Ethanol Innovation Turns Wood Into Sugar at Room Temperature
In what could be a major breakthrough for second generation ethanol production, German researchers have developed a new method that easily converts raw wood into sugar using a liquid ionic salt bath at room temperature followed by reaction with a solid acid resin.
The process works by chopping the complex raw wood molecules into smaller and simpler bits — the end product being single sugar molecules. The method can also be used on other second generation ethanol feedstocks such as grass straw. Once you’ve made the sugar, the rest of the process of making ethanol is as simple as making beer — literally.
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The current conventional method of making second generation cellulosic ethanol — or, “celluline,” as I like to call it — is actually very energy intensive and uses harsh chemicals to digest the woody materials in very strong acids and/or at extremely high temperature.
This new method, developed by the research group of professor Ferdi Schüth at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, foregoes those energy intensive methods and works at room temperature.
Right now, the major stumbling block for the new method is that the materials used to make the salt bath are expensive. But, as with everything, I imagine that when used at a commercial scale those costs would fall dramatically.
A while back, fellow gas 2.0 writer Alex Felsinger, wrote a post about a new new energy-efficient process that turns sugar directly into gasoline. Seems to me that if we were to marry these two processes, we might actually have the holy grail of our future biofuel transportation needs. Are those two groups talking?
So, put the fight about corn ethanol, energy efficiency, energy independence and food supply aside for a moment and take a long view of the future of biofuels. I really don’t mean that facetiously, it’s just that I believe we so often get caught up in the issues surrounding corn ethanol and making fuel from food crops that we tend to write off biofuels as a flop.
In reality, corn ethanol is a stop gap to help us develop an infrastructure for the second generation of non-food biofuels like cellulosic ethanol. I just hope that these seemingly disjointed groups of researchers start talking to one another and combining these constant breakthroughs into a coherent and commercializable product so that we can move on with our energy future.
Image Credit: superiphi’s Flickr photostream under a Creative Commons License
Source: Renewable Energy World (via Biofuels Digest)
“In reality, corn ethanol is a stop gap…”
Nothing receiving a government subsidy is a stop gap. It’s here forever!
This is great news. Unlike one reader, I worry about non-CO2 producing technology. The experimental hydrogen fuel cell cars produce water vapor, a green house gas hundereds of times more efficent at trapping heat than CO2. Thus hundereds of fuel cell cars = thousands of combustion engine cars in terms of greenhouse effect.
Of course with the recent rapid global cooling we may want more greenhouse gas in the near future.
Query: how much wood does this take to make the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline? A cord of wood would make how much, say? I’d like to get a feel for how much forest land would be needed for US gasoline needs - I hope it won’t have to cover Canada!
This wood to sugar process sounds promising.
And spotted owls are a bit stringy and scrawny. Their meat has to be braised for a long time, or else they have to be boiled for soup.
Spotted owls live in barns, store signs, inside house roofs, etc. They are adaptable. Bring them to NYC so they can help reduce the mouse problem.
Can this process convert junk mail into ethanol?
I wish someone would stick a fork in this “cellulosic ethanol”. It’s BS. The whole experiment fails because the TRANSPORT of the materials will consume more energy than can be produced from the materials. WEIGHT! How much does an acre of “switch grass” weigh? How much does it cost to cut? How much production can you get out of it? You think the cuttings from an acre of corn are worth more than the corn? We’ve already seen what “unintended consequences” we get from idiot government mandates in the free market. And to all those with perpetual heartburn over “globull warming” and the “vast increase” in CO2, get a life. 38 parts per hundred thousand IS NOT ENOUGH TO CAUSE GLOBULL WARMING.
You people just don’t get it. If you want to significantly reduce the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere and causing climate change (such as the cooling during the last 10 years) the simplest solution is to replace the coal used in thermoelectric power plants with saw grass, agricultural wastes, sawmill wastes, yard wastes, waste grease from restaurants and lots of timber, especially the dry brush that feeds those California wild fires. The energy value from all this stuff would all go into creating electrical energy and there would be no energy waste such as in all the hair-brained schemes to produce ethanol from cellulosic materials, and, in addition, no chemicals would be involved. You ain’t gonna get more energy in the form of ethanol out of these processes than there is already in the starting cellulosic material.
Of course, we would soon run out of available cellulosic stuff as there is a limit to the amount of cellulosic material that we can grow sustainably in a year without depletion of cellulosic stock, regardless of whether it is used to feed thermoelectric power plants or used as a substrate in processes to produce ethanol. And this doesn’t even take into consideration the detrimental effects that growing and harvesting that much cellulosic material will have on depleting the soil of nutrients, reducing water tables and degrading streams, rivers and the Gulf of Mexico. Our farm lands should be used exclusively for producing food products and our forests should be used to produce lumber for building homes.
pop sci.
tell us how the guy converts wood into alcohol, exactly? that’s okay; just tell us how you get the cellulosic bonds broken down to glucose. cellulose - polymeric glucose, but how do you break cellulose into glucose, exactly? come on. no bullshit. how’d you do that, dude? you tell me that, and i’m a believer. ie WTF is your cellulase? No handwaving now; you got some of that in a test tube, some little white powder or other, or whatever? come ON, man, you got that activity? man, I hope you do, if you do, you would be the MAN!!! or woman. whhatever.
This is neat science. But it is considerably easier to simply drill for oil in santa barbara and in alaska and off the eastern and western seaboard and in north dakota than it is to pay money to build new plants to make a substance that does not burn very well in cars. The crazy self imposed restrictions put on industry so they can not get OIL for the USA by politicians produces a false market for energy and hurts the country drastically.
We are not running out of oil. the earth is getting colder ( it snowed in october over most of the east coast of the usa and in London for the first time in over 100 years) and we are being forced to become poor because of government restrictions on energy production at home, and we sent ten times the cost of the iraq war overseas in the last two years in oil payments to foreigners. I am tired of wearing a hair shirt for politicians who dont have my best interests, and i see no reason why the public should be forced to support giving energy credits to alternative energy producers who are otherwise uneconomic when there is plenty of energy at home
I usually do not get involved with writing comments about news stories as the story is usually very superficial as this one is. The ionic liquids are a really cool thing to use and have been in use for several years in cellulosic conversion in the labs. They are not and probably won’t be used commercially for some time to dissolve plant matter or biomass because they are extremely expensive and may be an environmental night mare. The usual ionic liquids for cellulose are not commercially available and must be made batch wise in the lab (yes, there are some commercially available, but, generally not for cellulose). There are other research groups actively researching ionic liquids for cellulose. A google search will quickly identify these others working in this area. Most current research groups are using dilute acid hydrolysis or an alkaline process similar to AFEX. All have their pluses and minuses.
Also, the United States converted more corn grain to ethanol last year than any other year. The United States also exported more corn grain for feed and food than any other year last year. The ethanol from corn grain process produces 9 to 17 pounds of dried distillers grains per bushel of corn that is used as animal feed.
Lets get off of middle east oil and quit paying the people that hate us over a billion dollars a day and get behind the biofuels. Even if corn grain to ethanol is a stepping stone, we need to have the fortitude to stick with it until we have cellulosic ethanol worked out and commercially feasible.
Fred Brilla