Harry Campbell
Exciting new ways to make fuels are emerging.
The world of fuel chemistry and production is undergoing exciting change. The range of possible biofuels includes butanol, cellulosic gasoline, cellulosic biodiesel, cellulosic "biocrude," and many more. We will be able to remove a hydroxyl group here, add a hydrogen there, and create a longer or shorter carbon chain to optimize fuels.
Researchers and innovators from disparate fields are coming together to work out a new approach to biofuels. This "innovation ecosystem" is replacing the traditional energy research organizations and companies, which have been unable to make sufficient progress. While some common chemical and biological pathways, such as the biological ones used to ferment sugar for ethanol, have long been used successfully in biofuel production, others pathways--such as those that enable the thermal and catalytic conversion of biomass--await technology innovation. The companies working to deliver the necessary breakthroughs range from small, privately funded startups to behemoths such as BP.
Important work is under way. LS9 is using synthetic biology to move pathways from plants into bacterial cells, with the goal of making petroleum from the fermentation of cellulosic feedstocks. Amyris, a company that began working on the malaria drug artemisinin, is transforming itself into a biofuel company using the same technology platform. Gevo is now taking on BP and DuPont in the race to commercialize butanol (see "Cellulolytic Enzymes").
Range Fuels has developed an anaerobic gasification technique to convert biomass into ethanol. Elsewhere, a number of researchers speculated that they could improve on Range's syngas-to-ethanol catalytic-conversion process by replacing it with microbes (see "Ethanol from Garbage and Old Tires"). Coskata was born as a science experiment with a license to the technology from the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University, a few million in seed funding, and a few great researchers.
A wide variety of biofuel processes are being tried in two important areas: designing new microbes and enzymes with the latest technologies, such as synthetic biology, and using fresh catalysts and new approaches for gasification and catalysis. These and other advances in biofuels have happened in just the last few years. Imagine what new ideas the innovation ecosystem will bring to the development of biofuels in the next decade.
Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that has backed a number of biofuel companies, including LS9, Amyris, Gevo, Range Fuels, and Coskata.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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killian
74 Comments
inefficient
The textbook Fundamentals of Renewable Energy Processes says that sugarcane (one of the best feedstocks) solar energy-to-ethanol conversion efficiency is 0.13%. A Stirling dish, for comparison is 30% efficient, or 231 times better than sugarcane ethanol. To make it even more lopsided, electricity is a high-grade energy source; it can be turned into work with high efficiency. Turning ethanol and similar energy carriers into work is much less efficient (e.g. subject to the Carnot limit), by a factor of 2 to 4. So that factor of 231 is increased to a factor over 500 if you count the work that results from the original sunlight.
Algae is probably the most efficient harvester of sunlight for use as a feedstock, and still there is an advantage of 8 to 16 times in just converting sunlight into electricity directly. Indeed it would take only 5,000 sq.mi. to power all U.S. 2050 passenger vehicles with Stirling dishes using existing electric vehicle technology.
The recent Searchinger and Fargione papers in Science warn us that without paying attention to land use, biofuels can easily take decades to breakeven on greenhouse gas emissions. We don't have decades to solve our global warming crisis.
Biofuels have a role to play, but it is not a large one. Turning Ag waste (e.g. corn stover) into E85 or butanol for a few percent of our passenger vehicle miles, or turning algae into biodiesel for our non-electric freight transportation is reasonable, but we need to be careful that biofuels do not become a dead-end detour that delays the electrification of most transportation.
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prbenoit
3 Comments
Re: inefficient
I like most of what I've been hearing. But how about this: Kudzu as BIOMASS
It is currently at or near the top of invasive species lists for virtually every southern state. Kudzu, as a member of the Fabaceae family, is a natural nitrogen fixer and, thus, grows rapidly across the landscape with no inputs (e.g., fertilizers). Given its perennial growth habit, its rapid growth rate, and the fact that kudzu has a high starch content (particularly its root system), its potential as a biofuel could be tremendous. However, to date, this potential has basically gone unstudied.
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Al Truism
1 Comment
Re: inefficient
While your arguement is sound, there is a relatively simple way to beat your issue of efficiency. I have a bioreactor (machine that grows algae) that when configured to fit a 30' x 80' area, assuming the rest is present (i.e. facing South, no shade from trees etc.) this bioreactor design will grow up to 20 Kg of biomass per day. If you scale that up, (assuming you can feed the machine) one square mile of land can produce easily 250 tons of algae per day. This system also extracts CO2 from the atmosphere which is the only real way we are going to get any handle on global warming at all.
Imagine, if you will, at every railyard, a bioreactor. At every coal mine, a bioreactor (to go carbon neutral at the source). Covering much of the open space between airport runways and adding a process called CENTIA (ready on a mass scale by 2009) and the biodiesel made from algae can be "massaged" into a tighter molecule which has the same physical properties as jet fuel. Oh yeah I almost forgot. My design can also grow the primary componants for biobutinol (a green gasoline replacement).
This design is 150% solar efficient. careful attention to the exact placement and materials used for the solar collector allows the seemingly impossible. In a single square yard, 13.5 square feet of properly configured solar collector.
Basically, if you can grow enough algae, efficiency eventually becomes a non-issue. If anyone wants to know how I do it? All it takes is a phone call, and an appropriate donation.
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skipcjr
6 Comments
Re: inefficient
I like it......
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killian
74 Comments
Re: inefficient
When NREL studied algae, the efficiency peaked at about 7.5% (but you needed half intensity sunlight to achieve that). I have no idea what you mean by 150% efficient. Please explain, because obviously you don't mean you get 150% more energy than the sunlight that falls on the algae, since that is impossible.
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