Flax made its name as an industrial oil crop but less well known is the technology to produce oil from parts of the plant other than the seed.
An Ontario company plans to make fuel type oil and other industrial compounds from the straw.
Flax straw isn’t high in oil content, but it does contain the building blocks of carbon-based fuel and that is the type of feedstock that fits well with the technology that forms the backbone of the work performed by Ensyn.
Company spokesperson Randall Goodfellow said the same system that Ensyn installs for forestry companies to make use of waste fibre material is a perfect fit to convert flax straw into liquid fuel.
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The Ottawa company is seeking partners on the Prairies to develop a 400-tonne-per-day plant to process flax straw and potentially other lignocellulose waste materials into fuel.
Ensyn’s technology breaks down biomass material such as straw using a steady flow of sand heated to 450 C. The straw, chopped into six millimetre pieces, flows into a cyclone of sand and non-condensable, oxygen-free gases and in a process called pyrolysis that lasts less than two seconds, it becomes a gas that is cooled to form a liquid.
“We say it takes less than two seconds because that is a number that people understand. It’s actually a lot faster than that,” said Goodfellow about the technology that was first developed at Ontario’s University of Waterloo in the early 1980s.
Since 1989, an Ensyn pyrolysis reactor has been operating in Wisconsin, producing liquid smoke, a food flavouring agent.
The process creates a liquid form of wood or other biomass material such as flax straw, containing about 75 percent of the original biomass, only in another form.
The remaining products are carbon and some combustible gases that can be burned to heat the sand needed to perform this rapid thermal processing.
Forestry companies looking to generate some of their own power from wood waste have also contracted Ensyn to provide systems that would produce liquid fuel that can be burned like diesel oil.
Ensyn also operates its own facility in Renfrew, Ont., which takes waste material from sawmills and converts it into liquid, which has the consistency of a cup of coffee.
“Once you have a liquid form of energy, there is so much more that you can do with it. It is easier to handle than a solid or a gas,” said Goodfellow.
Ensyn’s 100-tonnes-per-day Renfrew plant does further processing of the pyrolytic liquid, to create resins, food flavourings, concrete and asphalt additives and energy.
“This is truly green energy – third generation biofuels that don’t require another process before they can enter the refining system,” said Goodfellow.
Fuel refiners are potential customers for Ensyn’s future prairie facility. The company hopes to be able to sell the organic fuel to petroleum refiners looking to “green” their gasoline and diesel.
“It is consistent and easily refinable. And it’s a (carbon dioxide) neutral product,” he said.
In the past, petroleum-based feedstock for gasoline, diesel and industrial chemical byproducts of the oil industry were cheap enough to keep pyrolysis out of the fuel marketplace.
However, with crude oil hovering around $100 per barrel, pyrolytic liquids are more than competitive as forms of refinable energy, said Goodfellow.
Ensyn sold its rapid thermal processing technology for use in the oil and gas sector in 2006.
“The same process works for breaking down droplets of heavy oil,” said Goodfellow.
The inventors are chemical engineers Robert Graham and Barry Freel, who founded Ensyn.
The Ottawa company sold the process for use only in heavy oil upgrading to Ivanhoe Energy for $100 million. That company said it is able to save $12 to $20 per barrel over conventional upgrading systems when it converts heavy oil to light crude.
Ivanhoe, in partnership with Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, is now using this technology in a 15,000-barrel-per-day upgrading facility in oil fields near Bakersfield, California.
Ensyn officials said the company hopes to find a partner in Western Canada in an area where farmland meets forest fringe and that is not too far from an oil refinery.
Ensyn officials have met with the flax industry on the Prairies, including Flax 2015.
“Flax isn’t the only crop residue that would work. It could be oat hulls, sunflower hulls. But flax (straw) is a biomass source where less than 10 percent of the product is sold or put to another use. Mostly it gets burned in the field. Instead of that, Ensyn could be turning into green energy and farmers could be supplying it as crop,” said Goodfellow.
