New Kansas Biomass Facility To Make Ethanol from the Non-Edible Plant Parts of Staple Food
November 10, 2011 Kyriaki (Sandy) Venetis 
Image courtesy of http://solar.calfinder.com.
A long-held problem with biofuels has always been that making them requires displacing land use and resources that would otherwise go to making food crops.
Well now, Abengoa Bioenergy Biomass of Kansas, with a new finalized loan guarantee of about $132 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, may have found one viable solution to the land resource problem.
Construction has just begun on a new facility that’s expected - when operational – to produce yearly about 23 million gallons of ethanol fuel from plant fibers including: wheat straw, corn stover (leaves and stalks), switchgrass, and sorghum stubble.
The facility is expected to convert about 300,000 tons of this “crop residue” per year to generate the desired annual ethanol volumes.
“The plant will also utilize the same biomass feedstock to produce 20 megawatts of electricity, adequate to power the ethanol production operations, and help make the facility even more energy efficient and environmentally friendly,” added Abengoa.