Gasoline from wood

[Reachable]

This is new. In recent years I've heard about a couple of other processes that use heat to break down bio and other organic molecules into alkanes in large quantities for fuel. What's amazing about this is how fast it's accomplished -- less than a minute.

The article doesn't go into a lot of detail but it lets you know it's there.

BTW -- ignore the "republican" in the URL. That's just the name of the newspaper.

http://www.masslive.com/news/republican ... xml&coll=1

[andyb]

1 minute

Even if it took 1-year its still better than the 50,000+ years it currently takes.

The main question is going to be how much energy does it take to produce.?


Andy

[frostedflakes]

Sounds promising, assuming the net energy is positive. From the article it sounds like the process is much more efficient than current methods, so it probably is. Was also kind of interesting how they mentioned using heat from the reaction to potentially provide electricity for the entire process.

There are a lot of other promising alternative energy sources (solar, hydrogen, etc.), but none of them are anywhere close to ready for prime-time IMO. I believe biofuels are the best renewable energy we currently have. The transportation infrastructure is already there, the production methods are getting more efficient all the time. We just need to get rid of the greedy corn lobbyists and start using practical biomass -- waste products, switchgrass, hemp, etc.

[walle]

Found this awhile ago...seems like two great projects.


Cheers

[pipperoni]

The main question is going to be how much energy does it take to produce.?

I think the real question is how much gasoline do you get per timber? Where is all this timber going to come from? Timber would probably be the most impractical commodity you could use...

[Avalanche]

Where is all this timber going to come from?

I think you know quite well where it's going to come from.

Joking aside, we definitely need a process than can use grass, leaves, and other yard waste. Or really fast growing trees.

[xan_user]

...Or really fast growing trees.

One snowboard company I know of has developed trees that can grow 30 feet in 18 months!



Of course many of my neighbors grow 15'+ "trees" in less than half that time...

[fri2219]

"We've proven this method on a small scale in the lab," Huber said. "But we need to make further improvements and prove it on a large scale before it's going to be economically viable."

It will never be viable- this idea gets trotted out along with perpetual motion machines and AMAZING (added for the diggtard effect) water powered 2000 kilometer/liter engines every time there's a crude oil price spike. What this lab is doing is nothing new whatsoever.

That said, there have been two approaches used:

Biological:
The thermodynamics of de-lignification just don't work (fast enough for impatient humans). In order to get an organism to do it, they have to either get enough energy out of it to make it worth their while, or be able to make an energy living while they're forced to do it. In either case, the payoff for the organism is incredibly low, meaning that the kinetics of the reactions involved are very slow, and as a result, isn't economically viable. (It's a great gig if you're a fungus that lives for a few hundred years, however.)

Chemical:
The process is essentially the same as some components of pulp processing, but it's been nearly impossible to control the cracking process to get economically viable yields of the polyaromatics. That is, it costs more in energy to process than you can extract in 'gasoline' (sic).

P.S. I worked on the (biological) project at the US Forest Products Lab at one time. This sort of publicity has more to do with earmark whoring than science.

Appropriate google search words: Polyaromatic delignification "Penicillium chrysogenum"

[Reachable]

Organisms aren't inclines to do this sort of thing because they aren't inclined to liquefy and depolymerize themselves.

The main weapon with these processes does not seem to be enzymes but rather heat.

There aren't many who would doubt that this is legit. It hardly needs to be said that the biggest barrier to a lot of good new technology being adopted is the vested interests in the old technology. The best weapon that that society as a whole has against Wall St., I would think, is just intense and constant public awareness.

[jaganath]

It will never be viable- this idea gets trotted out along with perpetual motion machines and AMAZING (added for the diggtard effect) water powered 2000 kilometer/liter engines every time there's a crude oil price spike.

frankly, to immediately lump this in with perpetual motion machines is more than a little hasty, especially from someone with a supposedly scientific background. after all, obtaining HC fuel from waste or low quality feedstock has been going on for many years (ie Fischer-Tropsch, thermal depolymerization, biomass gasification etc) so it's not as if it's banned by the fundamental laws of physics, as PM's are. whether it will in the end turn out to be economically viable depends on rather a lot of factors that, unless you are clairvoyant, remain opaque to us ordinary mortals.

http://www.physorg.com/news126785152.html more info and references

[fri2219]

lump this in with perpetual motion machines is more than a little hasty

It really is that unlikely, and the rest of the community agrees:
- If you check out their funding sources, you'll find it's start up money from the State of Massachusetts and NSF basic research. If it was promising at all, they'd have a bare minimum 2 million dollar grant from the DOE, or at least sponsored by the NRDC.
- Furthermore, the work comes from an Assistant Professor at a 3rd tier institution. Instead of releasing their work to peer review, the research group is using popular press, like NPR/Science Friday- which is always a dead giveaway for bad science/engineering. The work would have more credibility if it came out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and had come from this week's ACS conference.

Chopping down (even managed poplar and bamboo) forests is quite possibly the least intelligent way to produce biomass fuel I can think of, 2nd only to using fructose from corn. I'd be a great deal more impressed if they were using grasses grown on depleted saline soil in an arid climate.

[frostedflakes]

I don't think anybody was claiming we should cut down forests to produce biofuel. In the lab they used wood as biomass, but from the article, it sounds like any other cellulosic plant material will work.

Anybody with a lick of sense knows that we should use waste biomass to supply as much of our energy needs as possible, and offset the rest with fast-growing, low-maintenance crops, such as switchgrass and hemp. The only people supporting corn ethanol and similarly idiotic biomass are those with no clue and/or vested interests.

Also, this is not perpetual motion. Plants absorb vast amounts of energy from the sun, we expend energy to grow, harvest, and convert the plant material to a liquid form that is usable for combustion. There is plenty of evidence out there to suggest that, using the right biomass and production methods, it isn't difficult to obtain a favorable EROEI.

[thejamppa]

LOL, during WWII finnish were using thing called Häkäpönttö (aka carbiondioxide box )to make cars run when there was lack of gasoline. Makeshift thing worked when you burned wood and made car moving. So the idea of making cars moving with wood is not new. It just seem not evolving too much.

[VanWaGuy]

In an 8th grade (or so) science class, we did a lab where we heated a test tube of wood splits and the cooled the gasses driven off, and the resulting liquid contained I am assuming wood alcohol as it burned and we were told there was alcohol in it. Small scale, if you had a source of wood waste/leaves/lawn trimmings, and a solar reflector large enough to drive out the alcohol, there might be some DIY potential for something like this.

Certainly not in the realm of perpetual motion machine at all. May not be efficient, but harnessing free energy, and converting it to a form that is more usable, even inefficiently, and you are still (no pun intended) ahead.

[NeilBlanchard]

Hello,

This subject was covered today on Talk of the Nation Science Friday:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200804112

http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr ... 575953.mp3

There are other promising developments, too.