star2city Posted June 20, 2006 Share Posted June 20, 2006 ETHANOL: Officials: You cane not beet sugar There is skepticism among some sugar growers that ethanol is a viable end product for their crop. "If I was going to guess, I would say the economics are not going to be there," said Steve Williams, president of the American Sugar Beet Growers Association, who farms about 700 acres of sugar beets near Fisher, Minn. "The food value is better for sugar than for ethanol."If not ethanol, why not butanol? Dupont, BP join to produce biofuels The companies said a collaboration they began in 2003 has advanced to the point where they plan to introduce butanol made from sugar beets as a gasoline blending component in the United Kingdom. ... Like ethanol, butanol is an alcohol compound, but with four carbon atoms instead of two. DuPont officials said the different chemical structure of butanol gives it several advantages over ethanol, including tolerance to water contamination, facilitating transportation via pipeline. The U.S. fuel market has been constrained by the fact that ethanol, which attracts water molecules and therefore tends to corrode pipelines, must be transported on trucks, trains and bargest in relatively small batches to storage terminals where it is then blended with gasoline. Another advantage of biobutanol, officials said, is that it can be blended into gasoline at higher concentrations than ethanol without the need to retrofit vehicles, and it offers better fuel economy than gasoline-ethanol blends. DuPont officials would not disclose their conversion ratio goal for the fermentation process, which results not just in butanol, but acetone and ethanol as well. DuPont said it hopes to have the "generation 2" biocatalyst ready by 2010, but that there currently are no plans for a production facility in the U.S. "We believe the opportune time to introduce this into the U.S. would be when the Gen 2 organism is available," Connelly said. DuPont officials said their goal is to make the new technology fully competitive with unsubsidized petroleum production at oil prices between $30 and $40 per barrel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fighting Sioux Fan Posted June 25, 2006 Share Posted June 25, 2006 When CAFTA kills any American produced sugar profits, we will see how much more interested sugar beet growers are in ethanol. If they are interested in ethanol, though, why not just grow corn? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
star2city Posted June 25, 2006 Author Share Posted June 25, 2006 When CAFTA kills any American produced sugar profits, we will see how much more interested sugar beet growers are in ethanol. If they are interested in ethanol, though, why not just grow corn? Based on the economics and properties of bio-butanol, rather than ethanol, bio-butanol may be a profitable alternative to ethanol if CAFTA kills sugar profits. Moreover, if the butanol technology gets proven, ethanol demand for corn may diminish significantly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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