Posted on 08/19/2009 6:15:35 AM PDT by decimon
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Engineers at Ohio State University have found a way to double the production of the biofuel butanol, which might someday replace gasoline in automobiles.
The process improves on the conventional method for brewing butanol in a bacterial fermentation tank.
Normally, bacteria could only produce a certain amount of butanol -- perhaps 15 grams of the chemical for every liter of water in the tank -- before the tank would become too toxic for the bacteria to survive, explained Shang-Tian Yang, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State.
Yang and his colleagues developed a mutant strain of the bacterium Clostridium beijerinckii in a bioreactor containing bundles of polyester fibers. In that environment, the mutant bacteria produced up to 30 grams of butanol per liter.
The researchers reported their results at the American Chemical Society meeting Wednesday in Washington, DC.
Right now, butanol is mainly used as a solvent, or in industrial processes that make other chemicals. But experts believe that this form of alcohol holds potential as a biofuel.
Once developed as a fuel, butanol could potentially be used in conventional automobiles in place of gasoline, while producing more energy than another alternative fuel, ethanol.
Yang said that this use of his patented fibrous-bed bioreactor would ultimately save money.
“Today, the recovery and purification of butanol account for about 40 percent of the total production cost,” explained Yang, “Because we are able to create butanol at higher concentrations, we believe we can lower those recovery and purification costs and make biofuel production more economical.”
Currently, a gallon of butanol costs approximately $3.00 -- a little more than the current price for a gallon of gasoline.
The engineers are applying for a patent on the mutant bacterium and the butanol production methodology, and will work with industry to develop the technology.
This research is funded by the Ohio Department of Development.
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Contact: Shang-Tian Yang, (614) 292-6611; Yang.15@osu.edu Written by Pam Frost Gorder, (614) 292-9475; Gorder.1@osu.edu
Sounds like the premise for a good old time horror flick.
Sounds like the premise for a good old time horror flick.
Chlamydia gone wild.
So it takes 1000 ml of liquid to make 30 ml of butanol, thats 3% efficiency. If you want 1 billion gallons of BuOH you will need to make, process, extract, and dispose of over 300 BILLION gallons of culture media. Or you could just pump oil out of the ground and heat it to make gasoline.
What will that gasoline cost?
“What will that gasoline cost?”
Since that is the way gasoline is currently made, it will cost what you are paying at the pump. That cost includes, taxes and transportation fees that the BuOH guys no doubt have failed to add in their cost estimate. Having worked on bioprocessing projects in the past I can tell you that large scale biofuels production will never be cost effective as long as oil and natural gas can simply be pumped out of the ground.
It’s water that is used and thus can be recycled.
In my view this is still a long ways off as the production time and material cost may be uneconomic.
There are other schemes that hold better promise.
The information of this article points to the failed promise of ethanol and how some researchers are attempting to boost ethanol type additives. In other words the real information is seen in the failure of ethanol.
Good thing you don’t see metals like nickel, zinc and moly being produced. You’d have a cow.
Cue the late night horror flick about mutant bacteria which attack Ohio and turn everyone into gasoline (they can call it China Syndrome II)
Pumping it out of the ground is not so simple. Nor is refining it.
>So it takes 1000 ml of liquid to make 30 ml of butanol, thats 3% efficiency.
Not necessarily. We could apply the technology we have from beer-brewing’s ‘continuous systems’ where the alcohol, which is lighter than water, is allowed to float to the top. This higher concentration location is where the alcohol is siphoned off and the sugar-water replenishing the volume at the bottom.
“Not necessarily. We could apply the technology we have from beer-brewing’s ‘continuous systems’ where the alcohol, which is lighter than water, is allowed to float to the top. This higher concentration location is where the alcohol is siphoned off and the sugar-water replenishing the volume at the bottom.”
Alcohol is fully soluble with water so I’m not sure how well tjhe 2 phase separation process you are describing would work for beer. It would work much better for butanol since it is both insoluble with and lighter than water. 2 phase separations have been around a long time and I would certainly expect that they tried it to solve their product toxicity problem. It probably didnt work well since they ended up needing a mutant strain.
Probably, but if the bacteria form colonies couldn’t those colonies be ‘anchored’ to the bottom/non-toxic water? Or perhaps that’s what this technique does...
This is good news. Butanol has serious potential. It can be burned in existing vehicles with no modification.
As long as it's not subsidized I'm fine with it.
... refined, and sold for something approximating current prices. But how long can that continue? We got a brief glimpse of $4 gasoline not so long ago. A global recession has cooled off commodities markets, but the recession will end. China is now the world's leading automotive market. India is discovering cars. Ten years from now, do you think the price of gasoline will be closer to $10 or $2?
I'm all in favor of drilling offshore, drilling ANWR, and going after the oil shales, but I still expect that we will need to integrate new fuels into the mix. At the moment, the biggest wild card is probably algae, which can be grown in industrial quantity and can produce biofuels at a rate equivalent to 5,000 gallons/acre (demonstrated at lab scale) and perhaps 10,000 or more (projected).
That's a game changer. We can grow our fuel, and the A-rabs can go back to selling sand. It's all a question of price, but bioengineering is steadily driving biofuels costs down, while growing demand will continue to drive oil prices up in the long run. There will be volatility in the markets, but at some point the trend lines will cross for good.
Other things to look at are the "higher heating value" and the products of combustion. The heating value gives you an insight into how much energy per pound you can expect (all petroleum products are around 18,000 BTU/LB while alcohols are about 12,000) and is a major factor in determining MPG. Products of combustion points to potential pollution and possible steps needed to abate it (oxidizing alcohols generally produce aldehydes, nasty stuff).
Regards,
GtG
Anyone know how well butanol compares to gasoline? That is, is butanol just as effecient in an engine or do you burn more of it for the same "power" produced by gasoline?
If it is less efficient then the true cost/gallon would be more than $3 (so what would be the true cost as compared to gasoline). However, if it is just as efficient (or better), and the $3 holds, I would expect to start seeing investors gearing up to get this into larger production (especially as economies of scale kick in, further reducing the cost and making it even more competitive).
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