02/14/12 Des Plaines, IL
The IH2 technology is a catalytic thermochemical process that promises to be a very cost-effective route to produce liquid transportation fuels from renewable resources. GTI recently added a new Pilot-Scale IH2 Plant to broaden biomass-to-liquid hydrocarbon fuel conversion.
The IH2 process converts virtually any type of non-food biomass feedstock—such as wood, agricultural residues, algae, and aquatic plants. High-quality hydrocarbon fuels and/or blend stocks (in the gasoline, jet and diesel range) have been produced by the IH2 technology in tests at GTI using a broad spectrum of biomass feed. The IH2 products are fungible with fossil-derived fuels and are completely compatible with current infrastructure. In this way the IH2 process differs from other biofuel technologies that produce crude or oxygen-containing intermediates that need substantial further upgrading. GTI has licensed the IH2 technology to CRI Catalyst Company (CRI), an international company headquartered in Houston, TX, for worldwide deployment. The timeline to market is short, and commercial introduction is expected in early 2014.picture of GTI's IH2 pilot plant
"IH2 technology will increase the supply of economical, renewable, and sustainable transportation fuels in the marketplace and lower the greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector," notes Vann Bush, GTI Managing Director of Energy Conversion. "It will help to meet the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard obligation and the global appetite for fuels with local resources – good for regional economies and better for the environment than conventional alternatives."
Adds Alan Del Paggio CRI Vice President, Upstream and Renewables, "This pilot plant will continue to demonstrate the IH2 process as a differentiated biofuels technology. The process is designed to have low environmental impact. Since the commercial IH2 technology produces its own hydrogen and a surplus of water to be self-sufficient, it can operate in a stand-alone configuration anywhere there is sufficient biomass feed for conversion. And the process achieves >90% greenhouse gas reductions in comparison to fossil fuels."
picture of GTI's IH2 pilot plant The new pilot plant's ability to operate continuously provides an ideal platform for process optimization and detailed characterization. The facility processes 50 kilograms of dry biomass per day to demonstrate biomass handling and conversion for multiple feedstocks and produce product in sufficient quantities for fuels certification and engine testing, and will allow the IH2 process research team to validate process economics. CRI provided much of the funding for the new pilot plant.
GTI has received funding support for R&D and preliminary engineering for testing the IH2 process in the laboratory and pilot plant from the U.S. Department of Energy (EERE Office of Biomass Program). Participants in GTI's projects include Cargill, CRI, Johnson Timber, Parabel (a company formerly known as PetroAlgae), Aquaflow, Blue Marble Energy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Michigan Technological University.
The first extended runs of the pilot plant will be performed using Parabel microcrops and wood.
About Gas Technology Institute (GTI)
GTI is a leading research, development and training organization that has been addressing the nation's energy and environmental challenges by developing technology-based solutions for consumers, industry, and government for more than 70 years.
About CRI Catalyst Company
CRI Catalyst Company is part of CRI/Criterion Inc., an international company headquartered in Houston, TX, that supplies advanced catalysts, services, and technology solutions to the global refining, petrochemical and renewable fuel communities. CRI operates research laboratories, development facilities, manufacturing plants and business units throughout the world. It is dedicated to providing a broad customer base with effective and cost-efficient catalysts and technologies. CRI has a range of products with specific focus on environmental applications, hydrogen separation and recovery, selective oxidation and hydrogenation and the production of renewable fuels
"http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/biomass2010/pdfs/biomass2010_track3_s2_marker.pdf"
http://www.aicheproceedings.org/2009/Fall/data/papers/Paper171241.pdf
vrijdag 24 februari 2012
donderdag 2 februari 2012
Biofuel from beneath the waves
Engineered bacterium can produce ethanol directly from seaweed.
Zoe Cormier 19 January 2012
Seaweed could be a more sustainable source of biofuels than food crops like sugarcane or corn.
Bioengineers have devised a way to produce ethanol from seaweed, laying the groundwork for a biofuel that doesn't sacrifice food crops.
Yasuo Yoshikuni and his colleagues at the Bio Architecture Lab in Berkeley, California, engineered the bacterium Escherichia coli so that it could digest brown seaweed and produce ethanol. Their work is published in Science today1.
Yoshikuni says that his group chose brown seaweed because it was both sustainable and scalable. “Seaweed is already produced in huge quantities around the world without taking up any fresh water or arable land.” Brown seaweed also grows faster than red or green seaweed, with varieties such as the giant kelp, found off the coast of California, growing by up to a metre a day.
Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn), and have turned to different feedstocks including switchgrass, the succulent plant jatropha, cyanobacteria and green algae. However, producing biofuels from sugar cane or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land. In the case of maize, more energy is required for growing and harvesting the crop than can be gained from the ethanol produced.
But producing biofuels from seaweed has so far proved difficult for bioengineers. Seaweed produces four kinds of sugars — laminarin, mannitol, alginate and cellulose. The biggest fraction in brown seaweed is alginate, which is a complex polysaccharide and tricky for microbes to digest.
“The carbohydrates are rather exotic compared to traditional terrestrial sources like corn or sugar cane,” says Yoshikuni. “Alginate is the key to unlocking the potential of brown seaweed.”
Seaweed solution
So using Vibrio splendidus, a marine microbe that can digest brown seaweed, Yoshikuni and his team isolated a biochemical pathway that breaks down alginate. They inserted the genes responsible into a strain of E. coli, which could then digest the alginate into simple sugars. The team also engineered the strain so that it could convert those sugars into ethanol, enabling the direct production of ethanol from brown seaweed. This strain of E. coli could, in theory, be engineered to produce a variety of other useful chemicals and fuels.
“This is very impressive work — it really is a groundbreaking achievement,” says Yong-Su Jin of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who also studies biofuel production from seaweed. Jin works with red seaweed, which is less abundant in the world’s oceans than brown seaweed, but “relatively easy to ferment using yeast”, he says, because of its lower alginate content2.
Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at the University of California San Diego, calls the work “a very sophisticated engineering feat”, but adds “so far this has almost nothing to do with bioenergy production”. The main challenge in biofuels is not the ability to degrade complex carbohydrates and turn them into simple sugars, he explains: “It’s the rest of the steps involved in the lifecycle of growing and transporting the biomass.”
Scalability remains the big problem: people have farmed seaweed for hundreds of years, but only produce several thousand tonnes a year for food. Biofuel production would require billions of tonnes. “We still face a huge technical gap for large-scale cultivation,” says Jin.
That’s the next step, says Yoshikuni: this year his team will demonstrate the feasibility of their ethanol-production process at a pilot plant being built in Chile.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.9860
References
Wargacki, A. J. et al. Science 335, 308–313 (2012).
Ha, S.-J. et al. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 77, 5822–5825 (2011).
Zoe Cormier 19 January 2012
Seaweed could be a more sustainable source of biofuels than food crops like sugarcane or corn.
Bioengineers have devised a way to produce ethanol from seaweed, laying the groundwork for a biofuel that doesn't sacrifice food crops.
Yasuo Yoshikuni and his colleagues at the Bio Architecture Lab in Berkeley, California, engineered the bacterium Escherichia coli so that it could digest brown seaweed and produce ethanol. Their work is published in Science today1.
Yoshikuni says that his group chose brown seaweed because it was both sustainable and scalable. “Seaweed is already produced in huge quantities around the world without taking up any fresh water or arable land.” Brown seaweed also grows faster than red or green seaweed, with varieties such as the giant kelp, found off the coast of California, growing by up to a metre a day.
Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn), and have turned to different feedstocks including switchgrass, the succulent plant jatropha, cyanobacteria and green algae. However, producing biofuels from sugar cane or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land. In the case of maize, more energy is required for growing and harvesting the crop than can be gained from the ethanol produced.
But producing biofuels from seaweed has so far proved difficult for bioengineers. Seaweed produces four kinds of sugars — laminarin, mannitol, alginate and cellulose. The biggest fraction in brown seaweed is alginate, which is a complex polysaccharide and tricky for microbes to digest.
“The carbohydrates are rather exotic compared to traditional terrestrial sources like corn or sugar cane,” says Yoshikuni. “Alginate is the key to unlocking the potential of brown seaweed.”
Seaweed solution
So using Vibrio splendidus, a marine microbe that can digest brown seaweed, Yoshikuni and his team isolated a biochemical pathway that breaks down alginate. They inserted the genes responsible into a strain of E. coli, which could then digest the alginate into simple sugars. The team also engineered the strain so that it could convert those sugars into ethanol, enabling the direct production of ethanol from brown seaweed. This strain of E. coli could, in theory, be engineered to produce a variety of other useful chemicals and fuels.
“This is very impressive work — it really is a groundbreaking achievement,” says Yong-Su Jin of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who also studies biofuel production from seaweed. Jin works with red seaweed, which is less abundant in the world’s oceans than brown seaweed, but “relatively easy to ferment using yeast”, he says, because of its lower alginate content2.
Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at the University of California San Diego, calls the work “a very sophisticated engineering feat”, but adds “so far this has almost nothing to do with bioenergy production”. The main challenge in biofuels is not the ability to degrade complex carbohydrates and turn them into simple sugars, he explains: “It’s the rest of the steps involved in the lifecycle of growing and transporting the biomass.”
Scalability remains the big problem: people have farmed seaweed for hundreds of years, but only produce several thousand tonnes a year for food. Biofuel production would require billions of tonnes. “We still face a huge technical gap for large-scale cultivation,” says Jin.
That’s the next step, says Yoshikuni: this year his team will demonstrate the feasibility of their ethanol-production process at a pilot plant being built in Chile.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.9860
References
Wargacki, A. J. et al. Science 335, 308–313 (2012).
Ha, S.-J. et al. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 77, 5822–5825 (2011).
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