{"id":20734,"date":"2014-06-03T03:12:30","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T01:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=20734"},"modified":"2014-06-02T09:09:43","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T07:09:43","slug":"butanol-better-ethanol-isnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/butanol-better-ethanol-isnt\/","title":{"rendered":"Butanol is better than ethanol, or isn\u2019t it?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Butanol has long been used in the chemical industry and therefore has a number of existing applications and customers, which together create a so called market-pull. This is helpful for players working on renewable butanol as it eliminates the need to develop markets from scratch. Since the renewable and the conventional molecule are identical, downstream operations are left untouched from a switch, making it easier for existing markets to make the transition from conventional to renewable butanol.<\/p>\n<p>Major applications of butanol today include various products in the specialty chemicals sector. This is a business with fairly high margins, making the substance interesting for producers. Butanol can be used in a number of downstream products instead of ethanol and potentially lead to some efficiency gains due to its higher energy content.<\/p>\n<p>In the biofuels space, several superior characteristics of butanol over ethanol have been observed, which could give butanol a competitive edge once pure economic characteristics are on par:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>it does not absorb water like ethanol, which is important in combustion engines,<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>it has not been shown to cause corrosion in engine parts,<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>it evaporates much more slowly than ethanol, and<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>it provides greater energy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Moreover, butanol mixes well with gasoline and therefore can be put through existing pipelines, while ethanol requires additional infrastructure. Studies have shown that, theoretically, butanol can be burned at up to a 16% blend rate with gasoline, which is more than the 15% restriction (E-15) imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency on ethanol blends in the United States. It is also estimated that a plant that produces 200 mln litres of ethanol will produce 160 mln litres of butanol from the same inputs, i.e. volumetric yields amount 80% compared to ethanol but the butanol has about 80% of the energy density of gasoline, while ethanol has only just over 60%.<\/p>\n<p>Due to its appealing characteristics, both the renewable chemicals and the biofuels industries have laid their eyes on renewable butanol as an intermediate or blend stock, respectively. Nowadays, large quantities of butanol are still produced from fossil feedstock (propylene) through a process called carbonylation. There are, however, also several players that have been focusing on butanol production via the fermentation of carbohydrates, including Gevo and Butamax, the latter being a joint venture of DuPont and BP.<\/p>\n<h3>Gevo \u2013 first ethanol then butanol, now both<\/h3>\n<p>Renewable isobutanol \u2013 isobutanol is the isomer of the primary alcohol n-butanol \u2013 producer Gevo halted operations at its Luverne, Minnesota plant in the second half of 2012 due to an unexpected contamination with bacteria and has been without any product revenue since, even though it resumed commercial production of butanol in single production train mode in June 2013, with the second production train coming online in early August of that year.<\/p>\n<p>To read the full article, request you FREE demo now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Butanol has long been used in the chemical industry and therefore has a number of existing applications and customers, which together create a so called market-pull. This is helpful for players working on renewable butanol as it eliminates the need to develop markets from scratch. Since the renewable and the conventional molecule are identical, downstream [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"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":[570,3169,337,818,1214],"class_list":["post-20734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","supplier-bp","supplier-butamax","supplier-dupont","supplier-gevo-inc","supplier-united-states-environmental-protection-agency-epa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20734","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\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20734"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=20734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}