Apr

15

A New way to Upgrade Ethanol to Butanol

April 15, 2013 | Leave a Comment

Duncan Wass explained a discovery that could speed an emerging effort to replace ethanol in gasoline with the substantially better biofuel additive called butanol at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. In view of some experts regarding butanol as “the gasoline of the future” the report on this discovery holds [...]

Feb

19

Progress For Drop In Bio Fuel Gasoline Replacements

February 19, 2013 | 1 Comment

Renewable alternatives to gasoline like heavy alcohols such as isobutanol are promising candidates that are getting closer to your gas tank. The heavier alcohols have more carbon atoms than ethanol with two and methanol with just one.  They contain more energy than ethanol, but they are also more compatible with the existing gasoline-based infrastructure.  The [...]

Aug

16

New Tool Doubles Production of Butanol and Cuts Costs

August 16, 2012 | Leave a Comment

A new discovery at the University of Illinois should make the alternative fuel butanol more attractive to the biofuel industry.  Scientist Hao Feng has found a way to significantly reduce the cost of the energy involved and a way around a bottleneck that has frustrated producers in the past. Feng explains, “The first challenge in [...]

Jul

19

Butanol Gets a Commercial Start

July 19, 2012 | Leave a Comment

Butamax Advanced Biofuels LLC, the joint venture research effort of British Petroleum and DuPont has set up an “Early Adopters Group” (EAG).  Four more ethanol producers have joined the EAG bringing the total number of ethanol plants that have indicated interest in the company’s biobutanol technology to seven. Butamax CEO Paul Beckwith said in a [...]

Mar

30

UCLA Researchers Use Electricity and CO2 to Make Butanol

March 30, 2012 | 5 Comments

A research team at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has for the first time demonstrated a method for converting carbon dioxide into the liquid fuel isobutanol using electricity. The study paper is published today, March 30 2012, in the journal Science.  The study explains how James Liao, UCLA’s Ralph M. Parsons [...]

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 | 1 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 [...]

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