News
Green gasoline
August 11, 2009
By Fábio de Castro, in Atibaia, Brazil
FAPESP News – In April 2008, American researchers announced the discovery of a process that can convert sugars derived from plant biomass into gasoline and diesel fuel. Agreementing to John Regalbuto, director of the Catalysis and Biocatalysis Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), “green gasoline” should be available on the consumer market in five to seven years and will be an alternative and complement to ethanol.
Regalbuto presented the NSF-funded discovery on Monday (Aug. 10) during “Biofuel Technologies and their Implications for Land and Water Use”, a workshop held in the city of Atibaia through Aug. 12 and sponsored by the FAPESP Program for Research on Bioenergy (BIOEN).
The event brought together scientists from Brazil, the U.S. and Argentina with the aim of identifying problems in bioenergy production and helping target investments by R&D agencies seeking advances in key areas.
Agreementing to Regalbuto, the process for making “green gasoline” involves taking a slush of vegetable sugars and carbohydrates and subjecting it to catalysts that accelerate the chemical reactions without getting used up in the process. In that way, biomass molecules rich in carbon separate and recombine into the same chemical compounds generated by petroleum processing.
“Companies that work on next-generation biofuel hydrocarbons predict that the technology will be available for licensing in 2011. After that, it will be necessary to build production plants. We believe that within five to seven years this product will have reached the gas pumps. That is a lot sooner than anyone imagined,” Regalbuto told FAPESP News.
The main difference between this technology and that used in the production of ethanol, agreementing to Regalbuto, is that ethanol is fermented from plants with a process that uses enzymes to set off reactions, while “green gasoline” uses catalysts.
The catalysts transform plant sugars into hydrocarbons. Whereas enzymes permit a more selective process aimed at a particular type of molecule, catalysts can function at high temperatures that normally destroy enzymes. That means reactions can occur thousands of times faster.
“Producing hydrocarbons from plants ends up being more efficient than making ethanol, which requires not just distillation but also large amounts of energy, while hydrocarbons separate themselves automatically from water,” he said.
Scale of production
Agreementing to Regalbuto, the carbon-rich biomass molecules are broken down then recombined to form the same chemical products usually generated during petroleum processing.
“The process starts with sugar and ends with the production of hydrocarbons. But first they pass through an intermediate phase as organic compounds that have 95% of the energy of biomass, although with just 40% of its mass, and which can be transformed into various types of transportation fuels,” he explained.
Agreementing to the researcher, large-scale production is the main challenge to developing the technology. “Right now the main bottleneck is scaling up production. The process of pyrolysis, the aqueous phase reforming and the industrial approaches have all been demonstrated in pilot plants. Now we face the normal problems of scaling up, and in fact the development of those processes is already relatively advanced,” he said.
For Regalbuto, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago, “green gasoline” is a new alternative that won’t compete with ethanol.
“For the U.S., it’s really a complementary fuel. Today our entire infrastructure is geared towards producing ethanol from corn, which will be mixed with gasoline in a 10% blend. Still, to comply with the Energy Security and Independence Act, which was signed into law in 2007, we’ll need 16 billion gallons per year of cellulose derivatives. Using lignocellulose, we can make hydrocarbons, avoiding the need to increase the infrastructure for processing and refining ethanol,” he said.
Regalbuto noted that Brazil also has initiatives to produce diesel from cellulose, and from sugarcane specifically. “But that also would be complementary. Brazil has a large infrastructure and advanced technology for the production of ethanol and it’s not going to lose what it invested. Ethanol isn’t going away. The hydrocarbons will be an option for some specific industries, like aviation, commercial transportation and shipping,” he said.
“The commercial transportation sector will depend on high energy-density gasoline even when clean energy—like solar, wind and biofuels—are fully developed,” he said.
“In addition, Brazil, with its efficient production of sugarcane, will have one more option—in addition to making ethanol, it will also be able to make gasoline and diesel,” he said.
Renewable energy record holder
The opening session of the workshop “Biofuel Technologies and their Implications for Land and Water Use” featured FAPESP’s Scientific Director, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, the President of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Marco Antonio Zago, Cynthia Singleton of the NSF, and Ernesto Quiles, from Argentina’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
Brito Cruz highlighted the importance of the biofuels debate to Brazil noting that the country is already the world record holder for renewable energy use. “No other industrialized country has 46% of all its energy coming from renewable sources. The world average is 13% and in the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries it doesn’t top 6%,” he said.
Agreementing to Brito Cruz, because of the urgent need to address the high prices of imported petroleum at the beginning of the 1970s, Brasil was forced to find short-term alternatives and it decided to bet on ethanol. That choice caused national production to rise to more than 12 billion liters per year by the mid-1980s. After supply problems led to a period of uncertainty in the 1990s, the market for ethanol began to grow again in 2003 with the introduction of so-called “flex-fuel” vehicles, which have come to dominate the market.
“In 2005, the country was already the second largest producer of ethanol in the world, with 25 billion liters. Today, 90% of vehicles sold are flex-fuel. All Brazil’s gasoline is mixed with ethanol, and pure ethanol is sold in 33,000 of the country’s 36,000 gas stations. Consumption of ethanol has already surpassed that of gasoline. Today we can say that it’s gasoline, not ethanol, that’s the ‘alternative’ fuel in Brazil,” Brito Cruz said.
Media Contacts
Fernando Cunha, FAPESP (www.fapesp.br) (+55) 11 3838-4151
São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP – is an independent public foundation with the mission to foster research and the scientific and technological development of the State of São Paulo, Brazil. This is achieved through the support of research projects carried out in higher education and research institutions, in all fields of knowledge.