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 [...]