Shell and Codexis expanding cellulosic ethanol development
Codexis and Shell are expanding their collaboration on developing non-food based biofuels. Codexis develops what the company calls biocatalysts, the enzymes used to break down cellulose into simple sugar molecules. Codexis and Shell have had a cooperative agreement since 2007 and the expansion will see Iogen Energy participating as well. Iogen is already operating a cellulosic ethanol pilot plant near Ottawa, Canada. The hope is that the work of Codexis will be able to improve the efficiency of Iogen's processes so that costs can be reduced and yields increased.
Other biocatalysts that Codexis is developing go beyond ethanol and might be able to convert biomass directly into the compounds that make up gasoline and diesel fuel. These compounds contain longer carbon chains than ethanol and have greater energy density. By producing something more chemically similar to gasoline or diesel, the fuels could be used in existing vehicles without modification and without some of the corrosion issues that ethanol is subject too.
[Source: Codexis]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dr. James Singmaster 7:43PM (3/16/2009)
Biofuelishness continues that will only disrupt food supplies, perhaps mainly in using water to be shorting its supplies for food crops, while not doing a thing to lower the overload of GHGs mainly carbon dioxide already at work in the biosphere. Biofuels only at best recycle carbon dioxide, and several reports indicate that working the ground to grow biofuels results in some extra carbon dioxide emissions to be adding more of that gas.
Hydrogen is the fuel that should be strived for, and that is what Shell and other oil companies were hyping themselves for doing up to start of 2008. In mid 2007 one report on a catalyst to split water to hydrogen using sunlight energy was made followed since by reports on five other such catalysts. Suddenly Shell and the others fell silent on hydrogen as getting hydrogen from water would put several trillion dollars of oil company assets underwater as it were. The National Renewable Energy Lab(NREL) appears unaware of the catalysts(WHY?) and seems totally committed to biofuelishness.
Again Biofuels, regardless of how much energy they might provide, are just recycling carbon dioxide doing nothing to get a reduction of global warming.
Dr. J. Singmaster
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Noz 2:58AM (3/17/2009)
The problem is the oil companies are not in it for anything else other than oil. As I have pointed out elsewhere, they have spent less than 4% of their revenues in 2008 (BP contributing the most) to alternative energy...so they don't care one bit.
Second, hydrogen will arrive but at a much later date. And it will need to be coupled with electricity infrastructures since it cannot accomplish everything as electricity cannot either.
CNCMike 11:12AM (3/17/2009)
Actually there have several University studies that have concluded that if the proper crops were used in a permaculture style farming environment you could eliminate, or at least greatly reduce the amount of petroleum based fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides which would greatly reduce the CO2 produced manufacturing these products. Also they have shown that the crops can sequester in the soil, in form of sugars, 13 times the amount of CO2 produced by processing the crops, distilling the ethanol and burning the fuel in your car.
By the way, producing gasoline from oil uses considerably more water than making ethanol and the water used while making ethanol is a very useful product once the ethanol is distilled out of it. In fact everything that is left after making ethanol is a useful product. It can be used in the next batch of ethanol or used as fertilizer or used in a compost pile or one of many more uses. Everything that is left after producing gasoline is volatile,toxic waste. When the oil companies use water it ususally ends up as toxic waste that will be deadly to most life for thousands of years. Just look at the oil from tar sands that we import more of than oil from Saudi Arabia.
Dr. James Singmaster 6:43PM (3/17/2009)
Noz: Hydrogen could be here pretty quickly if Congress stopped wasting so much money on subsidies for biofuelishness, oil companies' entitlement ripoffs and clean coal-synfuel nonsense and got the money to NREL and other agencies to develop hydrogen instead. Some of that money should go to expanding windmill generated electricity as that is recycling extra energy loosened into the biosphere by our fossil fuelishness.
CNC Mike: Isn't the most important need to beat global warming the removing some of the 35% and growing overload of carbon dioxide in the biosphere, which recycling that gas does not do. You can sequester some of that gas for awhile in root systems, but only as cellulose; regular sugars will induce microbial attacks unless ground gets sealed.
I have detailed on the NYTimes Green,Inc. blog a rather long comment #21 on the March 13 write up about shipping that gas to bury via ocean shipping. What is proposed there is pyrolysis of organic waste matter to get charcoal and several other products while destroying germs, toxics and drugs the wastes. This is about the only viable way it seems to get some actual removal of that gas from the biosphere according to two top English environmental scientists. Dr. J. Lovelock, well environmental scientist, was interviewed in a New Scientist article Jan. 23 and indicated that pyrolysis was the only possible way to be getting removal. Dr. T. Lenton of Univ of East Anglia had his paper on geoengineering to get cooling(Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Vol. 9, pgs.1-50, 2009) outlined, and his conclusion was that the only feasible way was via pyrolysis to get charcoal to stop some of carbon's natural recycling. Both of them only spoke of using agricultural wastes apparently not recognizing the massive messes of organic wastes and sewage(The sieved off solids part) as having mainly cellulose that could be pyrolyzed. Dr. J. Singmaster
Rain 9:26PM (3/16/2009)
This article is called "The diesel that grows on trees".
I came across this article in November of last year,the beauty of this is that this fungus
works on wood and other waste cellulosic matter that would otherwise just be sent to the landfill or burned as waste,but instead the Gliocladium roseum digests and returns myco-diesel.
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/The-diesel-that-grows-on.4656287.jp
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