BUTANOL?

Check out this very interesting site. This company has a patent which they are pretty vague about, but anyway, they claim they can bring butanol to the market cheaper than ethanol. Wow. Butanol is a four carbon molecule, as opposed to ethanol's two carbon version, and thus would deliver a bit more energy.

"EEI has developed and patented a process which makes fermentation derived butanol more economically viable and competitive with current petrochemical processes and the production of ethanol. This economic improvement was developed under a federal DOE/STTR grant from the Department of Energy through the Small Business program - (DE-F-G02-00ER86106), in association with Dr. S.T. Yang of the Ohio State University applying Dr. Yang's Fibrous Bed BioReactor patent (FBB) to our process patent. The final report is available in PDF format (Final DOE Report). A tremendous amount of work has been published by Dr. Yang over the past 15 years on the efficacy of the FBB reactor model and can be found at his site.

Butanol is presently manufactured from petroleum. Historically (early 1900s – 1950s) it was manufactured from corn and molasses in a fermentation process that also produced acetone and ethanol and was know as an ABE (acetone, butanol, ethanol) fermentation. However, as demand for butanol increased, production by fermentation declined mainly because the price of petroleum dropped below that of sugar when the USA lost its low-cost supply from Cuba around 1954. EEI has developed and patented a process which makes fermentation derived butanol more economically viable and competitive with current petrochemical processes. "

Hmm....there's more...

" Butanol is also a replacement for gasoline as a fuel, to an even greater degree than ethanol, due to more favorable physical properties, economics, safety and the fact that it works without having to modify the engine of your personal car."

WITHOUT MODIFICATIONS TO YOUR CAR? This would mean that no one has to incentivize the purchase of flex-fuel vehicles, the DEMAND side of the equation would be already achieved. Wow.

" * Higher energy content (110,000 Btu’s per gallon for butanol vs. 84,000 Btu per gallon for ethanol). Gasoline contains about 115,000 Btu’s per gallon.
* Butanol is six times less “evaporative” than ethanol and 13.5 times less evaporative than gasoline, making it safer to use as an oxygenate in Arizona, California and other states, thereby eliminating the need for very special blends during the summer and winter months.
* Butanol can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines where ethanol must be transported via rail, barge or truck
* Butanol can be used as a replacement for gasoline gallon for gallon e.g. 100%, or any other percentage. Ethanol can only be used as an additive to gasoline up to about 85% and then only after significant modifications to the engine. Worldwide 10% ethanol blends predominate. "

Why has there been little or no effort to promote buanol as an alternative fuel? My guess would have to do with government intervention and the fact that whatever breakthrough these guys are alluding to, has made its production a bit cheaper, and thus the betting simply wasn't on Butanol.

"Prior to the success of EEI’s work, production of butanol from corn and other biomass has been stymied by the lack of technology to make it economically viable. The problem has been historically low yields and low concentrations of butanol compared to those of ethanol.

The historical ABE fermentation technology produces a variety of fermentation products. The ABE process uses bacteria to produce Acetone Butanol and Ethanol. This fermentation process yielded a 6:3:1 ratio of Butanol, Acetone and Ethanol.

That is, for each bushel of corn you would garner (1.3) gallons of butanol (0.7) gallons of acetone and (0.13) gallons of ethanol with concentrations of 1-2%.

If you compared ABE yield to that of the yeast ethanol fermentation process, the yeast process yields 2.5 gallons of ethanol from a bushel of corn, with concentrations of 10-15% it becomes very clear why ethanol was chosen as an alternative fuel source over butanol in the 1970's and 80's."

So how does butanol stack up from an economic standpoint?

"This will not be known in detail until we complete testing on the B-100 Mobile Demonstration model and the B-1,000 pilot plant. However, we can share the results of estimates we developed to established the merits of proceeding with these phases of the work.

Our preliminary cost estimates suggest that we can produce butanol from corn for about $1.20 per gallon, not including a credit for the hydrogen produced. This compares with ethanol production costs of about $1.28 per gallon. Taking into account the higher Btu content of butanol, this translates to 105,000 Btu per dollar for butanol and 84,000 Btu per dollar for ethanol with corn at $2.50 per bushel. As a further point of reference, butanol produced from petroleum costs about $1.35 per gallon to manufacture.

The economics of the EEI process will be even more attractive when waste material is used as feedstock instead of corn and the price to produce a gallon is $0.85 . In such cases the need and cost to grow and prepare the corn for fermentation, by far among the major cost items, are eliminated."

Well, we'll just have to keep an eye on butanol, and EEI. If butanol becomes economically viable, then the sheiks had better begin to shake, don't you think?