Butanol vs Ethanol

And now a word about Butanol. I didn't know about this alternative to Ethanol until I picked up the November, 2006 edition of the Sucessful Farming magazine when I got bored waiting in an office. In June, DuPont and BP announced plans to make it from sugar beets in Britain and to sell it next year. In July, 2005, inventor and founder of Environmental Energy, Inc., David Ramey, drove across the U.S. on it.

"There's no conversion of anything in the car. You can burn 100%. It gets better torque, better mileage," he says.

Just what is butanol? It's an alcohol. Here's the chemistry: A molecule of methanol, or wood alcohol, has one carbon atom. Ethanol has two. Butanol has four. Extra carbon packs more Btu's into butanol. A gallon has about 110,000 Btu's, nearly the same as gasoline. Ethanol has 84,000 Btu's.

Ramey says ethanol plants could be retrofitted to make butanol. The front end and back would be the same. The middle -fermentation- differs. Instead of turning sugar into ethanol with yeast, a bacteria converts starch to butanol, a clear liquid that, unlike ethanol, is toxic.

How soon to market?

Butanol isn't new. Bacterial production of it dates to 1916. It ran Japanese planess in World War II. Today it's derived from petroleum for use as a paint thinner and industrial solvent. Until now bacterial production of butanol wasn't efficient, Ramey says. A bushel of corn makes 1.3 gallons of butanol, plus acetone, and a little ethanol. A bushel of corn yields 2.5 gallons of ethanol or more.

With federal grants, Ramey has patented a process that uses two bacteria to make only butanol from plant materials, putting it on par with ethanol. It has advantages. It easily blends with either gas or ethanol, (which DuPont and BP plan to do). It can be shipped in pipelines.

Still, Ramey says it's at least two to three years from commercial use. DuPont spokesperson Michelle Reardon says DuPont and BP, "will likely use exisiting technology to get it into the market quickly." Ultimately " we're talking about making it with a new type of organism." BP is hoping for that before 2010. To see more on this go to BUTANOL