Either image of butanol works in you car today   !    

How Butanol Differs From Other Major Alcohol Fuels

Butanol is a four-carbon alcohol, double the carbon of ethanol and containing 25% more energy (Btu’s).

Butanol is produced by fermentation, from corn, grass, leaves and agricultural waste – anything that grows on the planet.

Butanol with a Reid Value of 0.33 psi. is safer to handle (less evaporative) when compared to gasoline at 4.5 and ethanol at  2.0.

Butanol is an alcohol that can be - but does not have to be - blended with fossil fuels – replaces gasoline one to one.

Butanol can be shipped through existing pipelines. It is far less corrosive than ethanol.

Butanol when consumed in an internal combustion engine yields no SO_X, NO_X or carbon monoxide; the CO₂ is ‘Green’.

Butanol solves the safety problems associated with the infrastructure for hydrogen supply.  Reformed butanol has four more hydrogen atoms than ethanol, resulting in a higher energy output (10 watt-hr/gram vs. 8 for ethanol).

Butanol is currently an industrial commodity, with a 2.4 billion pound per year market selling for more than gasoline at $3.38 per gallon.

Hydrogen generated during the butanol fermentation process is easily recovered, increasing the energy yield of a bushel of corn by an additional 18% over the energy yield of ethanol produced from the same quantity of corn.

NEED

            Nationally there is a need to become independent from foreign oil and to comply with the U.S. Strategic Chemicals and Clean Air Acts.  There is a need to replace ethanol and gasoline with a safer less evaporative power grade alcohol fuel.  There is a need to find a biomass source of hydrogen, and a safe high energy density liquid fuel for fuel cell power generation and distribution.  There is a need to revitalize the agricultural sector by developing new value added products that will have a high commercial and industrial demand well into this century, while at the same time creating jobs in depressed areas such as Ohio’s Appalachian Region.
 

National security is addressed by the creation of biorefineries supplying the country’s fuel needs while being disseminated throughout the country’s Corn-Belt and other biomass source regions –‘Bio-Belt’.  Locally generated fuel and electricity makes more sense than having our refineries located on coastal regions.  Local production makes it harder for acts of God and terrorist to disrupt entire sections of the electric grid and thus directly improves homeland security. Supplies are local thereby reducing the possibility of transportation sabotage.

            State wise (Ohio) can expect to see not only jobs at the envisioned BioRefinery Campus but also in the development of BioCottage industries, which consume the various raw products produced at the Bio-Campus.  A biorefinery campus is intended to be located in Junction City and New Lexington, Ohio and will impact some 25 local towns on the way to the Ohio River.  Towns such as Glouster, The Planes, Albany, Athens, Diesville, Dexter, Hobson’s Junction and Pomeroy can be developed into a new 21^st and 22^nd century plastics industry guaranteeing secure jobs.

 

The HISTORY OF BUTANOL and Ethanol

Production of industrial butanol and acetone, via ABE (Acetone, Butanol, Ethanol) fermentation started in 1916 during the First World War.  Chime Weizmann (US Patent No. 1,315,585) a student of Louie Pasture isolated the microbe that made acetone.  England approached the young microbiologist and asked for the rights to make acetone for cordite – a smokeless powder used to win World War One.  Under one condition – Israel would have a homeland after the war and so it was.  Up until the 1920s acetone was the product sought, but for every pound of acetone fermented two pounds of butanol were formed.  Finally someone took cotton nitrate and mixed it with butanol creating a fast drying lacquer and in three years the automotive industry turned the market around so around 1927 we could not make enough butanol and acetone became the byproduct.  Indeed butanol was used to make synthetic rubber and helped win WWII.

The Acetone, Butanol & Ethanol (ABE) fermetation is one of the oldest known industrial fermentations. It was ranked second only to ethanol fermentation by yeast in its scale of production, and is one of the largest biotechnological processes ever known. These anaerobic microbes were hardy enough to have created the first microbiological industry in the world. One of the world’s largest facilities, Commercial Solvents International, was located in Terre Haute, Indiana. 

Since the 1950's ABE fermentation declined continuously, and almost all butanol is now produced via petrochemical routes.  The production of butanol by fermentation declined mainly because the price of petrochemicals dropped below that of starch and sugar substrates such as corn and molasses.   The labor-intensive batch fermentation system's overhead combined with the low yields of 1.3 gallons butanol and 0.75 for acetone per bushel corn and a low concentration of only 1 to 1.5 percent butanol before the microbes died was also a reason. Truly a brew masters art. The loss of our cheap molasses supply from Cuba under Castro’s control in the mid 1950’s, put together with the expensive distillation recovery process and cheap foreign oil, acetone and butanol production from fossil fuel became more popular and sealed the fate of ABE fermentation in the United States.  Currently in response to the rising cost of petrochemicals and pollution, industries in many countries are reexamining  fermentation as a source of butanol .

In the 1970's the primary focus for alternative fuels was on ethanol, people were familiar with its production and did not realize that dehydration (a very energy consuming step) was necessary in order to blend ethanol with fossil fuels. Nor did we realize the difficulty of distribution of ethanol since ethanol cannot be transferred through the existing pipeline infrastructures in any practical concentration without corrosion and damage to rubber seals.  The selection of ethanol, a lower power grade alcohol, that is corrosive, hard to purify, very evaporative, and dangerously explosive is the result.  Ethanol is still subsidized today by the government since it is not profitable enough to compete with gasoline.  The laws should be changed in the future to say power grade alcohols such as ethanol and butanol or poly-carbon alcohols.  The laws were written to exclude methanol (mono-carbon) a very low-grade alcohol that is dangerously evaporative and invisible when burning.

For the past thirty years the very energy intensive ethanol process still has not solved our fuel, power or clean air requirements. Ethanol is used predominately as an oxygenate in gasoline at only 10% for all these years and only recently at 85% ( E-85) in highly modified vehicles.  Even in some states which require very specialized seasonal gasoline formulas when used in such places a Phoenix, Arizona and Cleveland, Ohio.  Ethanol still only yields 2.5 to at best 2.8 gallons per bushel corn.  Much of the research stimulated by the biomass ethanol industry has done wonders for consuming hard to digest lignocellulosic (waxy – corn stalks, switch grass) biomass and converting it into simple sugars for yeast fermentation.  Any front-end (material handling) technology that is applicable to present sugars to an ethanol facility can be used by a butanol biorefinery.  Only the fermentation parlor is modified.

Butanol is an important industrial solvent and is a better fuel extender/oxygenate than ethanol and a 100% replacement for gasoline, as proven by  The Buick going cross country in 2005.  Current Industrial Grade butanol prices as a chemical are at $3.35 per gallon with a worldwide market of 350 million gallons per year. The market demand is expected to increase dramatically if ‘Green’ butanol is produced economically. India, China, Japan and other developing countries need butanol for their burgeoning industrial growth.

        In a typical ABE fermentation, butyric, propionic, lactic and acetic acids are first produced by C. acetobutylicum  the culture pH drops and then undergoes a metabolic shift and butanol, acetone, iso-propanol and ethanol are formed.  Increasing butyric acid concentration to >2 g/L and decreasing the pH to <5 usually are required for the induction of a metabolic shift from acidogenesis (acid producing stage) to solventogenesis (solvent producing stage).  In conventional ABE fermentations, the butanol yield from glucose is low, typically at ~15% (w/w) and rarely exceeds 25% (1.3 gallons per bushel).  The production of butanol is limited by severe product inhibition.  Butanol at a concentration of 1.0 – 2.0% can significantly inhibit cell growth and the fermentation causing the fermentation to cease. Consequently, butanol concentration in conventional ABE fermentations is usually lower than 1.3 %.

In the past 20+ years, there have been numerous engineering attempts to improve butanol production in ABE fermentation, including using cell recycle to increase cell density and reactor productivity and using extractive fermentation to minimize product inhibition.   For example, ABE fermentation with cell recycle using a spin filter perfusion bioreactor, 49 g/L of cell mass was achieved and the process gave a butanol productivity of 1.14 g/L/h (grams butanol produced per liter of reactor volume per hour).

 Also, extractive fermentation with in-situ butanol removal from the fermentation broth has been shown to improve the fermentation productivity by twofold as well as butanol yield.  Despite all these efforts, the best results ever obtained for ABE fermentations to date are still less than 2.0 % in butanol concentration, 4.46 g/L/h productivity, and a yield of less than 25 % (w/w) from glucose. Optimizing the ABE fermentation process has long been the aspiration of over a century of research. Producing butanol via butyric acid converted from carbohydrates has been proven to increase yield, volumetric productivity and final concentration very efficiently.

The Company’s Technology Compared to Historic ABE Fermentation

 Compared to the conventional acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation, the company’s patent eliminates unwanted products such as acetic, lactic, propionic acids,acetone, iso-propanol and ethanol production, thereby saving the carbon atoms in the feedstock to produce only carbon dioxide, hydrogen, butyric acid and butanol.  This process doubles the yield of butanol from a bushel of corn from 1.3 gallons per bushel to 2.5 gallons per bushel – matching the average ethanol yield that is generally achieved through ethanol fermentation.  Since each process develops 2.5 gallons per bushel the process that converts sugars to butanol yields 24% more energy (Btu’s) per bushel. Since the ethanol route does not produce hydrogen as in the Companies anaerobic path, we gain another 18% Btu’s from the hydrogen.