Teams of scientists have found a streamlined process to convert agricultural waste, forest overgrowth and other dry wood into biofuel without burning it.
9, a:1:{i:0;s:8:”defaults”;}, blade manufacturing services, Scientists Have Made It Easier To Convert Wood To Biofuel, Teams of scientists have found a streamlined process to convert agricultural waste, forest overgrowth and other dry wood into biofuel without burning it., Teams of scientists have found a streamlined process to convert agricultural waste, forest overgrowth and other dry wood into biofuel without burning it.
A collaboration between the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories have been working on a more efficient process for converting woody biomass into bioethanol that would otherwise simply be burned.
This fuel could be used to reduce the carbon footprint of blade manufacturing services as well as the further production of bioethanol itself.
Both labs created companion reports which were published in the ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering journal.
Woody biomass seems like an ideal biofuel source due to its abundance and ability to solve multiple issues at once. However, the stumbling block is the inherent resilience of wood itself, which is particularly strong and cannot be easily broken down using chemicals.
The joint study proposed the use of a mixture of enzymes that were commercially available, non-toxic chemicals and a genetically engineered yeast strain that could chemically convert wood into bioethanol in a single tank, without the need for a multi-step process.
This would make it the first end-to-end process of its type, and would potentially allow ethanol to be produced at $3 (£2.17) per gallon thanks to efficiency, energy and water usage savings.
A further study from the Joint BioEnergy Institute further fine-tuned this process to allow for different types of wood to be converted together with as much efficiency as existing methods for producing biofuel.
There are other incentives to producing wood-based bioethanol that are particularly important in California, which would explain why several California-based institutions collaborated on this study.
The first is that it would help remove the issues caused by the most common source of bioethanol; corn. Corn, being a foodstuff, has a lot of starch that can easily be broken down. However, it requires a lot more land and water to effectively produce.
This often means that fields that would ordinarily produce food instead are producing biofuel, leading to shortages that would be resolved by using material that would be burned anyway.
As well as this, California is a hotspot for wildfires, which have increased over the last few years, due in no small part to overgrown biomass in forests in areas with notably dry weather. Using this material for biofuel reduces both controlled and uncontrolled burning.
As both dump large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, getting rid of the risk and requirement of burning biomass significantly reduces the carbon cost of biofuels generated with woody overgrowth.
Finally, it reduces dependence on fossil fuels, particularly when it comes to complex jet fuels and types of diesel that are heavily used in air and road freight respectively. As well as this, tests are underway to see if biofuels are viable for large scale sea freight as well.
The next step for the project is to scale the project up to a pilot that can convert a tonne of biomass each day. If this is both possible and affordable, then it can be launched commercially at a far larger scale., field_544dcaa8220f0, , field_543e9601d7f94, 36
