Sounds like the premise for a good old time horror flick.
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.
Cue the late night horror flick about mutant bacteria which attack Ohio and turn everyone into gasoline (they can call it China Syndrome II)
This is good news. Butanol has serious potential. It can be burned in existing vehicles with no modification.
Guess they’ve never heard of champagne. ;’) Thanks decimon.
The Bum Rap on Biofuels
American Thinker | 5-13-08 | Herbert Meyer
Posted on 05/14/2008 3:59:06 AM PDT by Renfield
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2015711/posts
Campaign to vilify ethanol revealed
ethanol producer Magazine | May 16, 2008 | By Kris Bevill
Posted on 05/17/2008 9:22:13 AM PDT by Kevin J waldroup
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2017389/posts
streams with 3% butanol and 97% water were sent to the waste disposal ponds at my butanol plant.
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/06/problem-with-biobutanol.html
Thus, this is not economical. Butanol has a solubility of 7.7 % in water, i.e. if the bugs can survive and produce a concentration higher that that, you only take the supernatant without spending money on an expensive distillation. My bet is that it is very difficult.