Re: Biobutanol
This morning's Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal reported that the DuPont Co. and BP have formed a partnership to develop, produce, and market biobutanol for gasoline blending.
The first step will be to convert an existing ethanol plant in Wissington, England to enable the production of biobutanol from sugar beets. The plant is expected to become operational in 2007 and will produce some 30,000 tons per year of biobutanol.
The article indicated that biobutanol has several advantages over ethanol, namely i) higher energy content, and therefore little or no reduction in gas mileage, and ii) does not absorb water and therefore can be blended right at the refinery and transported via pipeline.
DuPont also indicated that biobutanol can be made not only from sugar beets, but also from corn, wheat, or even straw and corn stalks.
I believe it was Robert Rapier who indicated a while back that biobutanol requires far less energy to produce because it does not require energy-intensive distillation to separate the butanol from the fermentation broth.
I think this is a very interesting development which, hopefully, might force some rethinking about the attractiveness of ethanol-from-corn and maybe slow down the ethanol-from-corn bandwagon, as least a little. (Though of course it must be recognized that the energy inputs for the growing of the crop feedstock upstream of the biobutanol process will not change one iota.)
joule on Wednesday June 21, 2006 at 9:35 AM EST
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