Backers Say It Is Time For BioButanol To Take Its Place in Energy Lineup
By Greg Johnson May 5, 2009
By Greg Johnson, Contributor
It's been four years since David Ramey fueled up his unmodified 1992 Buick Park Avenue with butanol derived from biomass and made a 10,000-mile road trip that took him from Blacklick, Ohio to San Diego and back.
The trip, which included stops along the way to court members of the media and environmental agency personnel, was conceived as a way to prove that "biobutanol" had inherent environmental and fuel-economy benefits over its better-known cousin in the green fuels family, ethanol.
Flash forward to 2009 and biobutanol still isn't getting the respect that Ramey and other proponents say the fuel deserves. Ramey, for example, continues to make demonstration drives - he'll fuel up a vehicle with biobutanol for the Fourth off July parade in nearby Gahanna, Ohio.
"There has been very little funding for biobutanol research over the past 30 years and we are simply in the infancy of this new technology," Ramey wrote in a recent email to Green Car Advisor. "Many are talking about biobutanol but few are producing it."
That situation is about to change, according to biobutanol backers who describe the fuel as a worthy challenger to ethanol. When properly formulated, they say, butanol burns cleaner than ethanol, has a higher energy density, can be transported in existing petroleum-product pipelines and won't hurt seals, gaskets or other parts of internal combustion engines.
Ramey has worked for more than five years to raise funding needed to commercialize his company's patented fermentation process for producing biobutanol. He said his privately held ButylFuel LLC is "looking for positive results in this next year."
Englewood, Colorado-based Gevo Inc. is partnering with ICM Inc., the company that built most of this country's corn-powered ethanol plants, on another advanced fermentation process that would allow ethanol plants to produce butanol.
Gevo has opened a 10,000 gallons-per-year pilot plant that produces 2-methylproponal (which is converted into butanol). The companies plan to have a commercial-scale plant operating by the end of the year that will produce more than 20 million gallons of 2-methylproponal and hydrocarbons per year.
Such big energy companies as BP Global and Dupont also are developing technologies that would turn biomass into butanol.
Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago recently conducted a study that compared ethanol and butanol as oxygenates in direct-injection, spark-ignition engines. Here's a bit of what the researchers presented at a recent meeting:
"Overall, the ability of butanol to perform equally as well as ethanol from an emissions and combustion standpoint, with a decrease in fuel consumption, initially appears promising. Further experiments are planned to explore the full operating range of the engine and the potential benefits of higher blend ratios of butanol."
Butanol backers say that gasoline, diesel and jet fuel equivalents can be extracted from just about any form of biomass, including corn stover, switchgrass and forest-product residues.
"These products are identical to petroleum-based products," said Gevo Chief Executive Patrick Gruber, "and they're going to be produced on a cost-effective and sustainable basis from renewable resources."
Gruber believes that butanol derived from biomass using its technology can become competitive with petroleum-based gasoline when oil is at or above $50 per barrel.
So why hasn't butanol made better inroads?
In part because of technological issues that are now going by the wayside. But it supporters also maintain that the fuel has bumped up against hard political realities.
"Ethanol still has all the funding and lobbying going for it," said Ramey, who adds that butanol was mentioned in the most recent federal energy bill, marking the first time that Washington, D.C. has included the fuel in energy legislation.
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