As reported in the New York Times, a New Zealand company, Lanza Tech, has developed a fermentation process to convert CO to EtOH via bacteria. The intriguing piece? CO is a large waste product from steel manufacturers and other industries. Per ton of steel, a half ton of CO is generated. There is a potential for 50 billion gallons of ethanol production using this methodology. Emphasis on potential.

The funding for Lanza Tech is coming from Vinod Kholsa, co-found of Sun Microsystems. A conversation with Mr. Kholsa can be read here. Interesting article discussing the potential pitfalls of ethanol.

Ethanol is touted as the short term fuel of the future…the clean burning biofuel. A new study calls into question the potential benefits of switching to ethanol, specifically E85 gasoline (85% EtOH, 15% gasoline).

Mark Jacobson, an environmental engineering professor at Stanford, published a study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology detailing possible health effects including cancer by 2020.

Note: The study was based on corn based ethanol usage for its determination of total carbon output.

The carcinogens of biggest concern from gasoline are benzene and butadiene. With E85, these are reduced, but since there is still 15% gasoline, they are not eliminated. According to the study, cancer rates would stay relatively the same, potentially a slight decrease.

When ethanol (CH3CH2OH) does not burn fully, formaldehyde (H2CO) and acetaldehyde (CH3CHO) form. That’s bad. They are precursors to ozone formulation. Ozone is great in the atmosphere, but on the ground its a carcinogen. It’s causes asthma, even deaths in the case of the elderly. Ozone is the fun component that triggers all of those “Spare the air” days in the summer.
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You’ve heard all about ethanol as the next big biofuel. You’ve heard about Brazil and their sugar-derived ethanol. Hell, you even saw that episode of the Amazing Race where it was a roadblock. You’ve heard about corn-based ethanol here at home. And now cellulosic ethanol is all the rage. Let’s start talking how.

Fermentation is the key here. Just like a fine wine (ok maybe a box wine), we’re trying to convert sugars to ethanol. With sugarcane, the sugar involved is polymer of glucose. With corn, enzymes called amlyases are used to convert the starch polymer into glucose. As we know with wine, glucose is easily converted to ethanol with various yeasts. Corn has an extra step, thus it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than sugar. The process is pretty quick on a commercial scale, yeast converts sugar to ethanol in a matter of hours.
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As reported by Biopact, a Malaysian company is projecting 6.5 billion liters of ethanol production per year by 2009 from the nipah palm.

How? The palm produces a sugar rich sap. When fermented, the nipah palm produces 7,000 to 15,000 liters of biofuel per hectare. That’s almost double the productive capability of sugarcane which only produces 3,350 to 7,000 liters of biofuel (corn isn’t even on the same chart at around 2,000 liters of biofuel).

It’s potentially big news as US demand is 22 billion liters of ethanol.

Let’s take this news with a grain of sugar…i mean salt. Harvesting, while can be done year round, is extremely labor intensive. Plus, the figures provided by the company only indicate a potential production of 200 million liters.

However, this is a sign of progress. The high sugar content sap is common near the equator, look for more development of ethanol in these countries soon.

One of the biggest hurdles to any biofuel is land usage. For example, every acre of corn used to make ethanol is an acre of corn out of production. Beyond the scientific hurdles associated with conversion to ethanol, farmers have the economic hurdle.

A team of researchers from the University of Minnesota have been experimenting with prairie grasses on no longer productive agricultural land in Northern Minnesota (the soil was nitrogen poor). They measured the bioenergy output with a varying combination of native prairie grasses (2 to 16 species). The summary: the net energy output is very high for these grasses, with the added bonus of being carbon negative (corn and soy biofuels are still carbon positive even though they represent a huge decrease vs what they would replace).

Cut to the Chase - Energy ratio is sum of all outputs (including coproducts) divided by the fossil inputs. (i.e. the higher the ratio the lower the dependence on fossil products for generation)

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