Furfural May Be the Future of Easy and Cheap Biofuels
Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed an easy, efficient and inexpensive method for transforming raw plant material directly into a fuel called furfural without any fermentation. Furfural can be substituted for diesel.
The current, most widely adopted process for making second generation cellulosic fuel — “celluline” — involves the use of acids, enzymes and fermenting microbes to get from the harvested plant material to a fuel that is usable in your car’s engine.
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This process is lengthy, expensive and uses a significant amount of energy (interactive graphic, click on “energy balance” tab at top right). Critics of celluline claim that the amount of energy used in making it creates a negative energy gain — that it uses more energy to make it than it puts out.
This claim is very much debatable. Actual energy gain is completely based on what plant is used, how it’s grown and what variation of the conversion process is used.
In the end it’s true that a significant amount of the potential energy in celluline is used up in the process of making it — not enough to make it a negative energy source, but enough that if the excess energy use could be reduced it would reduce both the amount of land needed to grow the fuel crops and the cost of the final product.
And that’s what’s so exciting about Mark Mascal and Edward Nitkin’s research. They’ve taken all those middle steps out and developed a method to convert the plant material — the cellulose — directly into a liquid fuel that can be used in a car’s engine.
Avantium, a Shell spin-off, has already been researching the capabilities of furfural fuels and has developed its own trade name: Furanics. Their findings indicate that furfural fuels can be directly substituted for diesel without modification of existing engines.
This appears to be a pretty major step in defuzzing what the future of biofuel looks like. Fufural might be to celluline what celluline is to corn ethanol.
Anyway, all this talk about furfural and the fuzzy future of biofuels got my (un)creative juices flowing, so I’ll leave you with a limmerick:
Furry Worry was a bear.
Furry Worry had no hair.
Furry Worry wasn’t furry, were he?
Well, in this case, no. No actual fur whatsoever. And as it turns out, he has no reason to be worried either — except about my horrible poetry skills.
Posts Related to the Future of Biofuels:
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- BP Invests $90 Million in Verenium’s Cellulosic Ethanol Technology
- Dedicated Energy Crops Could Replace 30% of Gasoline
- Diesel-Producing Grass? Researcher Thinks it’s Possible
- Prototype Ford Escape Plug-in Hybrid: 88 MPG on 85% Ethanol
- CleanTech Biofuels to Turn Dirty Diapers Into Ethanol
- Genetic Engineering for Cheaper Cellulosic Ethanol?
- How Green Are Biofuels? Comparison Chart [PIC]
- GM Announces New Cellulosic Ethanol Partnership with Mascoma Corp.
The first link doesn’t work
Couldn’t get the link to work to the source. I’d be interested in reading the source info, sounds like an encouraging step. Diesel engines have a longstanding efficiency edge, so it’s always good news to hear of advances in biofuels suited to them
The first link in the post is broken.
Sorry all!!! The first link is fixed! It’s a link to the press release. Unfortunately the release doesn’t go into much detail about the process. The actual journal article is only available for a cost of $30… or it’s free if you happen to be a member of a subscribing library (like at a university).
Here’s the link to the journal article in case you have free access or want to purchase it.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121359280/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
My wife works for a university so I was able to get access to the paper last night. Seems very promising, although it does require concentrated Hydrochloric Acid and either a palladium catalyst or an existing amount of ethanol. They haven’t tried it on real word feed stocks yet, just microcrystalline cellulose. They suggest in the paper that their next step is to scale up and try it on real world plant waste.
BlueFire Ethanol recently detailed their “Arkenol Process” used for turning ag, urban and forestry wastes into cellulosic ethanol, all for under $1/gallon. Pretty amazing–in fact, Los Angeles county just signed off on the papers granting Bluefire permission to begin building their first plant–and the beauty of their process is it is sighted right at landfills, so no need to truck in residues to convert to fuel–it’s all done onsite!
http://blog.gmnext.com/?p=224
I hope these methods eventually prove to be efficient and relatively non-polluting. We obviously still have a way to go - how much hydrochloric acid is used, and how is it disposed of? The good underlying fact is that plants are efficient at gathering the sun’s energy, so the potential is there, but the technology is not there yet.
Apparently it is worse than just the hydrochloric acid. There are some discussions at Digg - for example, this summary statement: “Furfural is a dangerous organic compound that is toxic to humans. When heated, it turns into formaldehyde, which is also toxic to humans.” The original paper also talks about various issues with toxicity, so this is not a home run. It still seems that wide use of wind and sun may be more beneficial, but I am willing to see attempts at non-food, non-farmland energy production if it is also non-toxic… but we are not there yet by a long shot.
If you read the paper, you’ll see no toxic products are involved. The paper does not describe furfural itself, but substituted furfurals, some of which are present in foods. Using waste cellulose to produce biofuel cheaply and efficiently looks like it could be a home run to me.
Thank you for clarifying, Mark. Since it does involve hydrochloric acid, however, that needs to be evaluated for impact, so I don’t think it is quite toxic-free. It would come down to relative quantities etc.
Hydrochloric acid can be recycled and contained within Mascal - Niktin process. When ethanol is added to CMF 5-chloromethyl furfural HCl is released and can be recycled back to the first reactor where is can once again change celulose to CMF 5-chloromethyl furfural. Adding ethanol to CMF produces ethoxymethyl furfural presently a diesel additive but a future Furanic diesel fuel.
George