{"id":18949,"date":"2014-01-22T03:03:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T01:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biofuelsdigest.com\/bdigest\/2014\/01\/19\/ethanol-the-next-generation\/"},"modified":"2014-01-21T20:31:44","modified_gmt":"2014-01-21T18:31:44","slug":"ethanol-next-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/ethanol-next-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethanol: The Next Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, the crew of the news-ship Digestprise<\/em> visit the University of Wisconsin, where a group of researchers have found a path to lop 10 percent off the cost of making ethanol. Moonshiners and fuel producers may well rejoice.<\/p>\n

\n

The Lactones are a weirdly named group of molecules \u2014 sounding more like an old doo-wop group from the 50s (the Lack-Tones, right up there with the Del-Tones, or the Def-Tones). But it\u2019s an ester, which in turn sounds like a book out of the Old Testament.<\/p>\n

In a hot biofuels development, a group out of Jim Dumesic\u2019s lab at the University of Wisconsin has come up with something fun and cool that you can do with lactones. In this case, a Gamma Velerolactone, which sounds itself distinctly like advanced space weaponry right out of Star Trek: The Next Generation.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s set aside the weirdness of the nomenclature and concentrate on the content \u2014 something that any fan of Engelbert Humperdinck learned to do, early and often.<\/p>\n

Science has the full story, published at the end of last week \u2014 a process that uses gamma valerolactone, or GVL, to deconstruct plants and produce sugars that can be chemically or biologically upgraded into biofuels. With support from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the team will begin scaling up the process later this year.<\/p>\n

Reducing the cost of ethanol production by 10 percent<\/h3>\n

At stake? A 10 percent savings in producing ethanol, compared to other known processes. And the process itself is more plant-based, and thereby more renewable.<\/p>\n

Because GVL is created from the plant material, it\u2019s both renewable and more affordable than conversion methods requiring expensive chemicals or enzymes. The process also converts 85 to 95 percent of the starting material to sugars that can be fed to yeast for fermentation into ethanol, or chemically upgraded furans to create drop-in biofuels.<\/p>\n

Now, 10 percent is, as they say, not nothing. The value of global ethanol production is measured these days in the tens of billions of dollars, which means that a 10 percent shift in cost represents a potential increase in margins in the billions of dollars. That\u2019s billion with a \u201cb\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the sugar platform, you have possibilities,\u201d says Jeremy Luterbacher, a UW-Madison postdoctoral researcher and the paper\u2019s lead author. \u201cYou\u2019ve taken fewer forks down the conversion road, which leaves you with more end destinations, such as cellulosic ethanol and drop-in biofuels.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShowing that removing and recycling GVL can be done easily, with a low-energy separation step, is a little more of an achievement,\u201d says Luterbacher. \u201cBy feeding the resulting sugar solution to microorganisms, we proved we weren\u2019t producing some weird chemical byproducts that would kill the yeast, and that we were taking out enough GVL to make it nontoxic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s neat is that we can use additives to make the solution separate,\u201d says Luterbacher. \u201cIt becomes like oil and vinegar.\u201d Their additive of choice? Liquid carbon dioxide. \u201cIt\u2019s green, nontoxic and can be removed by simple depressurization once you want GVL and solutions of sugar to mix again. It\u2019s the perfect additive,\u201d Luterbacher says.<\/p>\n

Available for sale from your local WARF dealer<\/h3>\n

This research has contributed new knowledge to the biofuels landscape, resulted in four patent applications, and gained recognition for GVL\u2019s commercial potential from WARF\u2019s Accelerator Program. The program helps license high potential technologies more rapidly by addressing specific technical hurdles with targeted funding and expert advice from seasoned business mentors in related fields.<\/p>\n

Under the Accelerator Program effort, Dumesic will serve as principal investigator for an 18-month project involving construction of a high-efficiency biomass reactor. The reactor will use GVL to produce concentrated streams of high-value sugars and intact lignin solids.<\/p>\n

Carbohydrates and lignin from the reactor will be delivered to scientific collaborators, including fellow GLBRC investigators, who will optimize strategies for converting the materials into valuable chemicals and fuels.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re excited by the team\u2019s scientific achievements and we look forward to supporting the project\u2019s next steps through the Accelerator Program,\u201d says Leigh Cagan, WARF\u2019s chief technology commercialization officer. \u201cIf the project successfully achieves the anticipated cost reductions for production of the sugars, lignin and ethanol, we anticipate significant commercial interest in this novel process.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bottom line<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s a biobased chemical that makes a transformative impact on fuel production. Reminding us that much of current technology development focus is on making more value at the sites and for the feedstocks that were already uncovered in the first-generation ethanol boom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These are the voyages of the ethanol fleet.
\nTheir continuing mission: to explore strange new fuels,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[],"supplier":[333,4965],"class_list":["post-18949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","supplier-university-of-wisconsin-madison","supplier-wisconsin-alumni-research-foundation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18949"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=18949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}