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.
- » See also: BP Could Start Selling Biofuels By 2010
- » Get Gas 2.0 by RSS or sign up by email.
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.
LOL JO yeah the current speed of the markets creating “vapor money” is part to blame.
Hey Jeff Baker, that sounds very promising. I’ll have to look into that technology. I just don’t understand why here in America, the “big 3″ arent all over that stuff. They’re all going under because they are fixated on petroleum in the USA. (don’t all GM brazillian vehicles use 100% ethanol and don’t many GMs in europe use CNG?) We just went through major crisis and people have already forgotten about the $4 gas. We have to get past the chicken/egg - infrastructure/vehicle conundrum we have in this country. If we can distribute e85 to the extent we have to date, we can begin on the ethanol water blending thing too. Boone Pickens is the only person with the stones to try anything, but he’s fixated on one fuel, nat gas. Oh well. I realize it take alot of money to get an idea going but it’s frustrating that we arent hitting the ground running fast with this stuff. Wouldn’t it be great if we could nix foriegn oil before the next price jump occurs? Then we wouldnt have to buy any of the crap.
Wow dude thats cool
http://www.anonymity.at.tc
Wow what great news coming close
to replacing gas with Butanol.
I wonder what the cost per gallon
will be.
thanks from tony
Ethanol does have a high octane rating and has been used in gasoline (in small amounts) to raise octane levels for decades. The problem with ethanol (beside the corrosivity issue) is that it does not contain nearly as much energy as gasoline. When it is mixed with gasoline (typically at 10%)it degrades the burn temperature of the gas, and reduces fuel economy. The reduction of fuel economy from this commonly sold mixture can be fairly drastic, depending on the car you drive, with some experiencing as much as a 25% drop in mileage. This is to be expected as the BTU (British Thermal Unit) content of ethanol per gallon is around 65,000 and gasoline is around 115,000. Does anybody out there know what the BTU content of Butanol is?
They should have asked someone with a chemistry degree to check this article. The first thing I thought when reading the headline was “What about the wretched smell?”
While pure alcohols generally have a pleasant smell, they easily oxidize in air giving aldehydes and acids. Buteric Acid is the concentrated essence of vomit.
First the Rant.
Ethanol does not corrode pipelines. Where do you people get this crap?
METHANOL is somewhat corrosive and needs to be contained in stainless steel but ethanol does not corrode steel pipelines that are used for transporting petroleum products. Ethanol is a solvent that will dissolve the wax, varnish and gunk that builds up on the insides of petroleum pipelines. Ethanol will also absorb the water that builds up in some places in the pipelines but which does not interfere with the transportation of petroleum products. This means that when the ethanol gets to the other end of the pipeline, the pipeline is cleaner and better than before but the ethanol is too dirty and full of gunk to be used. A few weeks ago you allowed some jackass Obambot to use your website as yet another platform to broadcast his love of The One and his hatred of The Other. If your goal is to destroy the credibility of this web site which is otherwise becoming a valuable resource for information about alternate fuels, keep it up.
End of rant.
There is a lot to recommend butanol. As mentioned in the article, it does not absorb water like ethanol does and it can be mixed in any quantity with gasoline and run in an unmodified car engine. An unmodified car engine can run on 100% butanol. Butanol will raise the octane rating of gasoline, although not nearly as much as ethanol, nevertheless 100% butanol has an octane rating comparable to premium gasoline.
The reason that we don’t use it for motor fuel right now is because butanol is significantly more expensive than gasoline.
Butanol can be made biologically in the same facilities that currently produce ethanol. This has already been done on an industrial scale. Around 1910, Chaim Weizmann discovered that the Clostridium acetylbutylicum bacteria, found naturally in the root nodes of some legumes, eats carbohydrates and excretes a mixture of 6 parts butanol, 3 parts acetone and one part ethanol. The Clostridium family of also contains the bacteria that cause botulism, gas gangrene and tetanus. This was of merely academic interest until 1915 when the British Admiralty realized that a)WW I was going to go on longer than anybody had originally thought b)they needed a lot of acetone to make cordite for the big guns on their dreadnought battleships c)their previous suppliers of acetone in Germany were unlikely to provide the products they needed.
Weizmann’s discovery was utilized by taking over a number of whiskey distilleries and using C. acetylbutylicum instead of yeast. Eventually cheaper feed stocks than malted barley were sought and molasses was found to work fine. As WW I went on, a number of purpose built plants were built to produce acetone in Canada, the US and in South Africa. One of those was in Boston and it gained some notoriety when a large, shoddily built tank full of molasses broke causing a molasses flood which killed dozens of people. For years afterwords that part of Boston had the faint smell of molasses. Chaim Weizmann became rich from his discovery, went on to become president of the World Zionist Organization and eventually the first president of Israel.
The production of acetone resulted in the production of twice as much butanol. During WW I they just built tanks and stored the stuff since they didn’t have any use for it. Even under the lax environmental rules of those days and even during a war, they could not get away with dumping tons of vomit smelling, flamable poison into the rivers. They could have used the butanol as airplane fuel due to its high octane but I guess it just never occurred to them. In the 1920s the butanol was used as a paint solvent for painting the cars that were being produced in large numbers during the economic good times.
Acetone and butanol continued to be produced by fermentation and distillation until the 1950s when cheap oil and increases in the price of molasses make it cheaper to produce those products from petroleum.
Using the naturally occurring Weizmann Organism ( Clostridium acetylbutylicum ) existing ethanol plants can shift to making butanol from their current feed stocks although they will also produce a lot of acetone and ethanol in the process. There is a good possibility that genetic engineering might modify this bacteria to produce more butanol and less of the other products. There is also a good chance that the bacteria can be engineered to consume cellulose.
I agree with Mark from Texas (I’m a Texan, too. Go figure), in his “rant” and am gratefule for the information in his following story.
Now for my own “rant”:
I don’t see an Obama administration as being very friendly toward alternative fuel sources. During the campaign, he originally started out with one list of “acceptable” alternatives. It was a very short list which trumpeted solar and wind technologies with vague mention of “biodiesel” (not ethanol) and specifically excluded nuclear. Not very “progressive”, eh?
I have read several articles that showed him to be less than enthusiastic about ethanol. Later in the campaign, as with many other issues, he “changed” the list to include the more “popular” vote-getting positions, and lent lip service to ethanol.
He is a politician, nothing more. He is NOT a savior, or messiah, as his mesmerized worshippers and the media seem to believe.
One also has to wonder where our oh-so-honest and unbiased, agenda-driven fact mangling news media will stand on these fuels. And let’s not forget the Hollwierd Halfwits. They know SOOO much. Let’s vote the way they tell us to, maybe they’ll send an autograph!
I look for the Obama administration to be another Carter-esque debacle, only far worse. According to a recent Zogby poll, he was elected by people who didn’t know what party was in control of Congress (some assumed that since the current President is a Republican, then they control that august body of liars, thieves and panderers), or didn’t know who Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid or William Ayers are. One wonders if they even know what the capitol of the state they live in is.
Of course, our fair and balanced media made sure they knew all about Palin’s shortcomings, but absolutely NONE of Obama’s.
Okay, I’ll end my rant, as well.
As to the fuels, I read a lot of articles that boil down to “the technology and/or manufacturing and distribution systems are not in place and perfect, so let’s not bother.” It seems to me that America’s short-attention-span mentality wants our problems to be solved in the timespan of a movie, and if it’s not, then we lose focus.
I also read a lot of articles that misrepresent the truth about the various fuels. Again, our media does a disservice to the American public.
I have (or had) plans to start a business producing crate engines for collectorcars, muscle cars, and hot rods, purpose-built to maximize the power potential of ethanol.
I am going to get certified in CNG conversions in Feburary.
I am researching hydrogen generators, and so on.
I am trying to do my part for the economy, the fuel situation and the environment.
Will our new President and his administration do the same? Or will they, as usual, get in the way?
Sorry, I guess this whole post is a rant. Unlike the Obamatrons, I hold no faith in politicians. They’re the ones who got us to the point we are at. They’ve proved their untrustwortiness time and time again.
For the sake of the nation, I hope I’m wrong about Obama. But my gut feeling tells me that the love affair will be short lived, and life in America is going to get harder. Certainly not utopian.
Ethanol is far inferior in energy content to gasoline and will never produce the fuel economy expected of gasoline. Ethanol blends are hard on automotive fuel sytems as ethanol is corrosive and absorbs water out of damp air. Ethanol contains aprox. 65,000 BTU per gallon as opposed to gasoline at 115,000. Addition of small amounts of ethanol improve octane of gasoline and have been used for decades by refiners. Larger amounts (10% is common) cause loss of fuel economy on the order of 15-25%! Does anybody know how much BTU content is in bio-butanol?
fuck biofuel. We need something that runs off of clean energy.
“Ethanol is far inferior in energy content to gasoline and will never produce the fuel economy expected of gasoline.”
Actually, that is not an accurate statement. If you are basing your claim on current “FlexFuel” vehicles, then the part about economy would apply. That’s because Detroit builds them to run primarliy on gasoline, with a compression ratio of approx. 8.5 to 1. That is far too low for ethanol to be efficient, since E85 has an octane rating of 103, which requires a higher ratio of 13.5 or 14 to 1. Give it that and it will easily match, or even outperform gasoline in both economy and horsepower. Just ask the drag racers and the Indy Racing League.
As far as harming the fuel system is concerned, that would be true of cars produced before 1979. From that point on, fuel systems were redesigned to be compatible with alcohol fuels.
Ethanol was added to gasoline to replace an outlawed additive, not as an octane booster. On the flip side, E85 has 15% unleaded gasoline to denature it (make it undrinkable), to give any flame that might occur some color (alcohol flames are invisible) and to help displace or prevent water absorbtion.
While gasoline may have the BTU values over ethanol, that only occurs when you have a thorough burn. I can’t think of a single production vehicle that has a completely thorough burn, though. That’s where the carbon that fouls your plugs and valves, and dirties your oil comes from. Not to mention the pollutants it produces.
Alcohol, on the other hand, burns much more thoroughly and cleaner than gasoline. The only significant carbon left behind comes from the additives. Engine and oil fouling are greatly reduced and the emmissions are a fraction of what gasoline produces.
However, since E85 requires higher compression, the amount of NOX produced is higher. This can be addressed by a type of catalytic converter.
Nay-saying ethanol based purely on engine performance is somewhat short-sighted. Pollution, finite oil resources and national security are serious considerations, when addressing alternative fuels.
What alternative do you suggest, because based on your post, nothing tops gasoline. So should we just give up and continue down the Big Oil path?
If as much energy went into developing alternatives as goes into shooting them down, we could make energy independence a reality for our children, if not us.