Peak Oil: Meet Virtually Unlimited Jet Fuel for the Future

One of the primary concerns of peak oil doomers is that there will soon be no more fuels for aircraft, ships, trains, trucks, and other supports for modern civilisation.  But if one looks at the huge sources for non-oil based liquid fuels -- from diesel to gasoline to jet fuel -- it becomes clear that there is very little reason for concern, for the next century or so, at least.

Follow the various pathways in the images below, to get a basic idea of processes which are already state-of-the art, and competitive at oil prices which already exist across many parts of the globe. A host of other ways of producing liquid hydrocarbons from feedstocks other than crude oil, are on the way. But these few that are pictured will do for now.

LanzaTech’s proprietary gas fermentation technology enables low cost production of sustainable alcohols and chemicals from waste gas resources that are completely outside the food value chain. These alcohols are then converted, using technology from LanzaTech’s partner Swedish Biofuels, to jet fuel that is fully equivalent to petroleum jet fuel, or that can be blended with petroleum. (Earlier post.)

In October, Virgin Atlantic, in partnership with LanzaTech and Swedish Biofuels, announced the development of a low-carbon, synthetic jet fuel kerosene produced from industrial waste gases with half the carbon footprint of the standard fossil fuel alternative.

The pathway to jet fuel with alcohol as an intermediate is proving to be a versatile way of producing advanced hydrocarbon fuels.
— Angelica Hull, Managing Director of Swedish Biofuels

Virgin Atlantic said it would be the first airline to use this fuel and plans to work with LanzaTech, Boeing and Swedish Biofuels towards achieving the technical approval required for using new fuel types in commercial aircraft. A demo flight with the new fuel is planned in 12-18 months, with commercialization targeted for 2014. _GCC

Readers of Al Fin Energy are already familiar with the Fischer Tropsch method of creating diesel from gas, coal, or biomass. They should also be acquainted with the Exxon Mobil "methanol to gasoline (MTG)" process, which is likely to see increasing use in North America.

The alcohol-to-jet fuel approach described in the GCC article above, is a new approach to Al Fin readers. But it is quite important, since it completes the fuel triad necessary to support modern civilisation transportation modes -- air, land, and sea. This capacity to supply aircraft, ships, and land transport with abundant fuels, even in the absence of crude oil supplies, should be reassuring to persons such as Ruppert, Kuntsler, and others who had been losing sleep from concern over the impending collapse of world civilisation.

Coals to Newcastle: Is it Rational to Make Ethanol from Hydrocarbons?

Celanese Corporation has developed a process called "TCX", for producing ethanol from hydrocarbons such as coal and gas. The company produces a range of acetyl products, including acetic acid, and patented a process for converting acetic acid to ethanol. Celanese has plans to build a coal-to-ethanol plant in China, and a gas-to-ethanol plant in Texas.

Everything hinges on the economics, of course. Celanese is focusing on the "industrial ethanol" market rather than the "fuels ethanol" market. The industrial ethanol market is a much smaller niche, and Celanese believes it can use its TCX process profitably if it aims at this smaller market.

The price comparisons in the table above suggest that if the production economics are comparable, it would be smarter to produce gasoline (or diesel) from your less valuable hydrocarbon feedstock -- coal or gas -- than to produce alcohols. But that is if you are targeting the fuels market.

Markets for industrial chemicals work a bit differently, and tend to fall under different sets of regulations. Celanese is already thoroughly involved in the industrial chemicals and materials business on a global scale. Often it is best to stay with what you know best, as long as you can make the numbers work.

Al Fin chemical engineers and industrial economists suggest that we are facing an ethanol glut on a global scale. Ethanol producers who are able to economically convert to butanol production should give such conversion serious consideration. And anyone considering either coal to liquids (CTL) or gas to liquids (GTL) for use as fuels, should probably avoid ethanol as a final product.

Maize Ethanol Gains Efficiencies With Time

While cellulosic alcohols offer far more promise, maize ethanol researchers and engineers are improving the marginal efficiencies of the overall process of ethanol from maize. From using plant waste to substitute for natural gas in the distillation, to finding better markets for co-products of distillation, maize ethanol grows more efficient with experience.

The results presented in this paper show that current corn-ethanol systems are much more energy efficient and have a much greater potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than previously published studies. The reason for this discrepancy is that, compared to the earlier studies, UNL's research team utilized more recent data that better represent how the corn ethanol industry is currently performing. In particular, updated values were used for: (1) yields and inputs required for corn production, (2) energy requirements in the ethanol plant, and (3) a more accurate representation of how co-products are used in livestock diets. _Bioenergy

More information here.

E. Coli Gene-Tweaked to Make 5 - 8 Carbon Alcohols With Much Higher Energy Density Than Ethanol, Even Higher than Butanol

With alcohol fuels, the longer the carbon chain, the higher the energy density -- the more energy per gallon of fuel. Scientists at UCLA have tweaked a strain of E. Coli bacteria to ferment alcohols with carbon chains between 5 and 8 carbons in length. Butanol has only 4 carbons, and ethanol has but 2. Lowly methanol has only one carbon. Besides having more energy per gallon, the longer chain alcohols will be easily separated from water, negating the need for the expensive distillation step required by ethanol.

Liao and his colleagues use synthetic-biology tools to tinker with the amino acid metabolism of E. coli. All organisms produce a large number of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. The researchers reengineer this metabolic pathway so that toward the end, the precursor compounds that would normally get converted into amino acids instead turn into long-chain alcohols.

To do this, the researchers insert genes into the bacteria that make them produce unnaturally long amino acid precursor molecules that have more than six carbon atoms. They also engineer two genes--one from a type of yeast, one from a cheese-making bacterium--into the microbe. These modified genes produce two new proteins that can convert the precursors into five-to-eight-carbon alcohols.

Startups LS9 and Amyris Biotechnologies are already reengineering microbes to produce hydrocarbon fuels. Both plan to begin commercial production of their fuels by 2010. _TechnologyReview

Very clever gene engineering. It will no doubt take time to scale up the process for higher yields and industrial quantities.

All the same, gene engineered micro-organisms stand to have the same revolutionary effect on biofuels production, eventually, that they are already having on pharmaceutical production. With some of the newer, less energy intensive processes, the largest expense after the physical plant will likely be feedstock. The ability to use minimally processed biomass as feedstock should allow such microbe produced biofuels to begin competing with petrofuels within the decade.

Syntec B2A: Better Catalysts for Bio-Butanol etc

Our process is compatible with any type of organic feedstock. It can be applied to agricultural, industrial and municipal operations, converting their waste streams into a value-added product. Syntec can take the leaves, stalks, and any left over biomass waste, and with our catalysts, convert it into a valuable fuel that can fill your gas tank and run your car.

Syntec Biofuel is an important player in the nascent biomass to alcohol industry. Now Syntec is focusing on the creation of efficient new catalysts for producing bio-propanol and bio-butanol from biomass and other waste streams.

Butanol is a promising alcohol biofuel and is currently used as a solvent and as a chemical intermediate in thousands of consumer products; it sells for in excess of $5 per gallon. Propanol plays an important role as a solvent in the plastics and polymers, pharmaceutical, paint and cosmetic industries. It is also used as a carrier and extraction solvent for wide range of natural products and also sells for in excess of $5 per gallon.

Currently, almost all butanol and propanol in the world is derived from fossil fuels. The commercialization of Bio-butanol and Bio-propanol will effectively reduce the carbon footprints of many major industries.
—Syntec CEO Michael Jackson _GCC

This Biofuels Digest summary lays out some of the recent activities of Syntec across North America.

As availability and price of feedstock for these new B2A processes becomes better defined, the longer term impact of B2A on the overall economy will be easier to predict. Biofuels is but one of many potential uses for bio-alcohols and other high value hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon derivatives.

Among the industries most interested in developments in this area are the petroleum industries, the chemical industries, fuels and utility industries, forestry, paper and pulp industries, the municipal waste industry, and agriculture. A thriving international market economy relies upon rational rules of trade that are not overly burdened by protectionism and nonsensical regulations.

Unfortunately, new leadership in the US promises to increase protectionist trade barriers and carbon hysteria-based energy regulations. These neo-Luddites will only slow the adoption of more rational and sustainable international energy industries.

Beyond Ethanol to Butanol: Retrofitting the Future

Synthetic networks for non-fermentative alcohol production from glucose in engineered E. coli developed by Dr. Liao at UCLA and licensed by Gevo. The red arrows represent the two-step conversion (KDC/ADH) of 2-keto acids to alcohols

Ethanol works well as low concentration blend with gasoline, but butanol has properties closer to gasoline, and can be blended easily at higher concentrations--without having to modify existing vehicles. If companies could economically convert existing ethanol production facilities into butanol production facilities, butanol could move closer to its rightful position in the biofuels hierarchy.

Gevo is taking the process one step farther, and plans to take convert their butanol into hydrocarbon components of gasoline!

Gevo, Inc. and ICM, Inc. have formed a strategic alliance for the commercial development of Gevo’s Integrated Fermentation Technology (GIFT) that enables the production of isobutanol and hydrocarbons from retrofitted ethanol plants.

...Our data says that it will cost less than $0.30 per gallon to retrofit an ethanol plant to make isobutanol. Isobutanol can be converted to gasoline blendstocks for less than an additional $0.25 per gallon. Think of it: gasoline from an ethanol plant for less than $0.60/gallon additional capital. _GCC

The economics of bioenergy will have to sort itself out over time. The only uncertainty is whether a crusading new political reich in the US will allow the economics of energy technology to do its market magic. It is quite likely that the Obama/Pelosi/Boxer rebellion and political riots will so badly interfere with the energy markets as to retard the development of sustainable clean energy for many years.

Government price controls, mandates, price supports, etc. are not a sustainable approach to energy. The market has to be allowed to work, to find the most economically sustainable approaches. If the US chooses to be the world's political retard as it appears, the center of innovation needs to move to a different location.

At this time, a likely successor to America's former market leadership is not easy to guess.

Ethanol Blender Pumps, No Mandates, More

New "blender pumps" being produced for automobiles in Kansas, will allow the blending of ethanol into gasoline at controlled rates of 10%, 20%, 30%, and 85% by volume. They will permit the adjustment of ethanol proportional burn according to availability.

EPA allows either a 10 percent or an 85 percent mixture of ethanol and gasoline. E-10 is viewed as acceptable for all vehicles and E-85 is acceptable for flex-fuel- vehicles that have been specially manufactured with alcohol resistant tanks and fittings plus a means to reset the engine to efficiently burn the high octane alcohol fuel.

... _Source

At the Republican convention in St. Paul, the Republican Party decided to drop ethanol mandates from its platform, and to let the market set the amount of ethanol to be included in fuels. That is certainly one large step away from special-interest politics, and one that Al Fin applauds.

A number of new crops for biofuels are being tried out. One interesting crop is "false flax", or camelina sativa. Camelina seed contains 40% oil, and yields more oil than soybeans per acre. Camelina is frost tolerant, grows on marginal lands, and can be planted as a cover crop after harvesting wheat and other crops. Camelina oil is high in omega-3 fats, which also gives it a market as a human food.

New Mexico researchers plan a commercial demonstration of algae oil within 18 months. That is an ambitious schedule, but then New Mexico is apparently expecting great things out of algal biofuels for its state's economic future.

Bioenergy is acquiring greater prominence among policymakers and newsmakers. South Korea's Knowledge and Economy Minister recently emphasised the importance of bioenergy:

Knowledge and Economy Minister Lee Yoon-ho says that bioenergy or biomass will be considered the most important and useful among new sources of renewable energy for a significant time in the future. _Source

Bioenergy has been important to humans since the time the use of fire was mastered. By learning to produce bioenergy without stripping rainforests, wildlife habitats, and depleting food sources, humans will demonstrate a rite of passage.

Methane, Methanol: Simple Fuels Making Sense

Methane is CH4, methanol is CH3OH. The simplest hydrocarbon, the simplest alcohol. Small molecules that promise to explode the petroleum monopoly on liquid fuels, likely leaving Mssrs. Chavez, Putin, Ahmedinejad, Qadafi and company in tears. Why? Because they're cheap and easy to make, and besides working in IC engines and fuel cells as is, they can be chemically converted to more complex hydrocarbons, plastics, and other organic compounds.

MCI has been pursuing the development of a process for the synthesis of methanol (CH3OH)—later used in the production of olefins and aromatics—using the CO2 emitted from factories and hydrogen obtained from water photolysis. The effort is part of the company’s strategy to develop innovative processes to contribute to significant reductions of greenhouse gases.

The pilot plant, located at MCI’s Osaka plant, will have a production capacity of approximately 100 tonnes of methanol per year, using about 150-160 tonnes of CO2 emitted the Osaka plant. Construction of the ¥1.5 billion (US$13.7 million) plant will begin in October, and is due for completion in February 2009. The plant is projected to come online in March 2010. _GCC

While using CO2 from emissions may make sense from a "greenhouse gas" point of view, the biosphere could really use that CO2. Much more reasonable to grow the biosphere and then make methanol from biomass. Brian Westenhaus looks at the prospects for methane in automobiles etc.

I have a certain confidence that.....the compressed methane route for fuel is going to have a few good years. It may be much longer than that should the biomass people come up with a cheap process to convert biomass carbon back to hydrocarbon in methane form. This is a crack in the gasoline monopoly..... Just to throw out another bit for the future - methane is one of the leading contenders for fuel cells too....Methane is way past being a fuel to watch. It’s time to look into how it might work and the costs to change over. _NewEnergyand Fuel

In other energy news, giant conglomerate ADM is collaborating with John Deere and chemical giant Monsanto to develop productive uses for corn stover and other crop residues.

The companies will work together to identify environmentally and economically sustainable methods for the harvest, storage and transport of corn stover—the stalks, leaves and cobs of corn plants. Corn stover can be used in feed for animals, as biomass to generate steam and electricity or as a cellulosic feedstock for biofuel production.

Stover is usually left on the field, where, in proper amounts, it helps reduce soil erosion and build up soil organic matter. A 170-bushel-per-acre corn crop, which was the average last year in Iowa, also produces about four dry tons of stover. The United States Department of Agriculture forecasts that in 2008, farmers will harvest 12.3 billion bushels of corn, resulting in approximately 290 million tons of stover. _GCC

While you were sleeping, hundreds of thousands of people were dreaming up ways to create more energy cleanly and economically. The news media will be the last to know what is going to happen.

Cellulosic Ethanol: Down to Micro-scale

Cellulose is nature's structural polymer. It is hard to break cellulose down into its constituents, otherwise there would be no tall trees. But now that the liquid fossil fuel supply is not flowing fast enough to meet world demand, industrialists find that they would like to be able to get at the energy stored inside cellulose--the individual sugar molecules that are polymerised into cellulose. If you can get to the sugar molecules, you can ferment them into a useful liquid fuel--ethanol, or perhaps butanol.

Here is a Technology Review article that deals with the engineering of micro-organisms that could aid people in the extracting of sugars from cellulose, and the further fermentation of these sugars into useful liquid fuels:

Producing ethanol fuel from biomass is attractive for a number of reasons. At a time of soaring gas prices and worries over the long-term availability of foreign oil, the domestic supply of raw materials for making biofuels appears nearly unlimited. Meanwhile, the amount of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere annually by burning fossil fuels is projected to rise worldwide from about 24 billion metric tons in 2002 to 33 billion metric tons in 2015. Burning a gallon of ethanol, on the other hand, adds little to the total carbon in the atmosphere, since the carbon dioxide given off in the process is roughly equal to the amount absorbed by the plants used to produce the next gallon.

Using ethanol for auto fuel is hardly a new idea (see "Brazil's Bounty"). Since the energy crisis of the early 1970s, tax incentives have pushed ethanol production up; in 2005, it reached four billion gallons a year. But that still translates to only 3 percent of the fuel in American gas tanks. One reason for the limited use of ethanol is that in the United States, it's made almost exclusively from cornstarch; the process is inefficient and competes with other agricultural uses of corn. While it is relatively easy to convert the starch in corn kernels into the sugars needed to produce ethanol, the fuel yield is low compared with the amount of energy that goes into raising and harvesting the crops. Processing ethanol from cellulose -- wheat and rice straw, switchgrass, paper pulp, agricultural waste products like corn cobs and leaves -- has the potential to squeeze at least twice as much fuel from the same area of land, because so much more biomass is available per acre. Moreover, such an approach would use feedstocks that are otherwise essentially worthless.

Converting cellulose to ethanol involves two fundamental steps: breaking the long chains of cellulose molecules into glucose and other sugars, and fermenting those sugars into ethanol. In nature, these processes are performed by different organisms: fungi and bacteria that use enzymes (cellulases) to "free" the sugar in cellulose, and other microbes, primarily yeasts, that ferment sugars into alcohol.

In 2004, Iogen, a Canadian biotechnology company based in Ottawa, began selling modest amounts of cellulosic ethanol, made using common wheat straw as feedstock and a tropical fungus genetically enhanced to hyperproduce its cellulose-digesting enzymes. But Iogen estimates that its first full-scale commercial plant, for which it hopes to break ground in 2007, will cost $300 million -- five times the cost of a conventional corn-fed ethanol facility of similar size.

The more one can fiddle with the ethanol-producing microbes to reduce the number of steps in the conversion process, the lower costs will be, and the sooner cellulosic ethanol will become commercially competitive. In conventional production, for instance, ethanol has to be continually removed from fermentation reactors, because the yeasts cannot tolerate too much of it. MIT's Greg Stephanopoulos, a professor of chemical engineering, has developed a yeast that can tolerate 50 percent more ethanol. But, he says, such genetic engineering involves more than just splicing in a gene or two. "The question isn't whether we can make an organism that makes ethanol," says Stephanopoulos. "It's how we can engineer a whole network of reactions to convert different sugars into ethanol at high yields and productivities. Ethanol tolerance is a property of the system, not a single gene. If we want to increase the overall yield, we have to manipulate many genes at the same time."

The ideal organism would do it all -- break down cellulose like a bacterium, ferment sugar like a yeast, tolerate high concentrations of ethanol, and devote most of its metabolic resources to producing just ethanol. There are two strategies for creating such an all-purpose bug. One is to modify an existing microbe by adding desired genetic pathways from other organisms and "knocking out" undesirable ones; the other is to start with the clean slate of a stripped-down synthetic cell and build a custom genome almost from scratch.

Lee Lynd, an engineering professor at Dartmouth University, is betting on the first approach. He and his colleagues want to collapse the many biologically mediated steps involved in ethanol production into one. "This is a potentially game-changing breakthrough in low-cost processing of cellulosic biomass," he says. The strategy could involve either modifying an organism that naturally metabolizes cellulose so that it produces high yields of ethanol, or engineering a natural ethanol producer so that it metabolizes cellulose.

This May, Lynd and his colleagues reported advances on both fronts. A team from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa that had collaborated with Lynd announced that it had designed a yeast that can survive on cellulose alone, breaking down the complex molecules and fermenting the resultant simple sugars into ethanol. At the same time, Lynd's group reported engineering a "thermophilic" bacterium -- one that naturally lives in high-temperature environments -- whose only fermentation product is ethanol. Other organisms have been engineered to perform similar sleights of hand at normal temperatures, but Lynd's recombinant microbe does so at the high temperatures where commercial cellulases work best. "We're much closer to commercial use than people think," says Lynd, who is commercializing advanced ethanol technology at Mascoma, a startup in Cambridge, MA.

Others are pursuing a far more radical approach. Soon after the State of the Union speech, Patrinos left the DOE to become president of Synthetic Genomics, a startup in Rockville, MD, founded by Craig Venter, the iconoclastic biologist who led the private effort to decode the human genome. Synthetic Genomics is in hot pursuit of a bacterium "that will do everything," as Venter puts it. With funding from Synthetic Genomics, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute are adding and subtracting genes from natural organisms using the recombinant techniques employed by other microbial engineers. In the long run, however, Venter is counting on an approach more in keeping with his reputation as a trailblazer. Rather than modify existing organisms to produce ethanol and other potential biofuels, he wants to build new ones.

Natural selection, argues Venter, does not design life forms to efficiently perform the multitudinous functions their genes encode, much less to carry out a dedicated task like ethanol production. Consequently, a huge amount of effort and expense goes toward figuring out how to shut down complex, often redundant genetic pathways that billions of years of evolution have etched into organisms. Why not start with a genome that has only the minimal number of genes needed to sustain life and add to it what you need? "With a synthetic cell, you only have the pathways in there that you want to be in there," he says.

Much more at Technology Review.

When you consider that biomass derived liquid fuels stand to replace a significant amount of oil-based fuels, you can begin to understand the type of money that is at stake. It is not inconceivable that in the future a biomass entrepreneur might easily have a higher personal worth than Bill Gates. That is not as much as future outer space entrepreneurs will be worth, but that will be then, this is now.

Butanol--Better than Ethanol as a Gasoline Substitute

Oil prices hover close to US $70 a barrel. This higher price drives a lot of research into finding substitutes for petroleum fuels. Ethanol is the cause celebre of the news media, but two-carbon ethanol is not nearly as good a gasoline substitute as is butanol, a four-carbon alcohol. Here is more information from Butanol.com:

* Higher energy content (110,000 Btu’s per gallon for butanol vs. 84,000 Btu per gallon for ethanol). Gasoline contains about 115,000 Btu’s per gallon.
* Butanol is six times less “evaporative” than ethanol and 13.5 times less evaporative than gasoline, making it safer to use as an oxygenate in Arizona, California and other states, thereby eliminating the need for very special blends during the summer and winter months.
* Butanol can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines where ethanol must be transported via rail, barge or truck
* Butanol can be used as a replacement for gasoline gallon for gallon e.g. 100%, or any other percentage. Ethanol can only be used as an additive to gasoline up to about 85% and then only after significant modifications to the engine. Worldwide 10% ethanol blends predominate.

Here is a list of the advantages of butanol from Pure Energy Systems:

# Higher energy content than ethanol.
# Not as corrosive as ethanol.
# Uses an air/fuel ratio which is close to that of gasoline. Ethanol does not.
# Can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines where ethanol must be transported via rail, barge or truck.
# Can replace gasoline any percentage up to 100%. Ethanol can only be used up to 85%.
# Gives better mileage than ethanol. (http://www.businessweek.com/autos/content/apr2006/bw20060427_493909.htm?chan=autos_autos%20indexpage_insight)
# Safer to handle than ethanol.
# Will also assist in the conversion of vegetable oils into biodiesel.

Here is a list of butanol advantages from lightparty:

Butanol is a four carbon alcohol. It has double the amount of carbon of ethanol, which equates to a 25 percent increase in harvestable energy (Btu's).

Butanol is produced by fermentation, from corn, grass, leaves, agricultural waste and other biomass.

Butanol is safer to handle with a Reid Value of 0.33 psi, which is a measure of a fluid's rate of evaporation when compared to gasoline at 4.5 and ethanol at 2.0 psi.

Butanol is an alcohol that can be but does not have to be blended with fossil fuels.

Butanol when consumed in an internal combustion engine yields no SOX, NOX or carbon monoxide all environmentally harmful byproducts of combustion. CO2 is the combustion byproduct of butanol, and is considered environmentally 'green'.

Butanol is far less corrosive than ethanol and can be shipped and distributed through existing pipelines and filling stations.

Butanol solves the safety problems associated with the infrastructure of the hydrogen supply. Reformed butanol has four more hydrogen atoms than ethanol, resulting in a higher energy output and is used as a fuel cell fuel.

Butanol is an industrial commodity, with a 370 million gallons per year market with a selling price of $3.75 per gallon.

Hydrogen generated during the butanol fermentation process is easily recovered, increasing the energy yield of a bushel of corn by an additional 18 percent over the energy yield of ethanol produced from the same quantity of corn.

Here are even more advantages for butanol from Environmental Energy Inc.:

Environmental Energy Inc has shown that BUTANOL REPLACES GASOLINE - 100 pct and has no pollution problems, and further proved it is possible to produce 2.5 gallons of butanol per bushel corn at a production cost of less than $1.00 per gallon. There are 25 pct more Btu-s available and an additional 17 pct more from hydrogen given off, from the same corn when making butanol instead of ethanol that is 42 pct more Btu-s more energy out than it takes to make - that is the plow to tire equation is positive for butanol. Butanol is far safer to handle than gasoline or ethanol. Butanol when substituted for gasoline gives better gas mileage and does not pollute as attested to in 10 states. Butanol should now receive the same recognition as a fuel alcohol in U.S. legislation as ethanol.

Besides using butanol as a straight substitute for gasoline, butanol can be blended with diesel or biodiesel and burned in diesel engines. When you combine the processes of producing biodiesel from oil seeds, and butanol from biomass, you can fuel all the vehicles on the highway. Then if you use byproducts of those processes in fuel cells to produce electricity, your overall efficiency goes even higher.

Here is a good article on butanol from Green Car Congress, a more recent article from R-Squared, and also a fine article from Fat Knowledge blog. Be sure to read the comments.

Ramping up butanol infrastructure is a matter of investment and chemical/manufacturing engineering technology. The public relations battle against the ethanol super-giants is another matter. Ethanol is represented by big farm conglomerate money, among other big business interests, and has its hands in government pockets. Government officials listen to ethanol. Butanol is the David against the ethanol Goliath. But Butanol is clearly the better man, so Butanol will eventually win. We should all hope that smaller farm interests will wake up to the possibilities, pool their resources, and put butanol on the main track soon.