DuPont, BP ready "Advanced Biofuels" like biobutanol
DuPont and BP announced Tuesday that the two companies are forming a partnership to bring next generation biofuels to market. DuPont and BP have been working together on biofuels since 2003 and are not ready to bring the first fuel, biobutanol, to market. It's not really clear what the other next-gen fuels are or will be. We took a brief look at biobutanol yesterday. The biobutanol should be available in the UK starting in 2007 blended with gasoline and will be made in a facility that is currently making ethanol. DuPont Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Charles O. Holliday, Jr. said in a press release that, "Biobutanol is just the beginning of new solutions DuPont can offer to transform global economies by improving our use of renewable ingredients and natural processes to deliver products for a better, safer, healthier world."
This is all fine and good, but what's with that picture of the chemist cooking corn soup?
[Source: DuPont]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Glenn A. 10:09AM (6/22/2006)
It's great news. I hope DuPont and BP will work with the US patent holder and introduce butanol in our country. BP have a lot of gas stations in the US.
Isn't it time for the SAE to establish with the auto companies, that butanol is safe for use in gasoline cars?
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Stafford "Doc" Williamson 9:24PM (12/31/2006)
The higher energy content of butanol (bio or otherwise) makes it a very attractive alternative to ethanol, especially since the handling characteristics and requirements are so much closer to gasoline and the infrastructure that already exists to deliver it. Richard Brason (mogul of Virgin Airlines, etc.) is investing in biobutanol as a big hope to "green" up his transportation businesses, and seems especially hopeful for the avfuel potential. However, in response to the "why is this guy cooking corn soup" in the accompanying photo, the fact of the matter is, that once you get beyond the simplest and cheapest part of "fermentation" used in alcohol production, your are faces with some form of distillation, and that is a very interesting and versatile process. You see, petroleum products are distilled from crude oil, and once you enter that realm, of DIFFERENTIAL DISTILLATION, or "cracking" all sorts of exciting possibilities open up. Especially helpful is catalytic reformation of distillates. The basics of most biofuels is that carbohydrates and hyrdocarbons are both essentially long chain versions of atomic and molecular "lego" units that can be re-shaped and re-plugged to form all kinds of interesting things, including plastics, as well as fuels. When you start considering the cellulosic biomass, not merely the "sugar" content of the plants, the yeilds zoom enough to support vast amounts of the energy being "produced" being used for process energy to do the conversions you want to achieve.
So long as the feedstock material is sufficiently inexpensive (and the processing is designed with appropriate environmental considerations in mind), then one is free to "spend" a lot of that energy to achieve the results you want. Part of the reason that gas in particular and petroleum in general has remained so cheap is that the "cost" of raising a barrel of crude to the surface in Saudi Arabia works out to less than US$1.00 a barrel (before shipping, processing and refining, just to get it out of the ground) which amount to about US$ 6.66 a ton (short ton, assuming approximately West Texas Light Crude). Shipping of the material is cheap, and refining is fueled by fractions of the raw feedstock itself (or can be). There are quite a few bio source feedstocks that will yeild economical fuels if you will be kind enough to deliver them to me at less than US$ 7.00 a (short) ton.
My personal favorites are sewage biosolids and livestock manure. We have plenty of both, without paying foreign sources a premium of $40 or $50 a barrel in royalties. The same is true for most localities, and local generation of energy sources just makes sense for all kinds of reasons.
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