For GSS Energy Use chapter 9. Excerpt: The ... cellulosic biofuels ...
process has been around since the early 1800s, when the chemist Henri
Braconnot figured out how to strip sugars from cellulose—the basic
building block of all plant life—and refine them into a crude form of
ethanol. ...For almost 200 years cellulosic ethanol has had the
potential to be one of the world’s greenest fuels. Unlike corn ethanol,
cellulosic doesn’t rely on food crops. ...Cellulosic refineries enjoyed a
brief heyday in the early 1900s—Henry Ford’s first models could run on
pure ethanol—but were driven out of business by cheap petroleum. ...in
early 2013, cellulosic ethanol refineries finally began producing
biofuel. Texas-based KiOR, the nation’s leading independent cellulosic
company, began shipping cellulosic diesel and gasoline from its refinery
in Columbus, Mississippi. INEOS Bio’s Florida refinery began producing
cellulosic ethanol from yard and wood waste in early summer. By 2014 the
Spanish energy giant Abengoa, the chemical conglomerate DuPont, the
ethanol maker Poet, and five other cellulosic refiners are expected to
begin producing next-generation biofuel. ...turning wood or grass into
fuel on a commercial scale is really hard to do. “Getting to scale” is
industry-speak for the process of moving from a small research lab
putting out fuel in 100-gallon batches to an industrial-size refinery
producing 10 million to 40 million gallons. When chemical or
pharmaceutical manufacturers scale up, they commonly do so by orders of
10 or 100, expressed as 10x or 100x. ...Congress asked the cellulosic
industry to scale up on the order of 10,000x in five years. “In a lab,
you’re working with perfectly clean wood chips,” explains Renata Bura of
the University of Washington’s biofuels and bioproducts laboratory.
“It’s almost never that pristine in a real-world refinery. At a
commercial-scale facility, you’ll have needles, bark, and branches”
polluting the mix..... http://www.onearth.org/articles/2013/08/are-cellulosic-biofuels-the-holy-grail-of-green-fuels. Bruce Barcott, OnEarth, NRDC. |
Updates >