Con-tango

A new competitor for ethanol?

Biobutanol is the name of a new biofuel that BP and Dupont are presenting today as an alternative to ethanol with a 30% more punch. The following is an excerpt from Forbes’ Kerry Dolan’s recollection:

DuPont and BP (nyse: BP–news–people )
have been working on the new fuel since 2003. The two companies plan to
introduce the first generation of biobutanol in the U.K. by the end of
2007. And they hope to roll out an improved second-generation
biobutanol by 2010. DuPont and BP aim to make the fuel competitive with
gasoline, even when oil is priced as low as $30 to $40 a barrel. In the
U.K., the partnership will produce the new fuel by extracting
fermentable sugar from sugar beets and converting that into a fuel,
similar to the way ethanol is produced.

Currently, biofuels
account for just 2% of all fuel consumption. But biofuels could account
for 30% of all fuel consumption by 2020, some sources predict. Dupont
and BP estimate the global market for biofuels could reach 87 billion
gallons by 2020, up from just under 11 billion gallons today.

On the other hand, Clean Edge’s Pernick is quick to point out:

The fact that biobutanol is more energy efficient than ethanol does
not wipe out ethanol’s appeal, says Clean Edge’s Pernick. Saab has come
up with a new vehicle that it says gets better mileage from ethanol
than from gasoline. "There are ways of getting around the
energy-efficiency issue of ethanol," says Pernick.

On AP’s feed Randall Chase reports on biobutanol’s tolerance to water
contamination, an additional and important advantage over its cousin
ethanol:

Like ethanol, butanol is an alcohol compound,
but with four carbon atoms instead of two. DuPont officials said the
different chemical structure of butanol gives it several advantages
over ethanol, including tolerance to water contamination, facilitating
transportation via pipeline.

The U.S. fuel market has been constrained by
the fact that ethanol, which attracts water molecules and therefore
tends to corrode pipelines, must be transported on trucks, trains and
bargest in relatively small batches to storage terminals where it is
then blended with gasoline.

Another advantage of biobutanol, officials
said, is that it can be blended into gasoline at higher concentrations
than ethanol without the need to retrofit vehicles, and it offers
better fuel economy than gasoline-ethanol blends.

"We concluded that butanol’s performance plus
ethanol’s economics would be a great combination," said DuPont chief
innovation officer Thomas Connelly.
The first phase of the DuPont-BP venture will
consist of using existing technology to convert sugar beets into 30,000
tons, or 9 million gallons, of biobutanol annually at British Sugar’s
facility in Wissington, England, east of Cambridge.

But, does the US have any producers that could challenge the BP-Dupont alliance?

EEI, an American butanol production patent holder responds:

How does butanol compare with ethanol as an alternative fuel?

Butanol has many superior properties as an alternative fuel when compared to ethanol. These include:

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.

Why has there been little to no effort to promote butanol as an alternate fuel?

Prior
to the success of EEI’s work, production of butanol from corn and other
biomass has been stymied by the lack of technology to make it
economically viable. The problem has been historically low yields and
low concentrations of butanol compared to those of ethanol.

The
historical ABE fermentation technology produces a variety of
fermentation products. The ABE process uses bacteria to produce
Acetone Butanol and Ethanol. This fermentation process yielded a 6:3:1
ratio of Butanol, Acetone and Ethanol.

That
is, for each bushel of corn you would garner (1.3) gallons of butanol
(0.7) gallons of acetone and (0.13) gallons of ethanol with
concentrations of 1-2%.

If
you compared ABE yield to that of the yeast ethanol
fermentation process, the yeast process yields 2.5 gallons of
ethanol from a bushel of corn, with concentrations of 10-15% it becomes
very clear why ethanol was chosen as an alternative fuel source over
butanol in the 1970’s and 80’s.

EEI’s patent changes everything. We are now able to produce yields of 2.5 gallons of butanol per bushel of corn.
(2004 Paper 2.5 Gal/Bu)

EEI’s patented discovery and the
economics did not exist to pursue Butanol versus Ethanol as a viable
alternative to gasoline until now.

What does EEI bring to the table when it comes to producing butanol?

EEI has developed and
patented technology that overcomes the limitations that have to date
complicated and kept the cost of butanol production from corn and other
forms biomass high. EEI is now able to produce 2.5 gallons of butanol
from corn with no Acetone or Ethanol, whereas others have not been able
to achieve better than 1.3 to 1.9 gallons of Butanol per bushel
and still utilize an ABE process. Further, EEI’s technology generates
hydrogen which is likely to receive additional attention as an
alternative fuel in the future. In fact, taking into account the
hydrogen production, EEI can produce 42 % more energy from a bushel of
corn than is typically produced by a corn-to-ethanol plant – 25 % of
the difference lies with the butanol and 18 % comes from the hydrogen.

What are the economics of the EEI process?

This will not be known in detail until we complete testing
on the B-100 (100 gallons butanol per week) Demonstration model and the B-1,000 pilot plant.
However, we can share the results of estimates we developed to
established the merits of proceeding with these phases of the work.

Our
preliminary cost estimates suggest that we can produce butanol from
corn for about $1.20 per gallon, not including a credit for the
hydrogen produced. This compares with ethanol production costs of about
$1.28 per gallon. Taking into account the higher Btu content of
butanol, this translates to 105,000 Btu per dollar for butanol and
84,000 Btu per dollar for ethanol with corn at $2.50 per bushel. As a
further point of reference, butanol produced from petroleum costs about
$1.35 per gallon to manufacture.

The
economics of the EEI process will be even more attractive when waste
material is used as feedstock instead of corn and the price to produce
a gallon is $0.85 . In such cases the need and cost to grow and
prepare the corn for fermentation, by far among the major cost items,
are eliminated.