A bulldozer mover bagasse around as piles added up from the local sugar cane farmers at American Biocarbon at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 1in White Castle, Louisiana.
Josh Molliere, of American Biocarbon, holds finished absorption pellets at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. American Biocarbon produces several different bagasse pellets from biofuel to absorption. Molded Pulp Packaging Cost
Brad Gulotta pours five ounces of water into a one ounce of bagasse pellets that are used for absorption applications in the American Biocarbon testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Biochar is made from the leftover bagasse that is not top quality so there is no waste at the plant.
Bagasse pellets roll down a conveyer belt to be bagged at American Biocarbon at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana.
American Biocarbon uses a large rolling dryer to dry the bagasse at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. The dryers are started using natural gas then are switched over to using heat from the process to finish drying for limited environmental impact.
A loader adds processed bagasse into a hopper for the machine that makes the finished pellets at American Biocarbon at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana.
A conveyer belt leads finished bagasse pellets to a bagging machine at American Biocarbon at the the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana.
Brad Gulotta holds a handful of the sorted non dried bagasse that will be made into pellets in the American Biocarbon quality testing lab at the the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Bagasse is sorted and dried for the various products that the plant produces with no part of the bagasse going to waste.
American Biocarbon’s second rolling dryer that was made with designs from the engineers that helped start the plant help to dry the bagasse at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. The dryers are started using natural gas then are switched over to using heat from the process to finish drying for limited environmental impact.
Brad Gulotta holds a handful of the fine bagasse that has been dried before being made into pellets in the American Biocarbon quality testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Bagasse is sorted and dried for the various products that the plant produces with no part of the bagasse going to waste.
Brad Gulotta test biochar in the American Biocarbon testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill to check product quality on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Biochar can absorb three times its weight in water where bagasse pellets can hold five times as both products can be used in various applications from absorption to biofuel.
Brad Gulotta holds a handful of biochar which is one of the products made from bagasse in the American Biocarbon testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Biochar is made from the leftover bagasse that is not top quality so there is no waste at the plant.
A cup with one ounce of bagasse pellets that have expanded to absorb five ounces of water sits in the American Biocarbon testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Biochar is made from the leftover bagasse that is not top quality so there is no waste at the plant.
A bulldozer mover bagasse around as piles added up from the local sugar cane farmers at American Biocarbon at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 1in White Castle, Louisiana.
Josh Molliere, of American Biocarbon, holds finished absorption pellets at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. American Biocarbon produces several different bagasse pellets from biofuel to absorption.
Brad Gulotta pours five ounces of water into a one ounce of bagasse pellets that are used for absorption applications in the American Biocarbon testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Biochar is made from the leftover bagasse that is not top quality so there is no waste at the plant.
Bagasse pellets roll down a conveyer belt to be bagged at American Biocarbon at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana.
American Biocarbon uses a large rolling dryer to dry the bagasse at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. The dryers are started using natural gas then are switched over to using heat from the process to finish drying for limited environmental impact.
A loader adds processed bagasse into a hopper for the machine that makes the finished pellets at American Biocarbon at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana.
A conveyer belt leads finished bagasse pellets to a bagging machine at American Biocarbon at the the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana.
Brad Gulotta holds a handful of the sorted non dried bagasse that will be made into pellets in the American Biocarbon quality testing lab at the the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Bagasse is sorted and dried for the various products that the plant produces with no part of the bagasse going to waste.
American Biocarbon’s second rolling dryer that was made with designs from the engineers that helped start the plant help to dry the bagasse at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. The dryers are started using natural gas then are switched over to using heat from the process to finish drying for limited environmental impact.
Brad Gulotta holds a handful of the fine bagasse that has been dried before being made into pellets in the American Biocarbon quality testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Bagasse is sorted and dried for the various products that the plant produces with no part of the bagasse going to waste.
Brad Gulotta test biochar in the American Biocarbon testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill to check product quality on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Biochar can absorb three times its weight in water where bagasse pellets can hold five times as both products can be used in various applications from absorption to biofuel.
Brad Gulotta holds a handful of biochar which is one of the products made from bagasse in the American Biocarbon testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Biochar is made from the leftover bagasse that is not top quality so there is no waste at the plant.
A cup with one ounce of bagasse pellets that have expanded to absorb five ounces of water sits in the American Biocarbon testing lab at the Cora Texas Sugar Mill on Thursday, May 18, 2023 in White Castle, Louisiana. Biochar is made from the leftover bagasse that is not top quality so there is no waste at the plant.
A few years ago, Mary Guarisco started noticing mountains of bagasse, the crop residue left after sugar cane is crushed, piling up at Alma Plantation down the road from her house.
“They’ve almost filled up just acres of land with this refuse,” she said. “Everybody is so curious about it here.”
Guarisco and her neighbors weren’t upset about the piles, but they were bewildered by their growth. At 87 years old, she said she’s never seen anything like it, even though she grew up around sugar cane.
It’s not just Guarisco’s imagination. The bagasse piles are bigger than ever before.
“It seems like piles are growing larger because Alma is grinding more cane,” said Kenneth Gravois, sugarcane specialist at LSU’s Sugar Research Station. “Pointe Coupee is now the number one sugar cane parish in the state.”
More sugar cane is being grown, but fewer mills are running.
“There used to be a lot of small piles scattered around in the 24 sugar-producing parishes,” said Jim Simon, manager of the American Sugar Cane League. “Now there are fewer mills, so each mill takes in more sugar cane.”
Instead of grinding 1.4 million tons of cane, the mills are grinding up to 2 million tons.
“There’s just more excess bagasse to deal with,” Gravois said.
More acres of sugar cane mean longer grinding seasons, which contributes to piles growing faster. But mills are also more energy efficient than they used to be, so they end up with more excess, said Charles Schudmak, chief operating officer of Cora Texas Manufacturing Co.
Bagasse is a pain to deal with. It’s light and fluffy and hard to transport. It’s expensive to move. And as piles grow, they take up space where more sugar cane could grow.
Sugar cane farmers and mills across Louisiana have been searching for ways to get rid of bagasse for decades.
For years, mills have used bagasse as a power source.
“By far the biggest use is to burn it in the mill as a green fuel,” Gravois said. “Mills use very little fossil fuel inside the factory. So when all that juice gets extracted out of the pulp, the majority of the bagasse ends up going to the boilers.”
The boilers create steam, which powers moving equipment and electricity generators.
Simon, at the American Sugar Cane League, said all 11 sugar mills in Louisiana use bagasse as fuel.
“We are in essence biorefineries. We grow our own energy,” he said.
But not all of it can be used. Gravois said roughly 10% carries over and gets stacked up into piles, like the one he calls “Mt. Alma.”
“All the mills have the same issue. There’s always a bit of excess out there,” he said.
Agricultural scientists have put a lot of money and brainpower into finding uses for that excess.
“Over the years, there have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent on trying to find alternative uses for bagasse. It is a very difficult product to deal with," Simon said. "At one point in our history, we made paper with it, additionally we made ceiling tiles with it. But they found other sources that are cheaper to utilize than bagasse, easier to handle."
American Biocarbon runs a pilot plant on the Cora Texas mill property, where it makes fuel pellets, a coal alternative used in industrial heating plants that are transitioning away from fossil fuels. It also makes biochar, which is placed under sugar cane roots and which the company estimates can increase yields by 30% per acre.
“You have a drought cycle and a wet cycle,” said Erwin Bogner, co-founder and chief technology officer at American Biocarbon. “When you put biochar in the ground, it absorbs water and fertilizer because it has a high absorption power, so then when the drought comes, the sugar cane root has more water for a longer time.”
Gravois said biochar could increase soil organic matter over the long term.
“A soil is a living entity, not just inert, so organic matter is important for all the soil microbes, bacteria, fungi,” he said. “The best place to put an agricultural waste is where you found it, out in the field.”
American BioCarbon is in the midst of building a larger production facility, which it says will eliminate all of Cora Texas’s bagasse.
“In three years, those piles will be gone. It’s gonna disappear fast,” Schudmak said.
Another potential for bagasse could be biomass slurry injection. A group of LSU professors has been researching how to take bagasse, grind it into a slurry and inject it deep into the ground.
Plants take in carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Most of the carbon becomes part of the plant’s mass and helps it grow, and some of it goes into the soil. The plant essentially becomes a carbon sink until it dies, then carbon is released back into the atmosphere during decomposition.
“Basically, what this project does is it doesn’t allow for the decomposition stage,” said Brian Snyder, one of the Department of Environmental Sciences professors working on the project.
Biomass slurry injection differs from more controversial carbon capture projects across Louisiana in a key way: Projects are taking carbon from an emissions source like a smokestack, whereas this process takes carbon from the atmosphere. The process could have a huge impact globally.
“We have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to come even close to the goals of the Paris Agreement," Snyder said, referencing a global pact to try and stop catastrophic impacts of climate change. "This process can’t do all of that, but it could contribute.”
These technologies are a good start, producers say, but more research is being done on bagasse all the time.
Schudmak at Cora Texas said some researchers are looking into creating second-generation ethanol, for example. AMS Compostable, a company in Florida, grinds the bagasse into a pulp and makes paper plates and food storage containers.
Those at the mills are anxious for a solution.
“It sits there. It decomposes very, very slowly. It’s a product that we’re trying to figure out a use for, because it’s expensive to handle it, to move it around," Simon said.
Email Rebecca Holland at rebecca.holland@theadvocate.com or follow her on Twitter, @_rebeccaholland.
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