Day 9 - Environment

Today was really cool.  We spent the whole morning at Cornell's Lab of Orinthology and heard from three dynamic speakers covering the topics of Green Buildings and LEED Certification, to Biochar as a bioproduct, and the usage of marginal land as a place for possible bioenergy feedstock production.  Equally as cool as the speakers was the tour of the lab and the opportunity to see a Great Blue Heron nesting site full of fledglings.  Lastly we did a

Side note: check out the lab's nest cams - Red Tail Hawks and Great Blue Herons.


Green Buildings - Lew Durland, PE

Our first speaker of the day was Lew Durland.  Lew is a Professional Engineer as well as the Board Vice Chair of the US Green Building Councils New York Upstate Chapter.  Lew spoke a lot about the LEED Certification process for new buildings and existing structures.  This is of particular interest to me as the new academic wing at US is hoping to achieve a LEED Silver rating.

First lets consider that 40% of primary energy use and 72% of electricity consumption is accounted for in the running of our structures (Environmental Information Administration Annual Energy Outlook, 2008).  If you then consider the benefits of building a "green" building and compare it to our sustainability diagram, the logic becomes more clear.

Benefits of a Green Building

What is LEED?

• Stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
• It was developed by the US Green Building Council in 2000.
• LEED provides building owners and operators with a framework for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions.

Put simply, Lew described LEED in the context of the building and it's ability to influence it's occupants.  "Buildings that use less energy provide a superior indoor air quality, enhance occupant productivity and well-being, and improves the bottom line for developers, owners, and tenets.

A LEED certification requires an independent, third-party audit of the building process and design.  The auditor compares the building's design parameters to the check list of points defined by the LEED framework.  The number of points achieved dictates what level your building attains: Certified, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

LEED Certification point distribution

Biochar - Dr. Dominic Woolf, Swansea University

The second speaker of the day was Dr. Dominic Woolf, a visiting scholar from Swansea University in England, who is working at Cornell.  Dr. Woolf talked about biochar, a charcoal-like byproduct of heating biomass in a limitedly oxygenated environment.  If you heat grasses, wood chips, or other biomass feedstocks, in this environment you produce a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide, otherwise known as syngas and leave behind biochar in a process called gasification.  The gasses are burnable as fuels.  The biochar that is left behind can be used as a highly effective soil amendment due to the increased surface area within the char particles available for nutrients and water to remain.

Biochar stove and the residual biochar from gasification of sugarcane.

If you burned the fuel in an open stove you would release carbon dioxide and water vapor to the atmosphere.  In third-world countries this is a large output of greenhouse gases (GHG) relative to other part of the world and is a major cause of indoor air pollution.  The ability to capture carbon in the form of biochar acts as a type of sequestration that keeps carbon out of the atmosphere for decades if not centuries.  I foresee designing and building a biochar stove as a lab/design activity in my Environmental Science class.

Marginal Land Feasibility - Dr. Brian Richards

Our last speaker of the morning was Dr. Brian Richards of Cornell's Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering.  Dr. Richards talked about the usage of marginal land for the production of biofuel feedstocks, such as grasses and woody crops.  Marginal is a term that describes the quality of the land that you want to grow your crop on.  It is defined as land or lands that have fallen or will be falling out of production because they can no longer be economically farmed.  This could be do to loss of nutrients, an increase in water retention to the point of flooding, an excess of stony soils, or simply being too remote to economically get product to market.

Professor Richards's marginal land plot

Dr. Richards's group is interested in determining if switchgrass is capable of being economically farmed on marginal land.  Dr. Richards's research appears to directly approach the idea that food prices will rise if we secede land over to biofuel feedstock production.  If we, instead, grow biofuel feedstocks on land that will not be used to produce food on the basis of economics or environment, we gain back that part of the argument.

Cornell's Lab of Ornithology Tour

Since the entire day was spent at the beautiful Lab of Ornithology, it only makes sense that we would take a tour of the building.  The lab is set away from the main campus and is nested up against a large span of woods, making it a wonderful location for the study of birds.  

Visitor Center at Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology

We were taken on a tour of the facilities which includes an incredibly diverse biological collection, including obviously birds, as well as aquatic species, as well as an incredibly thorough sound library of recordings from birds around the world.

Inside the audio library at Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Bird samples within the biological collection

 Algal Photobioreactor Lab

The second to last event of the day was to build a photobioreactor for algae.  Earlier in the week we had a talk about the possibilites of using algae as an oil producing species.  This experiment uses plastic bottles (Gatorade, Pepsi/Coke Bottles, spaghetti sauce, etc.), a culture of chlamydomonas algae, some MircleGro, and a fish tank aerator.  Similar to the bioproducts lab earlier in the week, this lab begs to have students create their own experiment.  There are just so many variables that can be manipulated or controlled.

Photobioreactors with different amounts of MiracleGro added to chlamydomonas

Tour of Cornell's Compost Facility

We finished the day by taking a quick tour of Cornell's Compost Facility, which is run by the school's Farm Services division.  The facility composts 850 tons of food waste generated from their 11 dining halls, however they compost more than just food.  The facility receives 3,300 tons of animal waste from the various livestock the agricultural school manages, as well as around 300 tons of plant waste from the various greenhouses and test plots/fields around campus.  They turn the piles biweekly and manage the facility to produce salable compost for the community and beyond.  The facility also added a 224,00 gallon leachate pond to collect run-off from the facility, which is then sprayed over adjacent fields as fertilizer.

Tour of Cornell's Compost Facility by Bill Huzinza

Recently turned compost pile

Leachate pond at compost facility

Day 8 -- Bioproducts

Tuesday was a complete change relative to the previous 7 days.  We spent the entire day looking at the business of biologically derived materials and their incorporation into salable products.  The day began by looking at a commonly forgotten segment of the bioproduct industry, medicine.  Dr. Donna Gibson. Dr. Gibson is an adjunct professor of plant pathology at Cornell and has done a lot of work on the development of synthetically derived taxol from the yew tree.

Later in the morning we heard from a participant of last year's program and fellow buckeye, Andrea Harpen, a physics and chemistry teacher from Blanchester High School in south eastern Ohio.  She spoke about leveraging Ohio's strengths in agriculture to create more bioproducts and jobs in Ohio.  More on her work later.

In the afternoon we participated in a series of lab activities that utilized materials that were 100% biologically derived and consequently qualify them as bioproducts.  Specifically we compared the stain-fighting properties of a soy-based carpet cleaner to a petroleum-based cleaner.  We also designed an experiment to compare the lubricity of a soy-based lubricant versus a petroleum based lubricant.  Lastly we used corn-starch and a variety of other ingredients to make our own biologically derived packing peanuts.  The beauty of these activities was that the procedure and methodology for comparing the product's abilities was left to us.

Comparison of a soy-based carpet cleaner (Green Carpet) vs. petroleum-based carpet cleaner (Spot Shot)

Making corn starch based packing peanuts using various different inputs (water, baking powder, glycerine, grass)

Day 7 - Bioheat & Power (Day II)

On Monday we heard from three speakers and took two field trips, all focused on heat and power.

The speakers were:

1. Dr. Mingxin Guo of Delaware State University who we had heard from before concerning biodiesel
2. Mr. Guillermo Metz, Green Building and Renewable Energies Coordinator from Cornell University's Tompkins County Extension
3. Ms. Catherine Spirito of Cornell University

Dr. Guo began the day by looking at a broad overview of energy from a comprehensive context.  Basically, it was an overview of energy in terms of physics, biology, and chemistry, all in a few PowerPoint slides.

He continued his talk by looking at the semantic differences between all the biofuel designations.  Specifically he laid out the difference between biopower, bioheat, biogas, and syngas.  

• Bioheat: Direct heating of biomass for the purposes of heating a structure.
• Biopower: Biomass that is burned for the purposes of generating electricity.
• Biogas: Biologically derived methane from anaerobic digestion in a landfill capture or on a farm.
• Syngas: Heating biomass in the absence of oxygen yields carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas (gasification), other wise known and syngas. The process also yeids charcoal or biochar.  This gas can then be burned, yielding carbon dioxide and water.

Biofuel options from biomass

The second speaker of the day, Mr. Guillermo Metz, spoke specifically about the usage of biomass for heat, or bioheat.  He is the Green Building and Renewable Energies Coordinator for an extension of Cornell.  One of his focuses is on getting residents of Tompkins County to participate in a subsidized energy audit and then consider applying for a low interest loan to improve the efficiency of their homes.    The program Mr. Metz discussed was the Upgrade Upstate initiative.  One of more interesting components of Mr. Metz's talk concerned the usage of biomass for heat.  As was stated in a previous post, the Vernon-Verona-Sherrill school district is working to switch the fuel they use to stoke their maple syrup production facility from an oil base to a biomass based fuel stock.  

My interest was peaked as a result of Mr. Metz's talk because my town, Lakewood, Ohio, has chosen to legislate against future installations of biomass based furnaces.

Lastly, Catherine Spirito, as Masters Degree candidate at Cornell, presented some of her research concerning anaerobic digestion of cow manure as a viable biogas (methane) production method.  Specifically she is looking at how a feed additive affects the process of anaerobic digestion.

In the afternoon we set up a small scale anaerobic digester that could be set up and run in a classroom.  It began with a 4.00-L vacuum flask (I would use a 5 Gallon Home Depot Homer Bucket with a PVC gasket and connector) attached via tubing to a smaller 2.00-L vacuum flask with a two hole stopper.  The connection from the digester to the collector is through a pasteur pipette to allow the biogas to bubble through a .1M NaOH solution (to remove CO2 and H2S).  The two remaning holes are used to confirm the working of the digester.  One is a ball valve that can be lit to confirm biogas production, and the vacuum tube is connected to a balloon that will inflate as biogas is produced.

Classroom Anaerobic Digester Setup

Dr. Guo then took food scraps from the week's lunches and blended them in a blender.  He added them to the 4.00-L flask and inoculated the sample with about 500-mL of untreated sewage so that a viable bacterial presence would be available.

Dr. Guo adding pureed food scraps to the digester

After the lab we loaded up the vans and travelled to Cornell's Combined Heat and Power station on campus.  The plant runs on natural gas and provides both electrical power to the campus as well as the local electrical grid, and it provides heating to the campus through the capture of heat from the water used to run the electrical generation.

Cornell Combined Heat and Power Plant

The plant has two boilers, rated at 15MW each and then utilizes a heat recovery steam generator that uses the "waste" heat to generate heated water for use in heating the Cornell campus.

Lastly we traveled to an anaerobic digester that is located on Sunnyside Farm in Scipio Center, New York.  We were led around by Ms. Jenny Pronto, and Dr. Tim Shelford.  Both Tim and Jenny are involved in anaerobic digestion of manure from farms.  Sadly, my camera malfunctioned while at the farm and I lack any quality pictures.  The following pictures are courtesy of Diane Wuest of the University of Delaware.

Anaerobic Digester at Buttermilk Dairy -- Buried underground

Biogas is burned in this huge engine to generate electricity

Digested material is mechanically separated into digestate (solids) and digestate (liquid)

Solid digestate is used as a bedding material for dairy cattle.

Liquid digestate is sprayed over crops as a fertilizer and, logically, doesn't smell.

Day 6 - Bioheat and Power

On Saturday we took two field trips, finished the biodiesel lab, and took the first round of data from the switchgrass ethanol lab.

We arrived Saturday morning at Cornell's Lake Source Cooling & Heat Exchange facility.  A research institution, such as Cornell, has an incredible demand for cooling.  Cornell has a lot of research labs, equipment, and offices that all depend on cool air to create an optimal environment for experiments and researchers.  This creates an enormous energy demand if the school were to use traditional electric air handling.  Instead, the school takes advantage of the thermal properties of deep lake water.  Cornell is situated on the banks of the largest (lengthwise) Finger Lake, Cayuga Lake.

Lake Sourced Cooling Facility

The Lake Source Cooling facility takes deep, cold water from the lake and draws it in to a facility that simultaneously brings warm water from the school down to the banks of the lake.  Inside the facility, heat exchanging metal plates allow the heat to transfer from the warm school water to the cool lake water.  The now cooled school water is pumped back to the school's air handlers for air conditioning, and the warmed lake water is placed back in the lake at a shallower depth so as to not disrupt the thermal properties between bathymetric layers.

Cooling Loop

Our tour was led by Mr. Tim Peer, a professional engineer and the plant manager.  He showed us each part of the plant and described how the physics and logistics of the plant functioned.

Mr. Peer explaining the heat exchanging plates

By switching to lake sourced cooling in 2000, Cornell University has saved over 25 million kilowatt hours annually and has seen an 86% reduction in energy consumption for cooling over that time.  The school does maintain standard electrical refrigeration plants on campus that are only turned on at times of extremely high demand and these chillers only pick up the difference that LSC cannot.

Chiller plates from above (darker color pipes come from campus, lighter pipes hold lake water)

63" diameter intake pipes that stretch out to 250' deep lake water intakes

Later in the day we visited the Cayuga Lake Nature Center to see a woodchip boiler that is used to heat the center's main lodge.  Act Bioenergy installed the .5 million btu/hour unit in the fall of 2009.  The unit is capable of providing the heating needs of the center at about 25% the cost of propane.  They can house a month's worth of wood chips on site and run the boiler for a week without reloading the 2 ton hopper.  A 10-wheel truck delivers hardwood chips with <30% water content once a month at a cost of $500.

Kevin Lanigan, Cayuga Nature Center's caretaker, describing the woodchip boiler

Hopper that holds a week's worth of woodchips

Hopper and boiler shed at Cayuga Nature Center

Lastly, we finished the biodiesel lab and gathered preliminary data.  Here are a few photos:

Unwashed biodiesel overlying the glycerine byproduct

 

Aerating washed biodiesel to encourage mixing

Day 5 - Biofuels II (Ethanol) w/ Trip to an Ethanol Plant

Today was all about the biofuel we use most often in this country, ethanol.  Typically, the gasoline that we use in our car contains around 10% ethanol, and all that ethanol is made from corn and almost certainly was produced domestically.  A lot of the research being done at Cornell's School of Biological and Environmental Engineering is on the development of second and third generation biofuels, also known as cellulosic ethanol derived from grasses and woody shrubs (willow).

The day began with a lab to observe and hopefully quantify the effect of a specific enzyme on a species of switchgrass.  We began with three samples of switchgrass, each a product of a different preprocessing technique: chopped, milled, and pelletized.  Our hypothesis was, simplistically, the switchgrass which was prepared with the greatest surface area would enable the enzyme to work more effectively and thus more glucose would be produced.  We will observe the results tomorrow.

Today we toured the Biofuels Research Lab (BRL) at Cornell.  We were toured by Dr. Stephane Corgie, a native of France and a research associate in the lab with a patent for a unique magnetic enzyme recovery system.

Dr. Corgie explaining the layout of the Biological Research Lab (BRL)

The lab, while straight forward in it's motives and design, contains more fancy equipment with huge price tags than I was able to comprehend.  Basically, the lab aims to research the production of ethanol from grasses and willow.  While the process is simple and widely understood, challenges exist.  Namely, cellulosic fibers consist of three major parts: lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose, of which only the cellulose is usable.  Thus a major hurdle is how do you separate the three pieces so that you can get at the important cellulose feedstock.  The lab also has the ability to ferment glucose, derived from the enzymatic breakdown of the cellulose, in very controlled conditions.  They have fermenters that can do as little as a few liters all the way up to over a 100-L batch.

Small fermenters lined up in the BRL

Medium sized fermenter, computer controlled

100+ Liter fermenter

Later in the day we travelled to Western NY Energy's Ethanol plant in Medina, NY.  Here they receive 70+ truckloads of #2 Yellow Dent corn from local growers every day.  They process approximately 20 million bushels of corn into 55 million gallons of fuel grade ethanol, 160,000 tons of distillers grains that are sold to local dairies or feed lots for animal consumption, 1.5 million gallons of crude corn oil that is sold for processing into biodiesel, and lastly they take the 100,000 tons of CO2 produced by the fermentation and condense it for use in the beverage and food industries.

Ariel view of Western NY Energy's Ethanol Plant

A) Storage for almost a month's worth of corn for producing ethanol.

B) 4 Fermenters, 3 with capabilities of over 750,000 gallons and 1 that can handle 1 million gallons.

C) Final product tanks.  Ethanol that has finished the last stage of water removal needs to be denatured (rendered undrinkable due to beverage distillation laws) and is sold at 200 proof.

Day 4 - Biofuels (Biodiesel)

Today was all about the topic that brought me to the BBEP program, biodiesel.  Inside and outside of the classroom I have been working to integrate biodiesel and the underlying chemistry/engineering into my research.  Today I had the opportunity to present my work before the group.  However, I was the second presenter, behind Mingxin Guo from Delaware State University.

Mingxin is an assistant professor at Delaware State University's Department of Agriculture and Natural Sciences, specializing in soil science.  Mingxin presented the research complexities of producing biodiesel and the chemical challenges behind the technology available to produce biodiesel.

Rudolph Diesel, the pioneer and namesake of the diesel engine, originally designed the engine to run on vegetable oil.  Oils, or lipids, are essentially a glycerol backbone with three long-chain fatty acids that uniformly branch off.  Vegetable oil, by itself, is capable of running a diesel engine, provided that the conditions are perfect: warm day (vegetable oil's viscosity is a limiting factor in it's ability to run an engine), infrastructure (dual fuel system is required so the engine can be started on petrodiesel and then switched to vegetable oil).  Biodiesel, on the other hand, is a low viscosity product that can be run in any diesel engine without modification.  The question is how and why?  Through the chemical process of transesterification, the complex lipid molecule is broken into it's four components, a glycerol and three fatty acids (FA), and each FA is then modified so that a methanol molecule is added to make it combustable and of lower viscosity.

Lab exercise producing biodiesel

The beauty of biodiesel is that it can be produced simply from a waste product that would otherwise be useless.  I was able to present my topic, Biodiesel in the Classroom, and specifically what is being done at University School.  Check out the powerpoint from the link above.

In the afternoon we began a lab that would take pure vegetable oil and convert it to biodiesel.  While much more technical and focused on a quality product than the average DIY type processor, the activity was valuable.  In part, this was due to a secondary part of the lab where we titrated pure, unused vegetable oil as well as waste vegetable oil collected from a fryer.  The titration is used to determine how much catalyst we would need as a function of the free fatty acids (FFA) created during the thermal breakdown in a frying application.

We will finish this lab on Saturday by using a separatory funnel to separate the glycerin and biodiesel, and then used again during the washing phase.  Pictures to follow.

Lastly, this afternoon we traveled to Homer, NY to the farm of Mr. Hugh Reihlman, a self proclaimed "gear head" who makes his own biodiesel with a commercially purchased processor.  He walked us through the process he uses and showed us his setup.

Mr. Reihlman describing his biodiesel setup

He did say that he has been having difficulty finding waste vegetable oil (WVO) due to the demand from several biodiesel processors in the region.  They purchase the WVO from the restaurants and thus he can't compete.  However, he is able to produce biodiesel at a rate of around $1.00 a gallon, instead of purchasing it from the local service station for over $4.00 a gallon.

The entire CMTT group from Cornell

Day 3 - Biomass and Big Flats

Day 3 started off with another series of lectures, all focused on biomass.  Dr. Peter Woodbury and Dr. Larry Smart both spoke about the growing and usage of both switchgrass and shrub willow.

Dr. Woodbury, a senior research associate at Cornell's Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, is an expert in GIS (Global Information Systems) and has research interests in how land use and potential fuel stock crop land can be synchronized.  Dr. Woodbury spoke to us about what the land use map of the north east looked like from the the stand point of potential biofuel production.

The general gist of the talk centered around how the north east, when viewed through the filter of land use and density, has a fair amount of land that is viable from a biofuel standpoint.  While most of the land, in fact a huge majority, is tied up in forests that should remain forests and not ceded over to biofuel production.  When you remove the federal lands, land that is already used for food crops, and pasture, hay or grasslands, the total amount of land available for biofuel stocks is limited but viable.

The talk then moved on to how to make the best use of the land, from a crop standpoint.  Specifically, why should switchgrass be part of the conversation.  Specifically, Dr. Woodbury cited the following reasons: it is native to the US, it's drought tolerance, it's low nutrient requirements, it's high biomass production, it's extensive root development, and how it is adaptive to northern climates despite being a warm season grass.

Since switchgrass is a C4 plant, it is especially well adapted to conserve water during periods of drought and particularly warm climates.  This is a competitive advantage that enables switchgrass to be established in most northern climates, where land is available.  It is also worth noting that switchgrass is able to be harvested with equipment that is already owned by the normal northern climate farmer, thus minimizing the inputs necessary by a farmer to bring a harvest to market.

Lastly, Dr. Woodbury discussed how switchgrass compares to the shrub willow, another common cellulosic ethanol feedstock.  Specifically, he focused on how grasses, much like pelletized hops for your average beer homebrewer, can be dried and pelletized for direct combustion in a furnace, either on the individual homeowner scale or at the industrial scale.  He also included the logistical advantage of possibly mobilizing the pelletizing equipment for use at the farm location.

Later in the afternoon we heard from Dr. Larry Smart, a Cornell researcher located at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, which is also home to Hobart College, my alma mater.  Dr. Smart spoke specifically about how shrub willow operates as a plant and how it fits into the biofuel spectrum.  Shrub willow is unique in that it can be propagated via cuttings, a practice common to a lot of woody ornamental species.  His research included an interesting project that incorporated a local high school (Vernon-Verona-Sherrill Central School District) with an agriculture (4H and Future Farmers of America) program that would plant willow cutting and utilize the biomass to fuel their maple sugaring operation, not unlike the program at US.

After lunch we had the opportunity to travel to Big Flats, New York, near Corning, to visit the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) Plant Materials Center.  Here Dr. Paul Salon and Mr. Martin van der Grinten led us on a tour of the facility, where crops are grown, seeds and biomass are harvested, and plots are managed to provide information for scientists around the worlds.

The smallest combine sold is ideal for managing test plots for researchers

Paul and Martin led us on a tour of their facility, including their equipment, seed cleaning operation, and field plots.

Martin demonstrating how seed screens are used to separate viable seeds from other unusable plant material

Researchers utilize the location due to the high quality soil and ideal growing conditions.

Paul discusses the different seed types and how their difference pose challenges in the seed cleaning process

Paul describes the phylogenic difference between Big Blue Stem and Gamma Grass

Chemung County Soil and Water Conservation District Logo

Research test plot of Buckwheat (white flowers) and Kanlow Switchgrass (green grass)