requiring future new construction to include rooftop solar arrays, minimally for water heating.
“We are entertaining the idea of the 2030 carbon-neutral challenge,” Patton says, referring to the challenge to the building and design industry by Architecture 2030. “If we’re going to be a leader in environmental and sustainable energy, we need to make a commitment. One of the first requirements is that buildings be 50 percent more efficient. The only way to get there is to have a renewable energy site. Putting arrays at building sites will do that. We’re also investigating bio energies and what we can afford. County government has a $7.2 mil electric bill every year. That’s incentive.”
Gary Scott Thompson Knight Rider, Las Vegas show runner, executive producer; The Fast and The Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Hollow Men, Split Second screenwriter
MOVIE DIRECTOR, PRODUCER,
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and SCREENWRITER INTERVIEWS
Michael Uslan The Dark Knight, Will Eisner's The Spirit, Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Batman Begins, Catwoman, Constantine, National Treasure, Swamp Thing, Shazam!, The Shadow, Constantine
Katy Chevigny Election Day, Deadline, Arctic Son, Arts Engine, Media That Matters Film Festival
David Wild author, He Is?I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond, Friends? ?til the End: The One with All Ten Years, And the Grammy Goes To?, The Showrunners, Friends: The Official Companion Book, Heart Full of Soul (Taylor Hicks autobiography)
Cheryl Crane daughter of actress Lana Turner, author of Lana: The Memories, The Myths, The Movies, Detour: A Hollywood Story
David Wild author, He Is... I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond, Friends... 'til the End: The One with All Ten Years, And the Grammy Goes To..., The Showrunners, Friends: The Official Companion Book, Heart Full of Soul (Taylor Hicks autobiography)
Bob Andelman is the host and producer of the “Mr. Media Interviews” podcast. He is also the author or co-author of 9 books including: Will Eisner: A Spirited Life; Built From Scratch; Mean Business; The Profit Zone; The Corporate Athlete, Stadium For Rent and several others. Complete biography & book reviews here. Looking to hire a collaborator or writer for a book? Contact my agent, Michael Bourret. Magazine editors can contact me directly.
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