Dec

20

A New and Efficient Wood to Butanol Process

December 20, 2011 | 2 Comments

Professor Aadrian van Heiningen and Tom Granström with a team of scientists at Aalto University in Finland and associated with the University of Maine in the U.S. have developed a process to make fuel grade butanol and other industrial chemicals from wood biomass. Butanol is particularly suitable as a transport fuel because it is not [...]

Aug

15

Genetic Engineering Runs High Speed Metabolism In Reverse

August 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment

They must have some interesting brains storming sessions at Rice University.  Bioengineering researchers at Rice have unveiled a new method for rapidly converting simple glucose, sugar, into biofuels and petrochemical substitutes.  Rice’s team describes with a paper published online in Nature, how it reversed one of the most efficient of all metabolic pathways — the [...]

Mar

10

Cellulose Direct to Butanol Bug Revealed

March 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced two of its scientists, Yongchao Li and Yunfeng Yang of ORNL collaborating with a team led by James Liao of the University of California at Los Angeles has for the first time produced isobutanol directly from cellulose.  This achievement has been for years a prime national goal, as it [...]

May

28

Making Butanol With Electricity

May 28, 2010 | 12 Comments

The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded James C. Liao, Chancellor’s Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, $4 million over three years to develop a method for converting carbon dioxide into the liquid fuel isobutanol using electricity. Liao’s grant was [...]

Dec

11

Breakthrough Bacteria That Makes Butanol From CO2

December 11, 2009 | 9 Comments

UCLA researchers at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide in a set of steps to produce the liquid fuel isobutanol.  Isobutanol is a form of the alcohol butanol, a favorite for many in a transition away from fossil fuels as butanol based products [...]

Oct

8

Here Comes Bio Butanol at Commercial Scale

October 8, 2009 | 9 Comments

Gevo, Inc. has announced the start up of the first bio butanol demonstration plant.  The new facility is designed from retrofitting an existing demonstration scale ethanol plant to produce the bio butanol. In successfully producing bio butanol at the one million gallon per year rate at a pilot plant in St. Joseph, Missouri, Gevo is [...]

Aug

24

A Butanol Breakthrough

August 24, 2009 | 3 Comments

Shang-Tian Yang, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State University announced last week at the American Chemical Society meeting that he has engineered a mutant bacterium that doubles his butanol process output. Readers will recall that butanol is a near direct replacement for gasoline with nearly the same energy density and burning [...]

Jan

13

One More Big Step For Bio Butanol

January 13, 2009 | 2 Comments

Many visits and email come looking for bio butanol information and in fact those efforts are justified. Butanol could be a one for one substitute for gasoline and could even be an extender or additive for diesel fuel. It’s a better panacea, if you’ll pardon term than ethanol, as it’s just a better fuel for [...]