Clearly the point was to test its feasability and performance as a fuel in a conventional vehicle on an existing stock of butanol before ramping up to produce it in quantity from biomass.

I think Butanol may very well be the Cindarella Fuel if he figures out how to scale prodution.

The way this is being pitched (sugars from maize rather than e.g. hydrolized wood waste), this is one more attempt at subsidy of farmers rather than energy independence.  Is there any calculation of how much corn would be required to meet demand, vs. how much is available?  Not that I can see.

This is a system with small-to-middling potential, and deserves a similar level of research support.  The big support should be aimed at schemes with much larger potential, from 20% to 100% or more of vehicular energy requirements.

Hi I posted the trip blog on

http://360.yahoo.com/dramey756

But greencarcongress seems to be where the dialog is.

At dramey756 are the proformace data at various Emissions testing facilities across the nation.

Lance is right we did it for demonstration purposes. To make the statement that Butanol replaces gasoline in YOUR CAR today without modifications if we had it.

No one knew the efficacy of Butanol to replace gasoline in all the years.

Now Butanol is at least on the table as an alternative fuel.

Tom we did have Butanol tested in Denver against 100% Ethanol so he said and we are cleaner they looked for 2.5000 and Butanol was 0.1214 grams per mile Hydrocarbons. But I think the HC of 2.5 is more like a gasoline standard than ethanol. Maybe he pushed the wrong toggle. I will post the data in a more formated form (Excel) on the blog in the next couple of days.

All in all it is great being home and back to my critters.

Butanol performed flawlessly everywhere we went. I use to know it was a good fuel but now I am in awe. There is no hidden battery Butanol stands on its own. And ehtnaol at one time was a stepping stone till we found a better solution.

Frankly I am not even sure if the Oil Companies have a back up plan come the day when Oil supplies are dwindling to nothing but for now as long as people are fed the belief that Oil is our only fuel source available then no one will ever know that we DO infact have a replacement for gasoline I.E. butanol! However with the oil companies having such power will the day ever come when we can start pushing butanol and replacing gasoline? If anything our country won't get anything out of the deal infact I think we are just waiting for Europe to create the alcohol fuel market because no one can see the economical benefits if we are the ones to reach it first... :/

-Shawn

Great Idea! Watch out for the Big Oil Thugs that will try to ruin your day... Good luck ,This planet needs a sensible energy solution like yours.

How can one make biobutanol at home ? (in a similar way to homemade biodiesel)?.

I'm shocked I hadn't heard of this before last week. Did this make national news? Why hasn't someone made a documentary about this?

In regards to producing Butanol from fermentable bio materials. There is a dual stage process proposed from EEI that increases the efficiency to work from corn or cheese production residues. Other biofermentations can actually produce more complex organic materials from Carbon monoxide , carbon dioxide and hydrogen. These simple molecules can be derived from coal or natural gas at relatively low cost.

Cellulose materials can be converted to these gases as well by very high temperatures and oxygen, but cellulose can also be converted to fermentable sugars by enzymes or simple strong acids. Recovering and reusing the enzymes and acids have been economic issues.

Wet air oxidation, used a hundred years ago to produce vanilla flavoring from wood, can be controlled to produce acetic and other simple organic acids from wood and other cellulose materials including peat. Super critical water oxidation is known to produce large percentages of hydrogen and carbon dioxide from organic materials. Many fermentations use acetic acid and hydrogen to produce other molecules including ethanol. Acetic acid might be used in the production of butanol by being a substrate along with hydrogen for a fermentation process.

Floating an organic, non-water-soluble solvent or oil on top of a bio-reactor solution would probably remove quickly much of the butanol that was produced from the fermentation water solution. Mixing and then allowing the solvent to separate would do it much faster. The solvent would be centrifuged to remove any trace of water, like a cream separator, and then butanol could be evaporated directly from the solvent at low temperatures with vacuum distillation.

Solar energy could be used at the low temperatures required for vacuum distillation. Carbon Dioxide produced by the fermentation is removed at fermentation, solvent mixing and solvent centrifuging stages and will not interfere with the vacuum distillation. Vacuum insulated solar collectors can be used to produce high temperatures even in the winter for distillation. Multiple effect distillation has reduced the energy needed to extract water from sugar solutions, by a factor of four to eight times, for more than a hundred years, and it is also likly that it will also work in butanol production.

One very significant advantage of butanol is that there are far fewer government taxes and laws controlling its production and distribution. Thus it is likely that a small plant that produced a few tens of gallons a day from cornmeal could be owned and operated by a farmer, and the unit would be factory produced at mass production prices like tractors. It would be automatically computer controlled for much of its operation as are modern cars. The other oganics produced by fermentation might not interfere much with butanols use as a fuel in some uses, but may have to be separated and sold or used on site for fuel purposes.

A German maker of Steam Engines has a division that sells long running, packaged internal combustion engine-generator-waterheaters for getting both electricity and heat from fuels. Honda is selling a similar small system for homes that run on natural gas, but both could be used with any fuel including biogas from the waste products of fermentation and any volatile liquid fuels that cannot be sold with the butanol. The heat may be used by the farm and the butanol producer as can the electricity.

can the corn,wheat,barley used in ferminting be used as animal feed afterwards, or is it toxic to livestock

Somebody know how is possible to obtein butanol/ethanol from Stachyose fermentation?

I'm interested in looking at homeowner production of butanol from yard/garden/kitchen waste. This could then be used to power the mower/trimmer/snowblower. Any extra could be used in a back-up generator to provide electricity for the home. I would appreciate any suggestions on sites for more information or people working on this aspect of the process.

Actually there is a much cooler way to make butanol than by converting plant feedstocks. There is a company that has invented a reactor, a reverse fuel cell of sorts, that can take CO2, water, and electricity and produce butanol.

Nuclear and coal account for approximately 68% of this nations electricity generation, and neither can be readily throttled down as load falls during the night.

There is enough surplus electrical generating capacity at night to provide the energy needs for our daily commute.

This new technology could simultaneously provide a useful sink for CO2, just as biofuel would, while at the same time not requiring any of the land or displacing food crops. Instead, this could take CO2 that right now is being dumped in the air by coal plants, turn it into an automotive fuel using surplus capacity at night.

This would allow us to continue adding wind generating capacity to the power grid and the peak production times where the wind blows but the demand is low, could be funneled into producing butanol.

If at some point the demand for butanol exceeded the co2 generating capacity of existing power plants, we could scrub co2 from the air.

This could be a big win for the entire planet but you know the oil companies and the big international bankers who finance them are going to fight it tooth and nail.