@ HealthyBreeze -

biobutanol is a potential replacement for gasoline, to be used in spark ignition engines. Furanics are one of a whole slew of second-generation biomass-derived diesel substitutes, suitable for CI engines. There's little point in a direct comparison of the two because they can't go into one and the same engine.

Fischer-Tropsch is actually quite exothermic, so that heat could be used to dry the biomass feedstock to some extent. Educt selectivity is also a problem, i.e. only a fraction of the liquid produced is suitable for motor fuel. Choren's BTL process does require fairly dry biomass but I'm not sure that's purely a question of the energy balance.

I suspect this particular catalytic process for furanics is also exothermic. If efficiency in terms of biomass energy in vs. fuel energy out proves to be poor, it is likely due to this chemistry rather than the heat needed to dry the feedstock.

The big advantage of catalytic conversion processes is that they are a little less finicky about the type of feedstock used and, they can be scaled up to industrial production levels more easily than enzymatic approaches.

It is amazing to see how so many people are still stuck with 100+ years old inefficent dirty combustion engines.

Using sun energy to produce plants, to produce agrofuel feedstock, to produce ethanol, biofuel, butanol etc to feed inefficient ICE machines seems to be futile.

Let's convert sun energy directly into clean electrical energy and use high efficiency electric or mostly electric vehicles. Simple, clean and efficent. Since solar energy is so over abundant, the conversion efficiency does not have to be that high, 20% will do, until we find a way to increase the conversion efficiency to 40% or more.

It makes so much more sense.

...Yeah, then we'll have stockpiles of inefficient, hazardous, mostly non-recyclable batteries all over the place. Gee, sure does make sense... :/

Until storage technology catches up (read: 25+ years), your utopia can't be a reality. Transportation will need a liquid hydrocarbon energy source for a long time to come.

@ HealthyBreeze -

yes, that is correct. Switching to furanics would reduce the operating radius of a vehicle with a CI engine by ~10% relative to dinodiesel. However, this is not a huge problem: the higher efficiency of a CI engine in part load means the same fuel volume will still propel you ~10% further than the same vehicle model can achieve with a comparable SI engine and gasoline.

@ Harvey D -

very early in the history of the automobile, electric drivetrains were common, precisely because they are clean and reliable. The issue for the past 90 years has been the poor storage capacity of batteries, compared to hydrocarbon fuels. It will take a combination of much improved technology and modified consumer expectations (especially wrt operating radius on a single charge) for true BEVs/PHEVs to capture significant market share.

Solar PV is expensive and suffers from the additional complication that it is available only during the day, whereas the most convenient time to charge up a BEV is at night.

Therefore, while your suggestion is sound from an energy balance perspective, it is not yet possible to implement it on a large scale. There's a fine line between vision and wishful thinking.

@ Joe -

lead-acid, NiMH and Li-ion batteries are all already being recycled today. I'm not sure which types you are referring to.

Yes, relying on solar powered PHEV's is not possible today, but 25 years from now we'd be a lot further if there were proper leadership.

Just this week GE got $6 million to put toward development of efficient, higher output electric motors. Yet makers of these biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol, get hundreds of millions in subsidies. Politically expedient, but it doesn't really solve any problems.

If someone like Al Gore ran things we'd be on the way to having this problem licked. If the US and/or China put the emphasis that the UK does on cleaning cars up, something would actually happen.

Besides voting I'm not involved in politics, but I would so vote for Gore right now, it's not even funny.

Catalytic convertion in the FT-process completely destroys every molecular bond in the feedstock, and then rebuilds it into the desired fuel. This (of course) is higly exotermic, thus not very efficient.
The catalytic processes described here only open a few atom-bonds of the sugar molecule and reorganize it into HMF. Since the majority of the atom-bonds are unaltered, the efficiency of this process is much higher.
The disadvantage of it (compared to FT) is that FT is much less specific, meaning that any form of carbon-containing feedstock can be used. In furan production, the feedstock can only be sugars (luckily, we have a lot of sugars in any plant material).

Furans are, generally, highly toxic substances, comparable with such nasty staff as dioxin. I would appreciate if somebody knowledgeable on the subject clarify how furanics biofuels score on that matter.

The question probably is not that much the toxicity of high concentration of HMF, but the degree of biodegradability of HMF. Since it is present in many natural products it is probably adequately biodegradable. As diesel or gasoline are a mixture of different alifatic and aromatic molecules, many of them are much less biodegradable. HMF is even present at concentrations of 10mg/liter in INTRAVENOUS nutrition and doesn't seem to be toxic. HMF forms spontaneously when sugars are heated, so we eat them every day.

I'm not thrilled at the thought of using aromatic compounds as automotive fuel. They have a higher ozone-forming potential than fuel candidates like ethanol. And here's another point: The mass production of ethanol was motivated not only so much to substitute biomass-derived energy for fossil fuel energy, but for this reason:

When mother nature threw a frustrating showstoppper at us regarding methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), we needed an oxygenate/octane improver to take its place. Ethanol, while undesirable if you get it into your system, is not as undesirable environmentally as MTBE. Its an oxygenate and octane-improver, as well as a source of energy.

So if we convert biomass into hydrocarbons with benzene-like ring structures, we negate part of the reason for mass-producing ethanol.

Given the problems that arise from using corn as a raw material for ethanol production, I hope, hope, hope that cellulosic ethanol (which can use non-food biomass like wood chips, switchgrass, etc) will become commonplace in the next few years.

Automobility for all,

----Alex Kovnat

Recycling lowers the environmental impact of batteries but it still uses energy and creates waste.Batteries are toxic(so far)and most require mining.Cellulosic ethanol allows us to keep our current car.

Well, what I mean is that it is much more efficient to gasify biomass in an simple gasifier and get pure synthesis gas rather than to chemically break down wood cellulose. First you need to separate it from lignin etc. This is done by chemicals (sulfides or something like that) as in paper mills. Then you have to hydrolize the cellulose. This means concentrated sulfuric acid. Lots of boiling, washing, filtering, lots of hazardous solutions of concentrated acids. The chemicals are all fairly expensive inputs in such a refinery. This is basically working with the methods of alchemists of the Middle ages. Yes, you can get the product, but you spend an enormous amount of effort to get there.

Thanks, Roger, I totally agree that gasification is way more efficient than hydrolysis. And yes, the syngas can be shifted to hydrogen, converted to methane or anything else - ammonia, fertilizers, methanol, formaldehyde etc etc etc. It can be used as fuel or chemical feedstock.
But I think that the problem is that at present there are still way too more oil and gas available. And for obvious reasons it is way more easy to work with gas or oil than to collect biomass. That's why it is not being used at present.
But this can change in the future. More and more plants will eventually start to use biomass as the feedstock.
Choren does that now, let's see how it goes for them.