Perhaps soon we will be using DME for gas grills. Perhaps the whole natural gas infrastruture should be converted to delivering liquid DME to the home at much higher energy density than natural gas and more than a hundred times the density of hydrogen.

Cellulose is natural so it must be as good as hydrogen or even better because nature has not left much hydrogen around on earth.

Actualy, plug-in-hybrids are a quicker and more efficient use of almost any waste residues, but some liquid fuels are still needed for when the engine is used. ..HG..

This is definitely going to be an interesting venture. Chemrec has had this technology for some time; this is basically an entrained-flow gasification. Because of it's consistency black liquor can easily be fed into a high-pressure entrained flow gasifier unlike lignocellulosic biomass. Also, by integrating their process into a pulp mill they benefit from the fact that the biomass feedstock i.e. black liquor is available on site; no need to collect biomass. This is a way to make renewable fuel from a waste stream that would otherwise be burned for power generation (it must be burned though to recover the inorganics).
But as the Pulpmillguy sad, additional electricity/steam would then have to be supplied from outside, and the plant would not be energy self-sufficient anymore.

This is a very valuable project, and it's sad that the US is not also involved in this. DME is a top contender among fuels for the 21st century.

It basically stores and handles like propane, and can be used to fuel a little-modified diesel engine with the result that you get minuscule pollution. Just needs solvent-resistant seals (as with biodiesel) and a positive shut-off seal in the fuel injectors so gas won't seep out. Since it doesn't produce soot, you can go heavy on EGR and curtail NOX as well. A diesel that's pretty clean without the aftertreatment. You can also mix in a goodly proportion of a conventional diesel fuel, biodiesel or SVO and still get no soot. DME also can reform easily into hydrogen for a fuel cell.

Until the renewable version is developed, DME will be the preserve of natural gas providers. It will help them put their product on the global market in a business a lot like today's oil--that is, without the heavy investment and commitment to customer relationships that pipelined gas and LNG leave you with. But based on reserves, this business could easily get dominated by just two countries, Russia and Iran. Like OPEC but more extreme. It would be very bad for the health of the free world for these two countries to be tempted to get any more full of themselves than they already are. That's why BioDME has to be developed to blunt the potential for monopoly and market domination. The Europeans know what they are doing.

US politicians' fealty to the energy free market charade is getting even more dangerous.

The Chemrec process apparently begins by separating cellulose from hemicellulose/lignin using the traditional Kraft paper mill process. The black liquor (hemicellose/lignin) is then converted to either methanol or DME. In an integrated biofuel refinery, the cellulose fraction can be converted to methane and carbon dioxide in a 50%/50% ratio by using the Laube and Martin bacterial methanogenesis method. See,www.aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/42/3/413. The cellulosic methane is separated from the carbon dioxide using a molecular sieve. The methane can then either be delivered to the natural gas pipeline or can be converted to more methanol or more DME.

The carbon dioxide "waste" (from both the Chemrec process and the Laube and Martin process) would be recycled by algae, grown at the refinery site in photobioreactors, to yield algal oil. The necessary inputs for algae growth in a photobioreactor are sunlight, wastewater and a sterile carbon dioxide stream (which is provided by the other processes). The algal oil can then be blended with 10-20% methanol to yield biodiesel.

An integrated biorefinery, which would combine the Chemrec, Laube and Martin, and GreenFuel (algal oil) processes, should have an excellent feedstock-to-fuel efficiency since virtually all of the biomass carbon (due, in part, to carbon dioxide recycling with algae) is used to produce fuel. Biomass transportation is also reduced because of the algae content, which is grown on-site. The available CO2-neutral fuels from an integrated biofuel refinery would be not only DME, but biodiesel, methanol (for M-50 or M-85), and natural gas as well.