Biofuels: It's the Economy, Stupid!
The long-term prospects of biofuels rest in the economics of production. If biofuels can be produced and marketed economically, they will gradually replace petroleum as fuels for transportation, aviation, heavy equipment, agricultural machines, and freight hauling. I expect biofuels to be the primary fuel for vehicular fuel cells as well. So how do you make biofuels more competitive, economically? Step by step.AE Biofuels,Inc. (OTCBB: AEBF) is working on:
Eliminating the initial cooking and cooling process significantly reduces energy and water consumption. In addition, the cellulose enzyme technology has proven successful in converting multiple lignocellulosic feedstocks, such switch grass, wheat grass, corn, and corn stover, the remaining corn “stalks” that are not currently being utilized as biomass, to ethanol. The multi-activity enzymes are expected to reduce capital and operating expenditures for cellulose ethanol production.__AEBF_via_Businesswire
Reducing the costs of concentrating the alcohol would help the economics of production significantly. Mitsui, GreenField Ethanol/Vaperma, and others are trying to develop membrane separation techniques (see graphic above) that would allow them to separate ethanol from water less expensively than using distillation for the entire separation.
Human ingenuity generally approaches such problems as this in a reductionist manner. Each step is looked at separately, in an attempt to achieve the same results in a simpler, cheaper, more productive manner. A useful technique is then to "step back" mentally, in increments, to look at groupings of process steps, deciding whether some steps might be streamlined or eliminated altogether.
I suspect that such process innovation might be amenable to "savant thinking", at least in part. Humans have two cerebral hemispheres, which function somewhat differently--just as humans have two sexes, male and female, which function differently. Both hemispheres (and both sexes) are vitally important in achieving optimal solutions. With the coming of electromagnetic autism, we may find ingenious ways of turning exceptional creativity on and off with a switch.
H/T No1203:Biofuels
posted by al fin at 9:37 am
2 Comments:
The idea of filtering ethanol to reduce the energy intensiveness of the process is a fascinating one and I am glad to see that it making progress. In addition to the energy savings, I suspect that it might improve some of the processes whereby more than one biofuel (ethanol and oil for biodiesel for example) could be generated with more flexibility. Such co-generation would mean having one facility sharing the expenses for two fuels and having the byproducts centralized for more efficient exploitation as resources. It encourages the concept of using biomass as a "crude" product and designing a multi-part "refinery" system to maximize the potential for both energy and chemical production. But these refineries would not have to be in ports where the oil can be shipped to but co-located with sawmills and food processing plants (or in deserts surrounded by algae farms). These mills and plants are already located as optimally as possible between the resource and the consumers and refining the wastes on site would be preferable to transporting them away to be dealt with.
The point you make about using biomass as a "crude" product or feedstock for energy refineries is exactly right.
There are several different ways to refine biomass into useful hydrocarbons. Some forms of biomass refinery will be almost indistinguishable from petro-refineries or chemical refineries, by external cursory observation.
While nature took many millions of years to turn plants into crude oil and coal, humans are learning to make even better fuels in a matter of hours and days, in bio-refineries.
I am encouraged by some of the creative thinking being shown in next generation approaches to biofuels.
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