EnviroPolitics Blog

Fill ‘er up…with citrus peels?

Can that corn. Make your ethanol with grapefruit and orange peels.

That’s the plan in Florida, where Citrus Energy, LLC plans to build a 4 million gallons per year ethanol bio-refinery, using the state’s plentiful, low-cost supply of citrus waste as the feedstock. The company calls citrus waste “the most economically attractive and technically feasible of the potential cellulosic feedstocks” and claims the process is less costly than using corn.

The company’s website lays out the economics behind the idea:

“Florida has 100 million citrus trees on 800,000 acres which provide 250 million boxes of citrus (80% of U.S. production) and 90 % goes to Florida’s 20 citrus processing plants, producing over 5 million tons of citrus waste annually. Most of the citrus processing waste is dried into what is commonly referred to as citrus pulp pellets (CPP) and fed to cattle. The production of CPP requires a large capital investment by the processor with little if any return on investment. During recent years, processors have been unable to sell CPP for a price high enough to pay for processing costs, let alone their capital investment. The CPP losses are borne by the main product from citrus, orange or grapefruit juice. Due to the high capital cost, many small citrus juice processors are unable to install feed mills to produce CPP, leaving them with tons of citrus waste for disposal. This has contributed to several small processors closing in recent years, reducing the demand for citrus fruit and depressing fruit prices paid to growers. Florida, like some other areas of the country does not have suitable climate for corn production and requires alternate ethanol feedstock development. Citrus processing waste, a pectin, cellulose and soluble sugar rich mixture of peel, segment membranes and seeds is available on a large scale and at A VERY LOW COST. “

Does all this sound more ideal that real? Perhaps not. Today, FPL Energy, LLC, a subsidiary of FPL Group, which is the $16-billion parent of one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, Florida Power and Light, announced it had signed a letter of agreement with Citrus Energy to develop the first ever commercial scale citrus peel to ethanol plant.

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Cooling buildings with ice? That’s nice

Most Americans are too young to remember the icebox. It was the forerunner of the modern refrigerator, though much smaller, made of wood, lined with tin or zinc and insulated with cork, sawdust, straw or seaweed. It contained a block of ice (delivered to your home by the ‘ice man’) and it kept a family’s fruit, meat, milk and butter cold as long as the ice held out.

Today, a number of corporations are applying this great-grandfather technology to cool their giant office buildings and reduce their giant-sized air conditioning bills. Credit Suisse, for example, is cooling 1.9 million square feet of office space at the Met Life tower, a historic building that was New York’s tallest in the days before the Empire State Building. The system took about four months to construct and company engineers say it is extremely efficient. Colleen Long of the Associated Press, reports on The Discovery Channel that: “Because electricity is needed to make the ice, water is frozen in large silver tanks at night when power demands are low. The cool air emanating from the ice blocks is then piped throughout the building more or less like traditional air conditioning. At night the water is frozen again and the cycle repeats.

“The concept is the same, but when you make something mechanical, it can break, but a big block of ice four floors below grade level isn’t going to do anything but melt,” said Todd Coulard of Trane Energy Services. The company built the Credit Suisse system and is one of several that work with ice storage.”

Ice storage at Credit Suisse lowers the facility’s peak energy use by 900 kilowatts, and reduces overall electric usage by 2.15 million kilowatt-hours annually — enough to power about 200 homes.In case you’re thinking about converting your home AC system over the weekend and giving the ice man a call, please note that the Credit Suisse project cost $3 million, although incentives were provided by New York State’s Energy Research and Development Authority.

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Read this while swigging your next Evian

The July issue of Fast Company magazine contains an article called “Message in a Bottle” that was an eye-opener for me, and just might be for you, too.

Here are two paragraphs to give you an idea of what I mean:

“Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States. Last year, we spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie tickets–$15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year.

Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We–a generation raised on tap water and water fountains–drink a billion bottles of water a week, and we’re raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We’ve come to pay good money–two or three or four times the cost of gasoline–for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes. “

Four times the cost of gasoline? The price we’re always grumbling about? For stuff we can get for pennies from our water faucets? Yes! In fact, as the article points out:

“If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.”

You can check out the entire article here.

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Raise a mug to wind power!

Finally, an alternative energy offer I can get behind.

“Sign up for clean energy and drink free beer.” That was the offer made to eco-festival-goers in Manhattan over the weekend.

The New York Times reports:

Those who signed up for electricity from Community Energy, which owns three wind farms in New York and Pennsylvania, received tickets for four pints of Brooklyn Lager at the third annual Citysol festival in Stuyvesant Cove Park, at the end of 23rd Street. (Brooklyn Brewery is powered by Community Energy windmills.)

Spread the word, folks. Maybe the PR guys and gals at River Horse will work up a similar enticement for energy-switchers in New Jersey. Yo, Yuengling! How about beer-for-wind in Pennsy?

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Supply problems rock NJ/NY biodiesel producer

Shares in Renewable Power and Light (RPL), a two-year-old, independent power producer with plants in Manassa, NY and Elmwood Park, NJ took a 70 percent hit on Friday after it announced expected losses because of a contract dispute with a supplier of palm oil–a feedstock for the company’s biofuel operations.

The stock price tumbled after RPL resumed trading on the AIM after suspending trading on July 5. RPL announced six days later that it was suing Safari Group Inc. for failing to supply palm oil at an agreed fixed price. Safari has cited a substantial increase in the price of palm oil as the reason for its inability to perform under the terms of its contract.

The Financial Times reports that:

A surge in global demand for biofuels has worked to the advantage of some suppliers such as Anglo Eastern Plantations. Shares in the oil palm plantation owner have risen more than 30 per cent in the past six months.

But that surge has hurt companies that depend on the oil, including Biofuels Corp, which runs the largest biodiesel plant in the UK. Biofuels recently announced drastic restructuring plans to stave off bankruptcy.
Although RPL says it expects a financial loss in the currrent year due to the supply disruption, it adds that its balance sheet “remains robust with almost $50 million in cash and Net Assets of approximately $84 million.”
The company said it has identified and tested alternative supplies and that “palm oil, jatropha and soy oil offer the best potential to meet RPL’s requirements.”
In addition to its two power plants, RPL plans to build a refining facility in up-state New York to convert raw palm oil into B100 Bio-diesel fuel.

For more information on RPL, click here.

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W. R. Grace seeks to duck Jersey claim

The specialty chemical manufacturer, W. R. Grace, is seeking to block a $30 million damages claim filed by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection on grounds that the DEP filed the claim too late.

Bankruptcy 360 (full story viewable with free trial subscription)reports that the dispute dates back to June 2005 when the DEP fileld an $800 million fraud law suit against the company, nearly four years after Grace had filed for bankruptcy protection. DEP argues that it did not discover, until after the deadline for filing bankruptcy claims had expired, that a former Grace manufacturing plant site in Hamilton Township, Mercer County, contained 40 percent asbestos. New Jersey contends that Grace lied about the extent of the contamination, an allegation that Grace denies.

Meanwhile, The Baltimore Sun reports that Grace might owe victims of its asbestos products as much as $6.2 billion, according to a legal scholar hired by attorneys suing the chemical maker. Mark A. Peterson, a research scientist at the Rand Corp., estimated that Columbia-based Grace may need to spend from $4.7 billion to $6.2 billion to resolve hundreds of thousands of asbestos cases over several decades.

Grace filed for bankruptcy in 2001 to protect itself from 135,000 asbestos claims. Early next year, U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Judith K. Fitzgerald is to hold a trial to set a value on the claims, a major step in resolving the company’s six-year-old reorganization effort.

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