So my recent senior project was on the ABE process, but they introduced a twist here. Yes, I am a chemical engineer.
Our challenge was to separate the butanol from the acetone and ethanol, then sell it to refiners to mix as an oxygenator to replace ethanol, which tends to separate from gasoline over long distances after mixing (butanol does not do this). The separations ended up being a significant portion of the energy budget for the plant (with some of the energy coming from firing your towers with ethanol and acetone). Doing some digging (I can't see their paper) it appears they are pulling volatiles off the beer and then, without further distillation, introducing the ABE mixture to the catalyst. In our analysis there was no way given current technologies you could profitably sell pure butanol at a price competitive with the going price of gasoline. However, this would not necessarily be the case here. Interesting.
However, you can't get away from the problem with the process (and the bioethanol process). We were consuming massive amounts of corn to pull off production targets. And c. acetobutylicum can't act on cellulose: it needs starch. You need corn, sugarcane... and I am not seeing how ABE to diesel is any more efficient than the standard biodiesel process, which is full-scale these days.
And you don't need thousands of pounds of palladium to pull off vegetable oil to biodiesel.
Interesting academically. I call BS on it though.
Ashfall just underwent a massive expansion and is a completely amazing place to visit, if you are in the area of north-eastern Nebraska.
Look it up if you are into mammoth-era fossil sites.
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So my recent senior project was on the ABE process, but they introduced a twist here. Yes, I am a chemical engineer. Our challenge was to separate the butanol from the acetone and ethanol, then sell it to refiners to mix as an oxygenator to replace ethanol, which tends to separate from gasoline over long distances after mixing (butanol does not do this). The separations ended up being a significant portion of the energy budget for the plant (with some of the energy coming from firing your towers with ethanol and acetone). Doing some digging (I can't see their paper) it appears they are pulling volatiles off the beer and then, without further distillation, introducing the ABE mixture to the catalyst. In our analysis there was no way given current technologies you could profitably sell pure butanol at a price competitive with the going price of gasoline. However, this would not necessarily be the case here. Interesting. However, you can't get away from the problem with the process (and the bioethanol process). We were consuming massive amounts of corn to pull off production targets. And c. acetobutylicum can't act on cellulose: it needs starch. You need corn, sugarcane... and I am not seeing how ABE to diesel is any more efficient than the standard biodiesel process, which is full-scale these days. And you don't need thousands of pounds of palladium to pull off vegetable oil to biodiesel. Interesting academically. I call BS on it though.
Ashfall just underwent a massive expansion and is a completely amazing place to visit, if you are in the area of north-eastern Nebraska. Look it up if you are into mammoth-era fossil sites.