July 31, 2007
STEELE CITY
On a day last week that Gov. Charlie Crist announced a new 75 megawatt, waste-wood biomass plant in Liberty County, Jimmy Cheek talked about cellulosic ethanol research and listened onsite to the numbers involved with Green Circle Bio Energy's wood pellet plant in Jackson County.
The pellet plant in Steele City will produce 200 loads a day and require 350,000 acres of timber to support, project consulting engineer David Melvin told Cheek, the University of Florida's senior vice president of agriculture and natural resources. Then Jackson County Development Council Bill Stanton added another number to the mix: 1.1 billion pounds.
That's how many pounds of wood pellets the plant expects to produce annually, Stanton said.
"That's a lot of wood pellets," Cheek said.
As construction continues rapidly at Green Circle's wood pellet plant, the Jackson County facility has attracted statewide attention for its plunge into renewable energy production, local and state officials said Thursday.
The company's CEO and president, Olaf Roed, spoke at the 2007 Farm to Fuel Summit in St. Petersburg, put together by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
This was Cheek's second Farm to Fuel summit. He said this year's conference differed from the 2006 event, with more people in attendance and a broader range of interests represented in St. Petersburg.
"The tenor was much more upbeat about biofuels," Cheek said, noting that the summit had attracted venture capitalists from other parts of the country.
Stanton also attended the summit.
Conversations at the summit centered around ways to convert potential alternative energy sources such as switchgrass, sugar cane and citrus refuse into fuel on a mass scale, Stanton said.
He said Green Circle's plant, which is scheduled to start production by the end of the year, attracted attention in part because it represented something tangible in all of the summit's discussions about renewable energy.
"It was a real project, where as everything else was speculative," Stanton said.
Pellets will be shipped by rail to Port Panama City, where they'll be stored in a bulk warehouse before shipment to Denmark and Germany for industrial power plant use, Melvin said.
Part of the electricity Green Circle uses in pellet production will come from methane gas supplied by Alabama and West Florida Electric Cooperatives, Melvin said, while the rest will come from hydropower sources.
Green Circle broke ground on the plant in February, the same month as Colorado-based Range Fuels announced plans for a $225 million wood-based ethanol plant in Soperton, Ga.
Cheek said UF researchers are looking for a new site to develop cellulosic ethanol.
He said the Legislature approved $20 million for the university this year to build a demonstration ethanol facility.
According to The Gainesville Sun, the plant is expected to initially produce 1 to 2 million gallons of ethanol per year, with a projected opening date of July 2008.
The plant would use E. coli bacteria to produce ethanol from plant material including sugar cane residue and fallen tree limbs, the Sun reported.
Green Circle's facility, plus UF's plans for cellulosic ethanol and Liberty County's new plant, show that the state can produce alternative energy, Cheek said.
Thinking long-term, Florida needs to develop trees more suited for energy purposes, Cheek said.
"We've got to get started with projects to develop new fuel sources," Cheek said.
Range Fuels' Georgia project is funded by Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm Khosla Ventures.
Cheek said that, in addition to scientific challenges, the renewable energy industry also must attract enough venture capitalists willing to invest $100 to 200 million in a Florida facility.
