by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) … In an exclusive Digest interview, Shell’s VP for Alternative Energy, Matthew Tipper, reveals the company’s thinking about RFS2, their increasing re-focus on North America and the EU. Plus, Shell’s ambition to “build, own and operate” a global biofuels business “to complement what we have in Brazil. At least as big as that.” We look at novel molecules vs drop-ins, the strategy behind bringing Virent’s drop-in fuels technology to North America — and more.
In this era of “repeal the RFS” efforts from API, would you be surprised that Shell regards the US Renewable Fuel Standard as “one of the more effective frameworks out there”?
Truth be told, Shell has the size and global perspective that requires it to think long-term, and with complexity — about the global energy business. Accordingly, they see opportunities in ethanol, diesel, gasoline and jet fuel — and are investing across the board in advanced technologies.
To understand more of the what, why, where and when, we turned with Shell’s Vice President for Alternative Energy — who brought Shell’s plans and thinking, well, just a little more out of the shell.
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MT: A true drop in is chemically no different than any fuel component in the refinery. It’s another molecule can be easily blended at high ratios into gasoline or diesel, for example, without dedicated infrastructure. It’s a molecule that also has comparable energy density to diesel and gasoline, and other performance characteristics. Something really similar.
It’s self-explanatory why we need to do that. We’ve seen the blend wall emerge in the US sooner than anticipated — it is here and now. And we see similar issues in the EU for biodiesel, with limits there around B7 there. It’s clear to us that more compatible products – especially for markets like shipping or aviation – are needed. We need to find solutions for distillates. But we have not given up on ethanol either. We can see a role for ethanol in the mix — not limited to Brazil. Particularly if competitive on price — in spite of these constraints that the retail structure and the fleet impose.
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MT: … But with the price of conventional sugars, it’s a challenge. We need something different to make it work for fuels — corn and cane sugars work better for chemicals [based on price]. So we needed to develop further a process that would start with biomass. We have the technology with Virent and the license. What we’ve done is to convert biomass as a front-end to the Virent process.
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BD: Why not turn to one of the many renewable sugar developers now emerging?
MT: There, we need to tailor the quality of the sugar for the process, and we need to have confidence in the developer. We decided to put our confidence in ourselves and our own technology. It’s one of the difficulties we all face. We are limited on plant scale because of the cost of transporting biomass, and we can’t afford too many process steps.
So we need to integrate the steps to minimize the capital intensity, instead of marrying an external sugars process to ours., Now, we’re not saying that we have got the answer… READ MORE