Canwest News Service - Ruth McLaren spent a cool, blustery Saturday morning as she usually does, doing chores on and around her Mountain, Ont., farm. Among other things, she fed the cows and loaded straw onto a flat-bed truck — straw that may power a Formula One Grand Prix race car.
A world away, in the dry heat of Manama, Bahrain, Brazilian driver Felipe Massa was savouring his excellent performance in qualifying runs earlier in the day for the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix. Massa and his Ferrari teammate Fernando Alonso of Spain nabbed second and third position for the start of Sunday’s race — and they did it using fuel made in part with straw supplied by McLaren.
Double Diamond Farms, a family business run by McLaren and partner Don Duncan for 22 years, collects straw from farmers across eastern and northern Ontario and ships it to Iogen Corp. of Ottawa, a biofuel manufacturer. Iogen uses the straw to produce cellulosic ethanol, which it supplies to Royal Dutch Shell, which adds it to the gasoline it supplies to Ferrari.
Sunday’s race marks the first time cellulosic ethanol has been used in the Grand Prix, and the folks at Iogen are pretty excited about it. So is McLaren.
“To be able to see the product going from the field to the vehicle like that is pretty amazing,” said McLaren on Saturday, as she took a break between chores and dinner.
Jeff Passmore, executive vice-president of Iogen, said the Ottawa company is thrilled to be making Formula One history, even if it’s not of the kind most fans would ever notice.
“No one else in the world is making large quantities of cellulosic ethanol like Iogen is,” said Passmore. “We’re talking about several thousand litres of fuel here.”
Shell owns 50 per cent of Iogen’s energy division.
“Since 2008, the rule of Formula One is that biocomponents make up 5.75 per cent by weight of the gasoline,” said Rainer Winzenried, spokesman for Royal Dutch Shell in The Hague. “The Iogen ethanol is not competing with the food chain, and has a clear advantage compared to other components for gasoline.”
Unlike other forms of ethanol, cellulosic ethanol uses waste product and does not divert crops intended for the food chain.
“Once farmers have harvested the grain for food — making bread, for example — we use the leftover straw for ethanol,” said Passmore. “We turn that agricultural residue into a high-octane fuel that contains 35 per cent oxygen.”
Iogen shipped ethanol from its Hunt Club Road demonstration facility to Shell more than a year ago, and Shell has been testing its performance in Europe for months. It wasn’t until early Friday morning that Iogen executives got word that their ethanol was going to power Ferrari’s team for the entire Formula One season.
“This demonstrates once again that a Canadian company is a world leader in this field,” said Passmore. “The fuel is performing extremely well in a very demanding high-performance application.”
Passmore says Iogen’s ethanol produces far fewer greenhouse gases than other fuels, because other components of the straw fibre are burned on site to provide the electricity for running the ethanol plant.
“That means you don’t have to import power to run the plant, because 80 to 90 per cent of your energy requirements come from the fibre itself,” Passmore explained.
That’s not happening at the Ottawa demonstration plant, but Passmore says it’s the plan for the Saskatchewan manufacturing facility the company is planning to build in Saskatchewan. Iogen has already signed up 600 farmers to supply straw to the proposed plant.
Double Diamond Farms trucks at least five loads of straw each week to the Ottawa facility, said McLaren. Each load is about 25 tonnes of straw, bundled into bales and tied down to the flat-bed truck.
“We do barley straw and wheat straw, but they’re mostly into the wheat and just a little bit of the barley,” said McLaren, who wasn’t clear on the technical aspects of ethanol manufacturing. “I know they take it and it comes out as a liquid — that’s about it.”
Shipping straw to Iogen is a small part of the business Duncan and McLaren have been running for 22 years. Mostly they farm — corn, wheat, beef and more. The family business has a motto. “It’s on all our tractors and trucks: “No farmers, no food, no future,” says McLaren.
“I’m supporting the farmers because they seem to be dwindling away, and we need them for food. The byproducts come in handy, too, for your ethanol and things.”
McLaren and Duncan are both truck drivers as well; in fact, McLaren used to drive the trucks to Iogen herself, “years ago,” she said.
Passmore, who is travelling to Amsterdam this weekend, isn’t a big racing fan, but says this weekend, he will definitely be tuning in the Grand Prix. McLaren says she isn’t much of a fan either, but Duncan is, so they, too, might be keen to see the Ferrari drivers in action — knowing that they’ve got Double Diamond straw in their tanks.
Ottawa Citizen
No comments:
Post a Comment