Reporter's Notes: Designer Biofuels
Concern over global warming and rising gas prices has just about everyone, including presidential candidates, touting biofuels. Taking the energy from plants to make a gasoline alternative that can run our cars has great promise. But there are challenges to meeting the nation’s goal to replace 20 per cent of the nations annual gasoline consumption with renewable fuels by 2017. Today's radio report is on the next generation of biofuels being developed right here in the Bay Area.
The biofuels we look at in this piece are primarily cellulose-based. Some of the researchers we talked with called the products they are designing, biopetrol because they are trying to mimic, synthetically, what petroleum does. The San Carlos start up, LS9, is making a biopetrol product. The hope of these researchers is to use plant matter, or biomass, to make a cellulosic biofuel that can be used in the existing petroleum infrastructure without needing to change pipelines, pumps at stations or gas tanks.
There are a number of California companies and research institutions working on developing advanced biofuels. The big, new academic center for research is the Joint Bio Energy Institute out of Emeryville.
As you will hear in this story, some are tinkering with microbes, others are trying to improve on current feedstocks.
Biofuels don’t have to come from traditional plants in the ground but can come from converting algae or trash into biodiesel. While that is not the focus of this story, we hope to take it up in the coming months.
You may listen to the "Designer Biofuels" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.
2 Comments
[...] our energy and environmental problems. Some say corn ethanol is the answer; others say it's cellulosic ethanol. Some say wind energy and some say solar energy; some say more government regulation is the answer [...]
Why make biodiesel or biopetrol? These hydrocarbons and alcohols pollute way too much. Instead, make a fuel with more energy, 1/4 the CO2 and pipelines into our homes and businesses [and into fueling stations for my 1998 Ford Econoline]: METHANE. The anaerobic bacteria are doing it to our garbage and agricultural waste anyway. Just capture it and use it. Since the uncaptured methane is 23 times the greenhouse gas CO2 is, removing the billions of tons of methane going into the atmosphere will reverse global warming. The CO2 and water from burning methane are far less injurious to our climate. Methane was routinely burned off of oil wells. If it had been used for electrical production, we wouldn't have an energy crisis anywhere. We are using the wrong resources for fuels, fouling our own nests and looking at a petroleum-scant world in less than a century. By then it will be necessary to make methane from coal, producing elemental mercury and fertilizer as by-products, to replace crude oil. Plastics will have to be made from renewable plant sources, hopefully from the non-food parts. We are going to be living in interesting times.