Rayonier Fights City Of Fernandina Beach Over Bioethanol Production

Rayonier Performance Fibers, LLC (also known as RYAM or Rayonier Advanced Materials) has filed lawsuits against the city of Fernandina Beach, Fla. and the board of City Commissioners for what Rayonier says was an illegal response to Rayonier’s site plan amendment application toward building a bioethanol production facility within its pulp mill site in Fernandina Beach, which has been in operation since 1939.

A byproduct of RYAM’s pulping process is “spent sulfite liquor” (SSL), which contains unused biomass components from the wood chips used to make specialty cellulose products. Currently, RYAM either burns the SSL in a sulfite recovery boiler for energy or sells it to LignoTech Florida, LLC.

RYAM has proposed to construct a project within the existing footprint of its current facility to covert the SSL byproduct through the biological process of fermentation into second-generation bioethanol. RYAM refers calls its proposal the 2G Bioethanol Project, which would have a maximum capacity of 7.5 million gallons of 2G Bioethanol per year. RYAM would use yeast to convert the sugars in the SSL to ethanol, and says local emissions would improve by reducing the amount of SSL that is burned in the recovery boilers. According to RYAM, the project, which received an air construction permit last October from Florida Dept. of Environmental Management, would entail a similar fermentation process used by breweries and distilleries in making beer, yogurt and certain baked goods.

However, in the lawsuit, RYAM says that opponents of the project, including former and current members of the City Commission and the Board of Adjustment, “have taken the erroneous position that the project represents either chemical manufacturing or chemical refining, which are not permitted” by law.

“The City Staff’s machinations to bow to political pressure from the community, candidates for political offices, and members of the City Commission to adopt this erroneous interpretation is at the heart of this dispute.”

The distinction between creating bioethanol through fermentation and chemical manufacturing is recognized by state and federal regulatory agencies, according to RYAM. In the proposed project, the fermented bioethanol mixture will be distilled and then dried using molecular sieves to phyically remove water contained in the alcohol so that the bioethanol can be used as a clean energy fuel source. The physical processes of distillation and drying, relying on temperature differences and mechanical separation to segregate the bioethanol, contrast the process in chemical refining that involves the use of chemical reactions, often through the addition of chemical agents that react with impurities.

However, RYAM believes local politics immediately came into play, such as from groups like NoEthanolFernandiana. RYAM says the city rejected the application and said it still constituted chemical manufacturing or refining, despite RYAM’s abundance of supportive documentations. RYAM says it spent approximately $4 million toward engineering, site planning, design, engineering and safety and environmental planning.

“Thus, for more than a year the City has engaged in an orchestrated, bad-faith, effort to deny RYAM a reasonable application process.”

As a result RYAM is seeking declaratory judgment, injunctive relief and supplementary relief in the form of monetary damages on aspects of five counts related to the city’s biased and improper handling of the process.

The Fernandina Beach City Commission has reportedly passed a resolution to defend the city in court and is denying all claims by RYAM.

Meanwhile a Florida State Senate bill is in the works that states the production of ethanol from plants and plant products by fermentation, distillation, and drying is not chemical manufacturing or chemical refining.