Wood chips to jet fuel, Gevo is converting plant waste to butanol
Inside Gevo Plant
Gevo, a startup research company in Colorado, has demonstrated the making of jet fuel from plant wastes. The company devised to manufacture yeast that facilitates conversion of cellulose found in plant stalks and wood chips to butanol, a basic element of gasoline, and helps in transforming butanol into jet fuel.
It employed a separate fermentation pathway into yeast to make it work with the stalks and wood chips for the production of butanol. Although it is easier to convert sugar available in sugar cane and starch of corn into butanol, Gevo chose to employ stalks and wood chips due to the abundant availability of raw material.
Butanol contains more energy than biofuels such as ethanol and burns more efficiently to offer more mileage per gallon. Unlike biofuel, butanol does not suffer quantity ratio limitations for blending with gasoline. The molecular arrangement of the product allows it to easily fuse with other petroleum fuels and butanol does not absorb water like ethanol and can be easily transported through pipelines.
To increase the product process competence, the company has introduced an exclusive separation technology and produced another product known as isobutanol. To produce isobutanol in larger quantities the company has introduced expertise to extract the fuel through zymosis suspensions before they become toxic to the generated organisms. But this know-how of Gevo is yet to be proved for commercial usage. It has to be seen whether the product can bring down the production cost of isobutanol with that of ethanol or gasoline.
Butanol is yet another liquid biofuel, and at some point, the science involved will cross over into the manufacture of biodiesel. This is a process that starts with plant waste materials, not food plants.
Photo from: http://teamstersonline.com/forums/community-lounge/15907-navy-ship-carries-memory-9-11-new-york.html
HONOLULU (AP) — The US federal government has turned to a 130-year-old Hawaii sugar grower for help in powering the Navy and weaning the nation off a heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
It will spend at least $10 million over the next five years to fund research and development at Maui cane fields for crops capable of fueling Navy fighter jets and ships. The project also may provide farmers in other warm climates with a model for harvesting their biofuel crops.
Hawaii has become a key federal laboratory for biofuels because of its dependence on imported oil as well as its great weather for growing crops. Factor in the heavy military presence at places such as Pearl Harbor, and the islands become an ideal site for the government to test biofuel ideas on a commercial scale
Testing a batch of biodiesel blends
The biofuel lab of the college was started by Don Heck, who is currently the director started it, as an instruction lab in the year 2006 and was functioning from the greenhouse of the college. It received patronage from the local biofuel companies who wanted it to have all the state-of-the-art lab features. He added that the features of the biofuel program and the equipments deployed at the lab attracted the attention of Steve Howell of National Biodiesel Board. To meet the rigid standards of accreditation the lab employed technicians who are qualified to work in the lab. He concluded saying that it took four years and an investment of $2 million to achieve the biofuels: BQ-9000 accreditation.
As mentioned by Heck, each biofuel product tested in the lab undergoes 10 to 15 types of tests such as metal content, cold flow properties, distillation properties and biodiesel pollutants that are precipitated during the production process. A generated test report is given on completion of tests irrespective of the fuel qualifying in the tests. Heck considers the BQ-9000 accreditation as a perfect launching pad for the lab to work and move towards achieving ISO accreditation.
The fact that this is the first lab in the US to earn this level of accreditation serves to demonstrate the newness of biodiesel in this country. The science of making and testing biodiesel should be one of the hottest learning goals in the nation, this is the future of diesel.
Ollie Kroner’s car doesn’t look all that different. True, a mid-1980s Mercedes sedan in decent shape will turn a few heads but it’s not the kind of vehicle meant to draw attention. There is the emblem, though: a few letters added as a prefix to the engine designation on the trunk, turning “turbodiesel” into “bioturbodiesel.”
It spurs some curiosity, but doubtless goes unnoticed by most.
The smell is a little more unique. The car fires up like any diesel, with the “chug-chug” rumble reminiscent of a semi-truck. But there’s no belch of black smoke and no leaden, oily fumes. In their place is an acrid smell, not unpleasant, but certainly not the typical diesel aroma.
Kroner’s car runs on biodiesel, a fuel made from leftover cooking oil. It’s a throwback to diesel’s roots — Rudolph Diesel touted his invention as an engine that could run on vegetable oil — and is an increasingly popular alternative to petroleum diesel, with all of its political and environmental baggage.
Alternative fuels like biodiesel are becoming Big Business. The EPA has mandated the domestic use of 800 million gallons of biodiesel in the U.S. market in 2011.
The biodiesel production capability of domestic producers has grown from a half-million gallons in 1999 to more than 700 million gallons, and the National Biodiesel Board estimated that American facilities have the capacity to produce more than 2 billion gallons of the stuff, if they were working full-out.
But that, unfortunately, is a big “if.”
Here is yet another fellow who should join Biodiesel Now’s forum and sign in please, looks as though he has a good time with biodiesel and would recommend it to anyone.