Butanol Could be a Much Better Gas Replacement Than Ethanol
The technology to make biobutanol, a non-food based biofuel, cost-competitive with gasoline isn’t here yet, but companies in the know say that it could be by 2010.
Regardless of how the debate between corn ethanol and second-generation, non-food ethanol (cellulosic ethanol) pans out, we may be arguing about the wrong thing. “Why’s that?” you might ask. You see, as a source of fuel, ethanol poses several serious problems.
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For starters, it corrodes pipes and tubing — meaning that it has to be shipped by truck, and cars have to be specially altered to be able to use it. Secondly, ounce for ounce it has a much lower energy content than gasoline.
In light of these problems with ethanol, the argument maybe shouldn’t be about first generation ethanol versus second generation ethanol, but simply about ethanol versus butanol.
Butanol is much less corrosive than ethanol and has a similar energy content to gasoline. It could be distributed using the same infrastructure used to move gasoline around and drivers would be able to use higher blends of it without altering their cars. Plus, you may not notice a difference in fuel economy when driving a car filled with butanol.
Researchers are pushing to find ways to make butanol cheaper, but right now the technology is still a ways off. Gevo, a small company focused on delivering butanol solutions, currently has a 20,000 gallon per year test butanol facility up and running. It appears that their main focus will be on providing capabilities to other companies to convert their first generation ethanol facilities into butanol facilities.
If butanol could get even a quarter of the political attention that ethanol has, its fortunes would surely change quickly. But, thinking it over, butanol’s relative obscurity as a biofuel may be a blessing in disguise. The massive amount of attention that ethanol has received seems have done more harm than good from both a public opinion and market-bubble-causing perspective.
So, maybe butanol will be the ultimate winner after all.
Source: Biofuels Digest
Image Credit: dodge challenger1’s Flickr photostream under a Creative Commons License.
In some ways, ethanol handling is the virtue of ethanol. The small number of companies with refineries and the difficulty in making a new refinery makes for a very closed club of companies who have little interest to compete. The number of people allowed to handle ethanol is legion in comparison.
There is also another form of infrastructure that matters as well. Gas engines are common and relatively easily converted to ethanol use.
That being said, I’m concerned about this recent explosion of alternatives. Mostly the efforts are laboratory breakthroughs and not at the stage of cellulosic ethanol where demonstration plants are being built.
I have to wonder where this sudden money for a broad diversity of sources and forms of bio-fuels seems to have come from. Interest has been there longer than this.
Putting on my tin foil hat I have to wonder if the point is balkanize alternative fuel advocacy. Making it so there are several factions which spend time infighting and keeping each other down and no clear choice emerges.
Interesting thoughts jpm,
Keep in mind that butanol can be used in current gas engines without any modification of the engines. Biobutanol would be a “cellulosic type” fuel, made from cellulosic materials just like cellulosic ethanol. It’s just that finding an organism that can ferment sugars and cellulose directly into butanol has been tough. Researchers at Gevo (and elsewhere) have been working on isolating strains of E. Coli that do just that and have been successful. The trick is now to bring the costs down so that people would consider buying it and getting the political support needed to bring it to the attention of the public.
A little misleading. Cars do not have to be modified to run ethanol. Not since the late 70’s when gasohol made it’s debut has there been any materials in the fuel systems that would be adversely affected by ethanol. There have already been tests of pumping ethanol thru existing pipelines with no problems. Actually before prohibition most cars were running on alcohol, not gasoline.
The biggest problem with alternative fuels is that the FEDERAL GOVERNENT chooses the winner based on politics rather than on profitability. This means that efficiency of the fuel in both energy content per unit volume and in profit generation is secondary to “sounding good”. Most of these “fuels” can survive only with government subsidies, the same type of subsidy that most people seem to hate when it is given to oil companies.
There is a subsidy that we could give to companies developing biofuels that would cost us nothing. We could eliminate taxes on companies or on specific divisions of companies that are exclusively developing biofuels. If it is a good fuel at a fair price, the company will grow and create many jobs that will generate the missing taxes. If the fuel developed is not good in terms of performance for price, then we have lost nothing in tax money used for subsidies, but we have gained the knowledge from this fuel development. This idea is hated by politicians because it takes control from the government and gives it to the entrepreneur.
Unless you are going to be putting up the money, let’s stop arguing about which is the best. Let’s instead try to get as much development as possible under way. If we do it this way, we will get choices rather than one size fits none solutions.
I believe that the future of vehicle fuel will be regional. Each region will create and use what it is most efficient at producing, but will haqve other fuel types for passers through. This is good because it spreads the wealth around and makes it possible to drive from place to place without worry.
If you were to do a quick web search about ethanol, you might discover that there are several materials that have very good resistance to any corrosive effects from ethanol interaction ( rubber is not good, but there are several other cheap & durable plastic hoses that work as good or even better than rubber hoses).
Lastly, the energy content of ethanol might be lower than those other fuel/potential fuel types, however it has naturally high octane. High compression engines love high octane, and do as good and better on the high octane fuels.
So, it is quite possible to run on cleaner burning ethanol (cellulosic or otherwise) with most modern fuel injected (serial & multi-port) engines today with little or no modification.
Ideally, an engine that runs on pure alcohol would be my personal choice.
Thanks all
Butanol absorbs water more slowly than ethanol, and BP have suggested that adding it in a blend with ethanol can help displace water that can be gained in transmission through badly maintained pipes. That makes distribution of both liquids quite a bit simpler. I hate to say it but the trick will probably be to make it in large quantities (from non-food crops)…
I have to agree with JPM up there - a multitude of ethanol handlers, facilities, etc. might do more to help things than hurt things. Also, from a performance point of view, the ethanol fuels have higher octane than gasoline, so significantly smaller engines can be made to run high turbo boost, delivering the sort of performance fat Americans (guilty!) have come to expect from 21st century cars.
(think about it: a 1994 Ford Mustang Cobra had 245hp … a 2004 Honda Accord could be had with more than 260hp!)
I’m all for ethanol and biobutanol. I thought currently, butanol was from petroleum sources but biobutanol is in its infancy. Anyway, having one fuel for all is what gets us into trouble like we were last summer. Talk what you want about what blew up the global economy, but it was high oil prices, pure and simple. Caused people to go into debt to drive their cars. We need biobutanol and cellulosic ethanol and plugins and fuel cells and CNG, we need the diversity and choice. We need all of the above!
Steve-O
while the gas prices were clearly a factor (I don’t think anyone would deny that), you had to figure a society of day-traders and house-flippers conning each other into a “money-for-nothing” economy would eventually fall apart, no?
I mean, I’m in Miami, and at least a third of the people I know didn’t have jobs. They were day-traders, or brokers, or whatever - but they didn’t have a 9-5 job where they actually “produced” anything. It was all “buy low, sell high”, and even THAT was on credit!
If someone didn’t see this coming, it’s because they didn’t want to.
There is a special relationship between ethanol and water, that butanol and gasoline don’t have. Butanol will mix with 7 to 9% water. Gasoline will mix with pre-bonded 4% hydrous ethanol. Liquid ethanol will combust with up to 50% water mixed in. Above 50% water, hydrous ethanol needs to be vaporized.
Ethanol’s compatibilty with water is the very thing that makes it superior. This is what Phil Ratte (Mechanical Engineer, BME University of Minnesota) says about ethanol in solution with water: “From 1981 to 1989, I worked with Herb Hansen, who had been an engineer on a WW II submarine, and a former captain of a nuclear submarine. We developed two prototype cars, a Ford Pinto Station Wagon and a Mitsubishi Sedan, that ran as well on 65 proof ethanol (2/3 water and 1/3 ethanol) as they did on unleaded regular gas.”
So here’s an example of two respectable researchers who ran vehicles on a vaporized solution of 1/3 ethanol and 2/3 water. How is that possible after you have diluted the low BTUs of ethanol even further, down to 26,000 BTUs? It’s because ethanol is extremely volitile and has a very high vaporization rate and flame speed. This may facilitate splitting water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen inside the combustion chamber.
Dongfeng, a major Chinese auto maker is introducing a car this year that runs on 65% ethanol and 35% water. This is a standard internal combustion engine equipped with a compact fuel processing device attached to the intake. Probably a vaporizer combined with a water splitting device. Possibly microwaves, ultrasound, or capacitor spark plugs. Dongfeng claims hydrogen is formed. The Chinese are using ethanol in a more efficient way than we are. When you leave 35% of the water in solution with ethanol at the refinery, you reduce the distillation energy needed to make ethanol by 60%. And you also extend the fuel 35% by adding water. Again the Chinese report that hydrogen is formed. That would be hydrogen on demand from hydrous ethanol. Gasoline and butanol can not do what ethanol can do with water.
Bottom line is that the highest use of ethanol is to blend it with water and not gasoline. That is the future of liquid fuel. Forget about butanol. Do what Dongfeng is doing with ethanol.