Biodiesel, or Bioethanol?
Once again, the news media gets it horribly wrong. Apparently, the text of the article is talking about a new method for obtaining some type of liquid biofuel, comparing to old ethanol efficiency numbers, and not even matching current efficiency. 2.2% energy gain isn't anything new for ethanol, and less than the 3.x (varies with source material) gain provided by biodiesel, which the article is labeled, but doesn't even cover. Whatever it is they are making, it isn't biodiesel. Nice try CNN, but you blew it!
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/06/07/biofuel.vision/index.html
The research can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org but isn't available to the great unwashed.
Abstract : Huber et al., Production of Liquid Alkanes by Aqueous-Phase Processing of Biomass-Derived ..., Science 2005 308: 1446-1450
For the real scoop from the University of Wisconsin, where they call it "diesel like" (not biodiesel), see http://www.news.wisc.edu/11260.html
Steve,
Dr. Dumesic asked me to respond to your email to him. I am a graduate student for him and was an author on the Science paper.
We hadn't realized that CNN picked up the article. (We never talked to a reporter from CNN and there are several technical inaccuracies with their article.)
Our process produces large alkanes from sugars, whereas biodiesel is produced from tryglycerides (plant oils). We view our process as complentary with traditional biodiesel production from triglycerides because we are using a different feedstock. Sugars are the major component of most biomass making up approximately 75 wt% of biomass, whereas the plant oils are only a small fraction of biomass.
We have only done our process on the bench scale, so far. Before this can become an industrial process we will need to continue to do more research (and get a lot more funding). We estimate the cetane number of the fuel to be between 46 to 80 depending on how we process it.
We don't know the emissions profile, but I imagine it would be pretty clean as they are all alkanes (no aromatics or sulfur containing compounds).
I am also unsure of the energy content, but the energy content of the fuel would be the same as the energy content of C7 to C15 straight chain alkanes.
George Huber
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/06/07/biofuel.vision/index.html
The research can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org but isn't available to the great unwashed.
Abstract : Huber et al., Production of Liquid Alkanes by Aqueous-Phase Processing of Biomass-Derived ..., Science 2005 308: 1446-1450
For the real scoop from the University of Wisconsin, where they call it "diesel like" (not biodiesel), see http://www.news.wisc.edu/11260.html
Steve,
Dr. Dumesic asked me to respond to your email to him. I am a graduate student for him and was an author on the Science paper.
We hadn't realized that CNN picked up the article. (We never talked to a reporter from CNN and there are several technical inaccuracies with their article.)
Our process produces large alkanes from sugars, whereas biodiesel is produced from tryglycerides (plant oils). We view our process as complentary with traditional biodiesel production from triglycerides because we are using a different feedstock. Sugars are the major component of most biomass making up approximately 75 wt% of biomass, whereas the plant oils are only a small fraction of biomass.
We have only done our process on the bench scale, so far. Before this can become an industrial process we will need to continue to do more research (and get a lot more funding). We estimate the cetane number of the fuel to be between 46 to 80 depending on how we process it.
We don't know the emissions profile, but I imagine it would be pretty clean as they are all alkanes (no aromatics or sulfur containing compounds).
I am also unsure of the energy content, but the energy content of the fuel would be the same as the energy content of C7 to C15 straight chain alkanes.
George Huber
posted by KK4HFJ at
2:15 PM
