The study paper is published today, March 30 2012, in the journal Science.  The study explains how James Liao, UCLA’s Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Chair in Chemical Engineering, and his team use a method for storing electrical energy as chemical energy in higher alcohols, which then can be used as liquid transportation fuels.

UCLA's Liao Electricity & CO2 to Make Butanol Fuel With Genetically Modified Organisms

Liao and his team genetically engineered a lithoautotrophic microorganism known as Ralstonia eutropha H16 to produce isobutanol and 3-methyl-1-butanol in an electro-bioreactor using carbon dioxide as the sole carbon source and electricity as the sole energy input.

For background, photosynthesis is the process of converting light energy to chemical energy and storing it in the bonds of sugar. There are two parts to photosynthesis, a light reaction and a dark reaction. The light reaction converts light energy to chemical energy and must take place in the light. The dark reaction, which converts CO2 to sugar, doesn’t directly need light to occur.

Liao explains, “We’ve been able to separate the light reaction from the dark reaction and instead of using biological photosynthesis, we are using solar panels to convert the sunlight to electrical energy, then to a chemical intermediate, and using that to power carbon dioxide fixation to produce the fuel. This method could be more efficient than the biological system.”

Continuing, Liao said that with biological systems, the plants in use require large areas of agricultural land. However, because Liao’s method does not require the light and dark reactions to take place together, solar panels, for example, can be built in the desert or on rooftops. It’s becoming obvious that any electrical source would do.

Theoretically, the hydrogen generated by solar electricity can drive CO2 conversion in lithoautotrophic microorganisms engineered to synthesize high-energy dense liquid fuels. But the low solubility, low mass-transfer rate and the safety issues surrounding free hydrogen gas limit the efficiency and scalability of such processes. Instead Liao’s team found formic acid to be a favorable substitute and efficient energy carrier.

Liao goes on, “Instead of using hydrogen, we use formic acid as the intermediary,” said Liao and then describes the process, ”We use electricity to generate formic acid and then use the formic acid to power the CO2 fixation in bacteria in the dark to produce isobutanol and higher alcohols.”

With the process worked out the team now believes the electrochemical formate production and the biological CO2 fixation and higher alcohol synthesis open up the possibility of electricity-driven bioconversion of CO2 to a variety of chemicals. In addition, the transformation of formate into liquid fuel will also play an important role in the biomass refinery process.

Liao winds up the press release saying, “We’ve demonstrated the principle, and now we think we can scale up. That’s our next step.”

Perhaps then the bedeviling questions can be answered.  How much electricity per unit of formic acid, how much formic acid and CO2 to what price of microorganisms, and what does a gallon cost?  The press release is very vague.

Yet one can fully understand the “Eurkea!” feeling and the rush to publish.  If the scale numbers work out well, the stampede to the researchers door will be quite something.

Liao points out an important point, “The current way to store electricity is with lithium ion batteries, in which the density is low, but when you store it in liquid fuel, the density could actually be very high. In addition, we have the potential to use electricity as transportation fuel without needing to change current infrastructure.”

This is an astonishing prospect.  The sources for CO2 are a long list.  Coal fired power plants alone generate an enormous store of CO2, relatively concentrated and not so hard to source. Using coal twice would an impressive accomplishment.  Displacing some oil production would be a bonus.  Depending on the state of the CO2 concentration crude oil could be a nearly obsolete product.

If the concentration required were low enough perhaps atmosphere alone would do as a source – an expectation quite hopeful, to say the least.

Liao has cracked into a huge potential opportunity.  How the first step numbers come in will be interesting, but when the process concept shows its details Liao and his team may be credited for an entire new industry.

This news makes an important point – for any nation with any sense, very low cost electricity is going to be an economy supporting bedrock and expensive electricity a millstone to dragging an economy down.

The folks at UCLA must be very proud today – as we are of them.

Aalto's Sample of Wood Chips for Butanol Production. Click image for the largest view.

Butanol is particularly suitable as a transport fuel because it is not water-soluble and has higher energy content than ethanol.  Moreover there is pressure building in the European Union as new fuel requirements state fuel must contain 10 percent biofuel by 2020.

A clear benefit of butanol is that a significantly large percentage – more than 20 percent of butanol, can be added to fuel without having to make any changes to existing combustion engines. The nitrogen and carbon emissions from a fuel mix including more than 20 per cent butanol are significantly lower than with fossil fuels. For one point of comparison, the incomplete combustion of ethanol in an engine produces volatile compounds that increase odor nuisances in the environment. Estimates indicate that combining a butanol and pulp plant into a modern biorefinery would provide significant synergy benefits in terms of energy use and biofuel production.

The significant new breakthrough in the study is to successfully combine modern wood pulp handling – and new biotechnology. Finland’s advanced forest industry provides particularly good opportunities to develop this type of bioprocesses.

Wood biomass is made up of three primary substances, the cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin. Of these three, cellulose and hemicellulose can be used as a source of nutrition for microbes in a bioprocess. Along with cellulose, the Kraft process that is currently used in pulping produces black liquor, which can already be used as a source of energy. But black liquor is not suitable for feeding microbes. In the Aalto study, the pulping process was altered so that, in addition to cellulose, the other sugars remain unharmed and can therefore be used as raw material for microbes.

The most commonly used raw materials in bio based butanol production so far have been starch and cane sugar. In contrast to this, the starting point in the Aalto University study was to use only the lignocellulose, otherwise known as wood biomass, which does not compete with food production.  The publication of the results are in Bioresouce Technology.

When wood biomass is boiled in a mixture of water, alcohol and sulfur dioxide, all parts of the wood – cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin – are separated into clean fractions. The cellulose can be used to make paper, nanocellulose or other products, while the hemicellulose is efficient microbe raw material for chemical production. The Finns’ new advantage of this new process is that no parts of the wood sugar are lost or wasted.

The published estimates indicate that combining a butanol process and a pulp plant into a modern biorefinery would provide significant synergy benefits in terms of energy use and biofuel production.  The program at Aalto University is developing new skills based on national strengths and related to the refining of biomass. The overall aim of the project is to increase the refining value of forest residues that cannot be utilized in, for example, the pulp process.

The lab results for the process successfully used batch and continuous production of acetone, butanol and ethanol (ABE).  Initially, batch experiments were performed using spent liquor to check the suitability for production of ABE. Maximum concentration of total ABE was found to be 8.79 g/l using 4-fold diluted liquor supplemented with 35 g/l of glucose.  In completing the course of testing the team returned to batch processing for the highest yields.

The Finn effort looks to have good results that may be applied wherever forests are harvested, especially where paper is made.  Butanol is the alcohol most desirable for a drop in gasoline replacement – producers won’t need to look far for customers/

The next step is to come out of the lab for a little real outside world testing.  There’s a large stock of black liquor from papermaking that could use a high value process to extract the value in a better way.  It looks like the Finn team might have it.

Beta oxidation is one of biology’s most fundamental processes. Species that use it range from single-celled bacteria to human beings.  Beta oxidation breaks down fatty acids and generates energy.

In the research for the Nature study, Professor Gonzalez and students Clementina Dellomonaco, James Clomburg and Elliot Miller took a completely different approach by reversing the beta oxidation cycle by selectively manipulating about a dozen genes in the bacteria Escherichia coli. They also showed that selective manipulations of particular genes could be used to produce fatty acids of particular lengths, including long-chain molecules like stearic acid and palmitic acid, which have chains of more than a dozen carbon atoms.

Rice grad students Dellomonaco left and Clomburg. Image credit: Jeff Fitlow at Rice University. Click image for the largest view.

“Rather than going with the process nature uses to build fatty acids, we reversed the process that it uses to break them apart,” Ramon Gonzalez, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and lead co-author of the Nature study said. “It’s definitely unconventional, but it makes sense because the routes nature has selected to build fatty acids are very inefficient compared with the reversal of the route it uses to break them apart.”

Just how quick is this breakthrough?  On a cell-per-cell basis, the bacteria produced the butanol, the biofuel that can be substituted for gasoline in most engines, about 10 times faster than any previously reported organism.

Gonzalez, in discussing the basic test said, “That’s really not even a fair comparison because the other organisms used an expensive, enriched feedstock, and we used the cheapest thing you can imagine, just glucose and mineral salts.”

Butanol is, for the most part, a drop in biofuel source for gasoline.  The production of butanol has been hampered due to the nature of butanol – it doesn’t mix with water like ethanol, and as concentration increases during production it tends to stop or kill the producing organism.  But the increased energy over ethanol and the friendliness to mix with petroleum based gasoline makes butanol the big gasoline replacement goal.

Gonzales said, “We call these ‘drop-in’ fuels and chemicals, because their structure and properties are very similar, sometimes identical, to petroleum-based products. That means they can be ‘dropped in,’ or substituted, for products that are produced today by the petrochemical industry.”

Butanol is a relatively short molecule, with a backbone of just four carbon atoms. Molecules with longer carbon chains have been even more troublesome for biotech producers to make, particularly molecules with chains of 10 or more carbon atoms. Gonzalez said that’s partly because researchers have focused on ramping up the natural metabolic processes that cells use to build long-chain fatty acids.

Just how far can the study into commercialization and scale go?  “This is not a one-trick pony,” Gonzalez said. “We can make many kinds of specialized molecules for many different markets. We can also do this in any organism. Some producers prefer to use industrial organisms other than E. coli, like algae or yeast. That’s another advantage of using reverse-beta oxidation, because the pathway is present in almost every organism.”

Gonzalez’s laboratory is racing with hundreds of labs around the world to find biomass sourced methods for producing chemicals like butanol that have historically come from petroleum.

Lots of questions are yet to be answered.  For example, yeast-making ethanol goes a very good job of getting virtually all the starches and sugars made into fuel.  Just how well the reversed process might work is yet to be explored.  Ethanol separation is simple distillation; just how a reversed butanol process works isn’t explored.

But speed matters.  Also the potential across organisms may well offer many more crop forms, perhaps cellulosic sources as well.  The Rice team has started a new field for exploration and research.

The key is the striking and impressive innovation in choosing the research field.  You don’t see “reversals’ often in research development, let alone applied to the genetic engineering.  Rice and Gonzales with the team members have made an important contribution in progress both in the research of the organism, but the precepts used in thought to choose a research path.

It’s double the congratulations!

Butanol is a four-carbon atom rather than the two-carbon atom of ethanol.  Its properties include energy density much closer to gasoline, a high octane more like ethanol, and it doesn’t mix with water as ethanol will.

Liao, chancellor’s professor and vice chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science explains why butanol is so desirable, “Unlike ethanol, isobutanol can be blended at any ratio with gasoline and should eliminate the need for dedicated infrastructure in tanks or vehicles. Plus, it may be possible to use isobutanol directly in current engines without modification.”

The team’s work represents across-the-board savings in processing costs and time, plus isobutanol is a more energy dense alcohol buy about a third than ethanol.  The team’s paper has been published online in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Cellulosic biomass like wood products, the grasses and crop residues are abundant and could be cheap, but are much more difficult to utilize than starch ready corn and sugarcane. This is because of “recalcitrance” a property of plants natural defenses to being chemically dismantled.

Direct use of the biomass could solve the processing complexity and expense that involves several steps – pretreatment, enzyme treatment and fermentation – which is more costly than a method that combines biomass utilization and the fermentation of sugars to biofuel in a direct single process.

To accomplish the conversion the team designed and developed a strain of Clostridium cellulolyticum, a native cellulose-degrading microbe that could directly synthesize isobutanol from cellulose.  Liao points out, “This work is based on our earlier work at UCLA in building a synthetic pathway for isobutanol production.”

While some Clostridium species produce butanol, these organisms typically do not digest cellulose directly. Other Clostridium species digest cellulose but do not produce butanol. None produce isobutanol, an isomer of butanol.

Now Li explains, “In nature, no microorganisms have been identified that possess all of the characteristics necessary for the ideal consolidated bioprocessing strain, so we knew we had to genetically engineer a strain for this purpose.”

While there are many possible microbial candidates, the research team ultimately chose Clostridium cellulolyticum, which was originally isolated from decayed grass. The researchers note that their strategy exploits the host’s natural cellulolytic activity and the amino acid biosynthetic pathway and diverts its intermediates to produce a more carbon atom rich alcohol than ethanol.

The researchers also note that Clostridium cellulolyticum has been genetically engineered to improve ethanol production, and this has led to additional detailed research.

Clostridium cellulolyticum has a sequenced genome available via U.S. Department of Energy’s’ Joint Genome Institute. The team’s proof of concept research sets the stage for studies that will likely involve genetic manipulation of other consolidated bioprocessing microorganisms.

This is encouraging research.  But butanol production to date shows two major issues the press release isn’t addressing.  The first is butanol is more toxic than ethanol, as butanol is produced and the proportion in the biomass mash increases, the organisms usually shut down or die.  How that is being addressed isn’t discussed.

The second issue is the utilization share of the available biomass.  Fermentation of corn and sugarcane as an example, nearly completely extracts the starches and sugars leaving the cellulose, proteins and oils in a highly useful state that earns income, offsets the cost of the crop and leaves almost no waste.

The UCLA ORNL team’s work deserves congratulations.  It not reasonable to expect they’re at the point where all that’s left is a mineral ash residue with all the carbon reformed into fuel. But it certainly looks much more simple now to get at least part of the cellulose biomass made into a drop in gasoline replacement fuel.

Liao’s grant was part of $106 million awarded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act from ARPA-E, a new agency that promotes and funds projects to develop transformational technologies to reduce the U.S.’s dependence on foreign energy, curb energy-related emissions and improve energy efficiency across all sectors of the U.S. economy.

Liao has received widespread attention for his work producing more efficient biofuels by genetically modifying E. coli bacteria, and recently, for modifying cyanobacterium to consume CO² to produce isobutanol – in a reaction powered by energy from sunlight though photosynthesis.

Now, Liao and his team would like to use electricity as the process energy source instead. The process would store electricity in liquid fuels that can be used as high-octane gasoline substitutes.

Liao understands CO² recycling issues, explaining direct synthesis of biofuels using photosynthetic microorganisms such as algae and cyanobacteria is promising but requires a large land surface area for capturing sunlight.  Solar photovoltaic cells are more efficient for energy conversion, but the electricity produced faces both a storage problem and the intermittent production matter.

Liao said, “Our proposed process will provide one of the most feasible and economical methods to convert electricity to liquid fuel in a scalable manner. The immediate impact is that it solves the electricity storage problem by converting the electrical energy to liquid fuels that are fully compatible with the current infrastructure for distribution, storage and utilization.”  Going to a liquid does provide a dense fuel and butanol would go to the largest liquid fuel market – gasoline.

Electricity driven butanol process might seem a stretch, but Liao isn’t one to be underestimated.  The professor has been at this for some years now and the early results have seeded a wide field of research. Any positive result from Liao is sure to provoke others to press on with other innovations.

Liao’s team engineered cyanobacteria produce isobutyaldehyde and isobutanol directly from carbon dioxide and sunlight as announced less than six months ago. The engineered strain of Synechococcus elongatus remained active for 8 days and produced isobutyraldehyde at a higher rate than those reported for ethanol, hydrogen or lipid production by cyanobacteria or algae. These results underscore the promise of direct bioconversion of CO² into fuels and chemicals, which bypasses the need for deconstruction of the biomass.  This is impressive research.

Cyanobacteria Producing Isobutanol. This is the full size image.

Liao’s grant seems to be out of the team’s usual field – electrical powered processes would be outside the genetic engineering field.  The experience in Liao’s team in building butanol is unassailable, somewhere in that butanol construction of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen there must be some clues on building the molecules synthetically using electricity.

The questions about sourcing the hydrogen and oxygen atoms may well be electricity’s big enticement.  Controlling the energy of the electricity put into a process might be very advantageous.  Just how Liao gets to butanol production will be fascinating.

This writer usually doesn’t consider a grant announcement as newsworthy, but butanol molecules built with electrical power – just the attempt is interesting and with Liao involved it’s sure to be going somewhere positive.  Getting a process that would scale economically that directly answers the world’s largest liquid fuel demand would be extraordinary in its implications.

Go Liao, go!

UCLAs Synechococcus Elongatus in Petri Dish. Click image for more info.

The research paper is in the Dec. 9 print edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and is available online, both as the abstract and the full text, for an indeterminate time at least.

Now the research is based on bacteria, thus the genetic modification is about the insertion of genes into the organism.  In short, the research team at UCLA has managed to find and modify the bacteria they use to produce primarily the chemical isobutyraldehyde and some isobutanol.  Isobutyraldehyde is a precursor for the synthesis of other chemicals, and isobutanol can be used as a gasoline substitute. Other bacteria and chemical processes can convert the isobutyraldehyde into isobutanol.

One engineered strain remained active for 8 days and produced isobutyraldehyde at a higher rate than those reported for ethanol, hydrogen or lipid production by cyanobacteria or by algae. The results underscore the promise of direct bioconversion of CO2 into fuels and chemicals, which bypasses the need for destroying the organisms to extract the products.  That in itself in very good news indeed, as the algae effort is essentially plugged by the work needed to get the oil out for processing.

UCLA Isobutyraldehyde Production Results. Click image for more info.

The UCLA researchers chose isobutyraldehyde as a target because it has a low boiling point, only  63 °C and its high vapor pressure is 66 mm Hg at 4.4 °C.  That suggests it can be readily stripped from microbial cultures during production. Subsequent purification is also relatively easy, and the isobutyraldehyde concentration in the production medium can remain low, below self-toxification levels.

Using more than one modified strain the UCLA team has come up with more than one production path.  As you peruse the paper it becomes clear the genetic modifications are at the very earliest stages and much more experimentation is forthcoming. For example, one discussed strain produced nearly at the rate reliable algae claims can make.  The strain lives productively for 8 days or so, and refreshed with new growth medium, resumes production without new organisms. Its quite different than algae that must be essentially killed and pressed some way to extract the oil or the yeast of ethanol production that are life cycled in each batch.

The significance of the UCLA work is that their technical skills have shown the production of isobutyraldehyde as a precursor to butanol fuel is technically feasible, using nothing more than sunlight and airborne CO2 as the raw materials.  Of note, the paper also mentions that the methods have used CO2 in concentrated form, but only up to a 5% level.  That low level lowers the threshold needed to consider the CO2 cost in the process.

While its quite early in the UCLA team’s progress, they have a very significant breakthrough.  The research could well lead to an industrial scale method to produce light motor fuel, and do so quickly.  The capital costs if or when scale is obtainable look at this point in time to be much less than algae or ethanol.  Yet, full of unknowns, the basics here are very encouraging.

The value for the work is immediate.  As an essentially a drop in replacement for gasoline, butanol production at large economical scale would cap oil prices and may well drive down the cost per passenger mile over time.

This writer is certain the algae effort will come to fruition in its time solving the problem of supplying the middle distillate range of oils like diesel, jet, kerosene and home heating oil.  A butanol solution at economical scale would fill the personal and light vehicle segment of the transport fleet including virtually all of the existing vehicles.

But butanol would have the most impact in the balance of trade problem that importing oil products load on consuming nations for their gasoline needs.

Just to keep the peace, both bacteria based butanol production and algae sourced middle distillate replacements would operate within the planet’s contemporaneous carbon cycle putting humanity in step with the rest of the life on earth.  It could lead to a reduction of the CO2 available in the atmosphere, which might seem to some – a good thing.

Gevo Butanol Pilot Facility

Quick refresh, bio butanol, the C4 alcohol, can be blended directly into gasoline and be used to make renewable hydrocarbons such as diesel and jet fuel, chemical intermediates and bio based plastics.

Gevo’s retrofit of the pilot plant was completed in less than three months.  Gevo claims in its press release the successful retrofit also represents the first step along the route to produce cellulosic biobutanol, which will be possible once biomass conversion technology becomes commercially available.

Next up Gevo will be working Wall Street looking for financing to go out and buy up to five ethanol plants to retrofit.  In another press release, Gevo announced the formation of Gevo Development, LLC to finance and develop retrofit projects.  According to Gevo spokesman Jack Huttner, Gevo is the majority owner of Gevo Development.  Gevo Development is to be managed by Mike Slaney and David Black, men who have significant experience in the financing, acquisition and operation of ethanol facilities. As managing directors of Gevo Development, they bring the skills and expertise Gevo needs to finance a rapid deployment of its bio refinery technology to produce butanol and hydrocarbons for the fuels and chemicals industry.

According to Huttner, Gevo Development is already currently working to procure a facility and has begun the process of raising money to finance the retrofit. He said the company could begin work on its first commercial-scale facility within six months.

So ‘why’ is the question for many with so much ethanol, the C2 alcohol, already making such headway?  Both can be used as a gasoline additive. But bio butanol has some clear advantages. There is no blend wall such as ethanol’s 10% limit in gasoline. Bio butanol is approved to get to 16% today – and Gevo, which is backed by investors including Khosla Ventures, Burrill & Co. and Total SA – says that “standard automotive engines can run on biobutanol blended into gasoline at any ratio.”

That’s a fact – bio butanol could fully displace gasoline and change the engineering dynamics with much higher compression ratios – from its native high octane rating.  Bio butanol has higher energy content than ethanol and a lower Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) – which means lower volatility and evaporative emissions. Importantly, standard automobiles and all those small engines can run on biobutanol blended into gasoline at any ratio.

Another advantage is bio butanol can be put into pipelines and refineries without problems. When ethanol runs through a pipeline it works kind of like a cleaner and sweeping up a lot of unwanted gunk as well as absorbing water.

On the money front the ethanol makers are trapped between the proverbial rock and the hard place of corn prices and gasoline prices. Gevo bio butanol can take multiple feedstocks (corn, stover, sugar cane) and critically can sell its output as either a gasoline additive or as a chemical feedstock to make things like plastic bottles.

Others major players are excited about biobutanol, including Butamax, the joint venture between BP and DuPont working in the UK.

The question still holding is the “commercial scale” matter.  The Gevo demonstration-scale plant in Missouri has an annual capacity of about 1 million gallons and no one knows if this is an ‘economic at scale’ model.

Undeterred, Gevo CEO Pat Gruber says, “When applied at commercial scale, this technology can give ethanol plants a new future. Retrofitting existing plants represents a quick and cost-efficient way to get to advanced biofuels. We congratulate the team in St. Joseph for their success in commissioning the plant and look forward to working with ethanol producers to convert existing plants to butanol.”

This is the first time that an existing ethanol operation has been successfully retrofitted to produce biobutanol instead of ethanol. The ICM pilot plant at St. Joseph had been designed and constructed as a reduced scale replica of a dry-milled ethanol production process.

The ICM people seem happy.  Dave Vander Griend, President and CEO of ICM said, “It was a pleasure working with Gevo’s team at our pilot plant in St. Joseph. Gevo’s biobutanol retrofit technology is an exciting option for ethanol producers looking to expand their routes to produce advanced biofuels and renewable chemical products.”

Gevo and ICM have established an exclusive arrangement to provide engineering solutions for the development of butanol and other related isomers at North American facilities that utilized dry milled corn and grain sorghum feedstocks. This has to cheer up the corn production segment of the ethanol industry with corn profits gone with the collapse of crude oil prices.

A quick perusing of the media and even blogs shows a noticeable level of doubt.  With the major questions still out there, such as the energy recovered from the feedstock, operating energy requirements and others, there is room for skepticism.  But the focus is on the commercial scale issue, which from practical sense seems answered.  The real concern is from the operations expense and  cost for the inputs vs. the income from the product.

I’d say the new Gevo Development leaders have their hands full.  A lot more data needs explored about the economics.  It really isn’t a surprise that bio butanol can be done commercially, but how do those economics work?  Is the Gevo process going to get more or less of the carbon from the feedstock?  Will there be more or less energy demand compared to ethanol?  These are the questions of the day.

Its very much a congratulatory point in renewable fuel history, a mark which allows the existing fleet to use an alternative fuel with no change and the future fleet to use even more optimized engineering to make use of the bio butanol attributes.

Ethanol has a huge head start, but the technology to retrofit offers a locked asset another means to pay its way.  Ethanol always has been a fuel with a future more akin to the other light fuels where the fuel cell is more optimal than internal combustion.

Now the industry has a choice.  And consumers do too.  That’s the very best possible outcome.

Readers will recall that butanol is a near direct replacement for gasoline with nearly the same energy density and burning properties.  But butanol is a difficult product to source from biomass.  Currently butanol is used in chemical processes and as a solvent sourced from petroleum.  Even from petroleum butanol is priced at or above $3.00 a gallon before taxes, the lure of a biomass sourced direct replacement is so very tempting.

Normally, bacteria could only produce a limited amount of butanol – perhaps 15 grams of the chemical for every liter of water in production tank – before the tank would become too toxic of butanol for the bacteria to survive.  Yang and his colleagues’ mutant strain of the bacterium Clostridium Beijerinckii lives and works in a bioreactor containing bundles of polyester fibers. In that environment, the mutant bacteria produced up to 30 grams of butanol per liter while surviving.  This is a doubling level of improvement, but 30 grams is still only 3% by volume.

The new bacterium’s life in the new fibrous bed bioreactor should improve production.  The patent abstract states, “The cells are immobilized onto the surface of and within convoluted sheets of a fibrous support material and reactant bearing fluids are caused to flow between the opposing surfaces of such convoluted sheets. . . . The product may be extracted from its aqueous media by high distribution coefficient solvents.”  This might be a way to upgrade the butanol output.

But what is left out from the patents and the news releases are the hard data on the proportion of the source carbohydrates upgraded to the butanol product.  With ethanol moving inexorably to cellulosic raw material feedstocks, butanol is way behind.  It’s not for want of trying though.  Butanol at 4 carbon atoms is much less bio friendly stuff for production than the 1 and 2 carbon atom products of methanol and ethanol.

Yang isn’t missing the whole point saying, “Today, the recovery and purification of butanol account for about 40 percent of the total production cost.  Because we are able to create butanol at higher concentrations, we believe we can lower those recovery and purification costs and make biofuel production more economical.”

The goal it seems to me would be to get to 100% consumption of the carbohydrates going in, as ethanol production does, which is very close now to getting the whole of the grain and sugar cane carbohydrates made back into fuel.

But the market driving forces might change too fast for butanol.  Personal transporters like cars, motorcycles and e-bikes might as a market move too fast for butanol to make a major splash.  The fuel cell technology seems destined, the anti carbon crowd notwithstanding, to be headed to light hydrocarbons and alcohols instead of straight hydrogen.

The news from Ohio State is worthwhile.  A sustainable source of 4-carbon butanol is going to be a market of some noteworthy size for decades if not centuries to come.  But the major efforts with deep pockets are from BP a major oil company and Dupont the huge chemical company who have teamed up to crack a new process.  Little news has been coming for a couple of years.  A tight listing of the news is here, which includes some of the research and privately financed ventures groups.

Looking out into the future holds one key point, the response by consumers to their need for lower costs for getting the work done.  Efficiency and conservation may have taken a recess in the demand destruction of the current recession, but by no means will the recession last or stay entrenched across so much of the world’s economy.  That thought puts gasoline and butanol in a darkening future for growth with alternatives likely to see a brighter picture.  As wealth building recovers, the chance could be that the gas-guzzler might come back, but more likely the wealth will go to much more efficient and conserving kinds of personal transport vehicles.

An economical high efficiency fuel cell fueled by light alcohols or petroleum at one or two carbon atoms per molecule with a wide operating temperature to recharge batteries or capacitors would signal the end of internal combustion power sets.  Where butanol might fit in such a future is more likely to be fuel for heavy equipment and in flight kinds of equipment.

If research can get going with more major caliber kinds of breakthroughs in butanol the internal combustion engines could have much longer roles in powering people’s workloads.  By all means a natural source of butanol for chemical supplies is worthwhile.  Yet this writer, for all the enthusiasm for continuation of the status quo in preserving and raising living standards, finds the building of new more efficient products more of an economy booster than a continuation of the past’s simple burning to thermal to mechanical powered systems doing the work.

A couple of years ago butanol had a huge opportunity, but the march of technology continues on, leaving butanol pointed to a market that if sense has any input, will shrink in the coming decades unless the optimal fuel cell runs on butanol.  Now that might be a research effort that might become important in the coming years if the production issues can be worked out.

Enthusiasm here is high for butanol, it’s just the range and market depth of  that applications looks to be narrowing.

Late last week saw Hans Blaschek, microbiologist in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois announce the publishing of his paper in the December 2008 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology about a breakthrough with the development of a mutant strain of a soil bacterium called Clostridium Beijerinckii that produces higher concentrations of butanol when added to a vat of plant byproduct.

Hans P Blaschek

Blaschek explains, “One of the beauties of Clostridium, is that unlike yeast that can only use six carbon sugars, this organism can use five or six carbon sugars, so you’re not limited. You can use distiller’s grains, biomass, pretty much anything that can be deconstructed to sugars and can be fermented. Clostridium eats both and it does it naturally. You don’t have to engineer the organism like people have been doing for the last 20 years with yeast trying to get it to use five carbon sugars.”

The story is, “When we did the original study 10 years ago that resulted in the mutant strain, we didn’t do it in a nice, careful way using sophisticated molecular biology. We did it using brute force and it worked. However, the problem with that approach is that you don’t really know what genetic alterations caused the enhanced production.” Now there’s one of those serendipity things. Blaschek goes on, “In 2004 we put a request in to the Department of Energy to sequence the parent strain. After we had access to the sequencing information, we were able to do the first global evaluation of the two strains – the one that over-produces butanol together with the parent strain — to see what genetic alterations were responsible for this attribute.”

Then the new strain and the original were fermented separately, sampled; the RNA isolated to see how much RNA was present at moments over the course of fermentation. The underlying assumption was that if there was more RNA there’s more protein. They have been at it doing it for a series of over 500 genes. Blaschek found that the amount of RNA being produced for certain enzymes involved in butanol production was much greater in the mutant strain than in the wild type. There was also a difference in the ability of the mutant to make spores.

Blaschek says that the organism doesn’t make any butanol until late in the fermentation process. So the thinking is that if you can prevent the organism from going into the next physiological state, which is sporulation, when the bug sets out to send its reproductive spores out, that you can keep it more or less producing butanol.

Blaschek says, “The next step is to take that knowledge and produce a second generation strain by not using the brute force approach that I used earlier, but actually going in and very specifically making those genetic alterations in a targeted sort of way. You would take the wild strain and mutate the gene for the characteristic that you’re interested in. And now that we have the sequence, we actually know where those genes are.”

The mutant strain produces higher concentrations of butanol, and has become the basis for Tetravitae BioSciences, a local company that licensed the patented strain from the University of Illinois and is scaling up to use the over-productive strain on a large scale – the size of an ethanol plant.

Meanwhile, butanol is currently being made from crude oil for industrial uses and products like paint thinner, brake fluid and plastics. Currently butanol is much more costly than gasoline. With attributes like clean burning, high energy density, and good prospects for bio sources, bio butanol could well find a market to displace or substitute for gasoline. There remain several unanswered problems, like the low concentration of butanol poisoning microorganisms, separation issues and other process matters.

In any case, what the paper makes clear is that the possible range of biomass to butanol has grown and the organism can produce to higher concentrations – both worthwhile results. Butanol is in fairness dozens of centuries behind ethanol and methanol in its development. The small carbon molecules are easier to make and do offer more hydrogen available if the market goes to fuel cells.

But for internal combustion, chemistry and industry butanol is a top target, the current best use if it can be made to market scales in the tens of millions of gallons per year. It’s worthwhile news, one more step.