Biofuels Agian

This is an extract from an article in Nature about Butanol as an alternative to Ethanol by Katharine Sanderson. There is a series in the latest edition of Nature about the use of ethanol as a biofuel. I have written in here before about ethanol as a biofuel. Ethanol isn't horrible but I don't think it is the best option. The unfortunate thing is that this little section below is the only few paragraphs about Butanol in 4 or 5 entire articles. I am not saying these articles are bad but maybe more time could have been spent on alternatives to Ethanol.

Nature 444, 673-676

Ethanol alternative

Companies large enough to afford it are also following the basic research route rather than placing early bets on particular technologies. BP has announced it will invest $500 million over ten years to fund an Energy Biosciences Institute, which will be a dedicated facility based at a university. The University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have all been mentioned as possible hosts — the final decision is expected in December.

One intriguing possibility for such research to pursue is replacing ethanol with another form of alcohol. The fact that ethanol is easy to ferment can blind people to the fact that it has almost as many inherent problems as a fuel as corn has as a feedstock. Its tendency to pick up water wherever it goes makes it hard to transport, particularly in pipelines. It's corrosive. It's more volatile than one might wish. And its energy density is low compared with regular petrol.

For these reasons, BP and DuPont are working with British Sugar to adapt their ethanol fermentation facility in East Anglia to produce butanol — an alcohol with four carbons in it, as opposed to ethanol's two. This requires training microbes in new tricks, but it is not as hard a problem as breaking down woody plant material. The East Anglia plant will use locally grown sugar beet as the feedstock, but in the long term the aim would be to use a cellulosic feedstock. "We accept that taking stuff out of the food chain is not the right way to go," says Robert Wine, a BP spokesman.

Drinkwater thinks that an industry demand for butanol as an end product could actually increase interest in cellulosic approaches. "Most refiners would be much happier to use butanol than ethanol," he says. If oil companies become confident in biofuel technologies, investors would in turn be more confident of the biofuels industry as a whole, giving the industry that elusive final shove that it seems to need.

There has been numerous studies on on future energy sources for an energy hungry world and most studies have found that ethanol will not be a viable biofuel in the future. Biodiesel was found to be one of the best alternatives, and butanol has emerged as a biofuel worth looking at. Though with the efficiency of diesel engines (with out being a hybrid car my bosses new car gets around 5L/100km) I think that diesel powered vechiles and Biodiesel will be the way to go.

Lewis