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Researchers Develop Biofuel Alternative To Ethanol
coondoggie writes "Researchers say they have developed a method of using bacteria to convert decaying grass directly into isobutanol, which can be burned in regular car engines with a heat value higher than ethanol but similar to gasoline. The research could mean great savings in processing costs and time, plus isobutanol is a higher grade of alcohol than ethanol, according to the Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) and its Oak Ridge National Laboratory"
Warning: that link is goatse
Some grassoline that most of us can use. I've been intrigued by the biodiesel movement for some time now, but there are so few Diesel cars available for purchase in this country that it hasn't even been worth considering for me. If this will burn in a regular gas engine, though...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yes, isobutanol provides many benefits over ethanol and petrol, but there's bound to be an IP issue pretty much any time these days, as Gevo is currently finding out. Of course at a time when solutions are needed fast.
Perhaps (un)surprisingly BP is the plaintiff here...
http://corporate.lexisnexis.com/news/corporate-counsel,intellectual-property/cat200003_doc1373404955.html
And it wasn't even a functioning goatse. Kids these days.
Program Intellivision!
grassoline sounds pretty snappy
are backing this process? Because they're going to be up against some huge opposition from the big agribusiness firms plus Big Oil.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Ethanol fuel in the US is a subsidy for corn growers, plain and simple. Any effect is has on the fuel supply is a distant afterthought. Therefore, any alternative to ethanol that isn't made from corn, corn, and only corn completely misses the point and won't get any national attention. I tell you, the first and most important step in balancing the US budget is to move the first few. most inluential, presidential primaries to states that don't grow corn!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Apparently it's already in your grass clipplings, so all you need to do is;
1 separate out the C. cellulolyticum H10
2 culture and grow an inoculating culture
3 sterilize you grass clippling
4 inoculate with you C. cellulyticum and ferment
5 profit
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Actually corn sucks as a fuel FYI. Most other alternative fuels pack more punch per ounce including waste materials like methane. Unfortunately as Americans, corn is all we really have because that's one of the few the crops the government chose to subsidize starting back in 1929. We have so much corn that the government at times decided to purchase and burn tons of it just to keep prices inflated and protect farmers. But if you care to save our sacred crop that makes us fat, makes our livestock sick, and sucks as a fuel then more power to you.
I support growing more grass even if we use it as fuel.
Whereas right now, corn productions is managed efficiently, and the starving people all get food... right.
Starvation is mostly a logistics and political problem. Low-grade corn is cheap near where it's produced, but that's generally not where people are starving. Moving the food to the people costs money, which raises the final cost beyond what the people can afford. A government could subsidize that cost, but that kind of action is often systematically abused and easily spun by political opponents as "propping up those greedy transport companies".
Basic economic analysis tells us that with starving people needing food, but only being able to pay a lower amount for it, a smart distribution company will simply ignore those people in favor of markets that will turn a profit. The simplest solution is to make starving areas profitable, either with a subsidy or by lowering the cost of transport.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
"We" aren't doing anything. I'm using my grass to create food, and fuel, and whatever else I need. You can use your grass however you want.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
If I understand correctly, one of the major problem with ethanol from corn is that corn requires fertilizer, and fertilizer these days comes from natural gas. Or to put it another way, ethanol is a fossil fuel! One of the other problems with ethanol is that it takes land that could be used for growing food and converts it to land used for growing fuel.
How is this grass-based fuel any different? To make it in large quantities won't we still need fossil fuel based fertilizers and large tracts of land?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
First butanol isn't particularly water soluble, 87 g/L at 20 C and its density is 0.802 g/cm3, so it floats on top of the water
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Hold them all on the same day. Then you get it out of the way immediately without all the stupidity of a state with less than 1% of the population weeding out candidates before others get to vote on them. This makes it the perfect time to get in alternate voting methods as well to bring about a likelihood that someone will get a majority vote.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If I remember correctly, a couple of the proposed crops for making cellulosic ethanol are switchgrass and miscathus, and they both grow fine without human intervention. Switchgrass is native to North America. My understanding is that either crop could be used on land that isn't actively being farmed for food crops or that is "resting" for a few years as part of a normal crop rotation cycle.
I knew I'd have a use for this darn inoculating culture and this darn grass clipping steriliser one day. Now I just need a C. cellulolyticum H10 separator. I wonder if Uncle Bob will lend me his... [rubs chin]
If this grass or process can benefit from using arable land and irrigation, then please no.
The biofuel thing has always mystified me. If there are two things in the world that are more scarce and fundamental to life than oil, they've got to be arable land and irrigation water. The corn ethanol thing caused all sorts of havoc in farming and food pricing, particularly with international farmers destroying staple food crops to grow fuel plants and selling corn to oil producers instead of families. This is not the way of the future.
If this grass can grow in otherwise unusable land, and it can grow without diverting otherwise useful drinking or irrigation water, then fine. I'm very skeptical that even if that is technically possible that it will play out as such once the prices come in and farmers have to choose between taking money from poor hungry people or rich gas guzzlers.
Can we just abstract the whole fuel source thing and skip to all-electrics like the Tesla and power them with... nuclear? solar? hydroelectric? wind? geothermal? hamsters?
Cheers
Isobutanol is not very soluble in water (87 g/L) - I wonder if this process also avoids the need for distillation? Distillation is the most energy-intensive part of bio-ethanol production.
If it doesn't separate, distillation will really suck, since it's boiling point (107.89 C) is higher than water.
That's why it's an advance if we can create it from cellulose. It's not like we couldn't synthesize isobutanol from plants before. Making fuel out of sugar is no big secret. What's new is that this time, it's from parts we can't eat. It's not perfect, but it's an advance.
The law of unintended consequences has proven many times that moving food to the starving tends to put the local farmers out of business creating the need to continue moving food. Why subsidize something to make it profitable? If there is not a natural profit in the venture, a government should do it directly thus saving taxpayers the "profit". Lowering the cost of transport does not fall under the term "simple solution". I'm not advocating letting people starve, but I don't know of any simple solutions that work though eliminating farm subsidies is a good start.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Or, you know, build some modern nuclear power plants.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Just wait till they make fuel from fermented human waste. Assoline will confuse matters even more.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Engineering Corynebacterium glutamicum for isobutanol production
or pdf download:
doi:10.1007/s00253-010-2522-6
Corn does make livestock sick. If you feed a cow nothing but corn, they get overgrowths of bacteria in their rumen, produce excessive gas, and can suffer from stomach and intestinal ruptures. This is a large part of the reason why 80% of antibiotics used in the USA are fed to farm animals as prophylaxis, in an attempt to prevent stomach ruptures and feedlot deaths. You're correct, though, that the sick livestock cost ranchers. They just don't see any (fast, easy) way out of the feedlot model. The feedlot cows are ALL sick, but just healthy enough to walk from truck to slaughterhouse. That's close to all the USDA requires.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10