i was researching alternative fuels and came across something called Butanol, apparently its a direct replacement for gasoline and can be made from corn. with these riseing gas prices its costing me a fortune to drive to work and back, i really hope this stuff catches on soon. http://www.butanol.com/ seems like a much cheaper and enviromentaly friendly alternative to ethanol blended gasoline, propane and natural gas.

 

Interesting write up, have to keep an eye on that...

 

The website shows a fundamental lesson in organic chemistry. The more carbon atoms in the molecule, the more heat energy per gallon. Whats wrong with that? Greenhouse gas emissions (CO2), if you believe the "global warming is caused by man" argument.

Jim

 

I was thinking the same thing when I read it. They claim is as "green" because it doesn't give off Nitrogen or Sulfur Oxides. It would be interesting to see a comparison of CO2 emmissions running on Gasoline, Ethanol, and Butanol. Perhaps the Butanol is less than Gasoline? If so, it could be a good intermediate solution for all the gasoline cars that are out there. Plus it would add to solving our dependence on oil.

It looks like DuPont and BP have taken notice of this fuel:
DuPont, BP join to make butanol; they say it outperforms ethanol as a fuel additive

-Jim

 

Thing is, virtually all fuels with a notable exception of H2 contain some carbon, and so while CO2 emission is less than ideal, completely avoiding it is not easy.

 

Modern gasolines contain almost no sulfur, so where are the sulfur oxides going to come from? Nitrogen is in the air, so NOx is produced by high temperature combustion of any fuel. Butanol is no different than gasoline here either.

It performs better than ethanol as a fuel because it is chemically closer to gasoline in composition. That has advantages and disadvantages, depening upon its use. As an oxygenate additive to gasoline, it is less effective, because now you have one oxygen atom for four carbons instead of two.

I'm only playing devil's advocate here. There are no "magic bullets".

Jim

 

Diesels used to contain quite a bit of sulfur, but I'm not sure about recent ones -- I think they're a lot cleaner. Bunker or other heavy oils used mainly in furnaces or in ships can still contain some significant amount of sulfur.

The problem with ethanol is that engines made primarily for gasoline usually get miserable mpg on E85 because to run it efficiently, one would need a higher compression engine. On the other hand, butanol may be a lot closer to gasoline in many respects. What they had on the butanol website sounds almost too good to be true, but I didn't see any obvious red flag, or a BS alert, and their FAQ appeared to be honest, too.

 

the fact that it can be made from a renewable resource is what i think is important. gas prices are only going to keep going up as oil gets harder to find, butanol will probly either stay at a fixed price or go down as more and more companys start produceing it. last year i was only paying around 80 cents a liter for gas, this year its been as high as $1.24 (canada). thats quite a big jump in price for a year, i can only imagine how high its gona get in the next couple years.

 

There are quite a few fuels with a renewable source, so I don't think that's such a big deal. Being a possible direct replacement for gasoline with no adjustment to the engine is the main feature of butanol, IMHO. However, since it is not currently tested by 3rd parties or the fed, their claims about suitability are hard to verify.

Another thing, many of the sources that can be used to make ethanol or butanol can also be used as a human or livestock feed, and at some point, it might be more important to use them to feed people or animals. Of course there are quite a few waste products containing cellulose or other long chain carbohydrates that are not suitable even for a livestock feed, though making alcohol from them is usually somewhat more complicated.

 

That part of the aargument is easy, it doesn't take away any of the food produced, rather, the fuels are a by product of processing the grains for food. Ethanol is not the only product of the distillation process, it only uses the starch. In the process of making corn sweetener, ethanol is produced anyway, it is just a matter of separating it out.I imagine butanol is the same. Livestock feed is also a byproduct of processing the grains for it's particular use.

 

Guys, butanol stinks ! That said, it looks like a very interesting fuel. But supposedly, if you get butanol 1 or 2, instead of straight chain butanol, thats when you get the noxious odors. Which version the Ramey process gives off I don't know, but butanol seems very much like a 'pour it in and go' option. DF, @ his Dad's house

 

Here's Dupont/BP's official "biobutanol site".

biobutanol

They have a quote from Ford's CTO on there. It'll be interesting to see if Ford/GM puts out a statement such as "all models made since XXXX are ok to run on biobutanol" (assuming we begin to see biobutanol at gas stations). If they did, I'd imagine it could hurt their sales of E85 vehicles that they are really trying to push now. They may have to however, if Honda/Toyota/Nissan/etc come out with a similar statement. Either way, it is easy to ignore Ramey and EEI, but it will be harder to ignore a BP/Dupont partnership.

Dupont also quietly says during their flash animation that they are working on some "fast growing grasses" that could be used to produce biofuels in the future. Maybe we could plant some "victory lawns"...

-Jim

 

Are those vehicles only flex fuel capable, or optimized for E85? I think it's the former, and they push them because they get 1.2 mpg credit for flex fuel capable vehicles.

I think they came out with E85 because they had no other option at that time, and because the manufacture of alcohol is a well known process and can use the plentiful US corn.

However, a fuel that could be a direct replacement for gasoline even in older vehicles, would be a lot more desirable. Even though early adopters such as Brasil are heavily invested in ethanol, my bet is that ethanol could fade away in the US and replaced by something else that is more compatible with gasoline. Heavier alcohols such as butanol, propanol (a sibling of rubbing alcohol) or pentanol are possible candidates, as long as they can be made cheaply by fermenting. We already know that's the case for butanol.

 

Like the idea of Hydrogen fuel cells being the untimate fuel source because there are no emissions except for water, forget or close their eyes to the fact that the huge amounts of electricity needed to produce hydrogen is produced primarily by burning coal. Not to mention that the plants that are grown to make biofuels don't grow in clay alone, they have to be fertilized and fertilizer comes from natural gas.

I know for a fact that producing ethanol converts the available sugars into CO2 and Ethanol, at about equal rates, by weight. So a ton of sugar converts to roughly, a half ton of alcohol and a half ton of CO2.

By the sounds of this butanol, it has double the carbon as ethanol so maybe the CO2 emissions from the fermentation process isn't as high as producing Ethanol but that carbon is going to be realeased somewhere in the combustion process.

Believing that we can get away from fossil fuel use overnight is a pipe dream. Maybe it will happen one day, when someone invents a way to store the sun's energy directly into a storage device, that can be used immediately without any post-processing. Oh wait, we already have those. Hopefully the (environmental) cost of making solar panels, batteries and electric motors is lower than that of an equivalent measure of electricity, produced by conventional means would be, or even an efficient CNG or hybrid vehicle.

To add, the most logical thing to do is build vehicles that run on CNG. That way, instead of going through several conversion and transportation stages of natural gas into fertilizer, into plants, into ethanol/butanol/vegetable oil ->biodiesel... why not just take it out of the ground and put it in the car. It costs money, and time, and even more fuel energy to go through all these conversion and transportation stages, it doesn't make much sense.

 

You're right, hadn't thought ot the CAFE credit. It tough to give a credit for butanol, though, since it seems that it can be run in an unmodified vehicle. I don't think anyone wants to see car companies get a credit for doing absolutely nothing to improve mileage, alternative fuel adoption, or emissions. I'm wondering if there is any incentive that would move car companies to say "butanol doesn't void the warranty" (similar to what they've said for biodiesel for newer diesels, or E85 for FFV's).

In this report it was even noted, "The auto manufacturers stated that the CAFE incentive program has been a major factor in developing and manufacturing alternative fuel vehicles in high volumes".
NHTSA - REPORT TO CONGRESS Effects of the Alternative Motor Fuels Act, CAFE Incentives Policy, Summary of Findings and Recommendations
It is interesting that one of the recommedations was to link the CAFE credit to the amount of alternative fuel that is used. Sure, it's great that the car companies produced and sold the FFV cars, but is anyone using the alternative fuel? Very similar issue with butanol since it is a claimed direct replacement for gasoline. Maybe there should be a CAFE like program on the oil companies to sell a certain amount of alternative fuels? Just a thought, I'm not in favor of more laws generally, and of course it'd probably get quashed by a lobby.

I absolutely agree, and felt that needed to be quoted.

-Jim