A new report has recently been published by the National Academy of Sciences, regarding replacing gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel with just a few changes to the engines. These biofuels have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 96%.
The research project was a collaboration between Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory. Together, they have come up with a cost-effective way to produce these biofuels.
The conventional way of making ethanol from plants is a complicated three-step process that increases the cost of fuel. The team has been working to develop a conversion process to combine the three steps and also lower the costs of creating a new biofuel.
This one-step process is known as Consolidated Alcohol Dehydration and Oligomerization, or CADO. In this process, they demonstrated the complete conversion of anhydrous ethanol. CADO offers low-cost potential concerning conventional catalytic approaches because of the 1 step processing. It can be accomplished at near atmospheric pressure between 275-300°C and requires no external hydrogen.
Previous measures have had a generally low hydrocarbon yield of about 36% with our current technologies. The team was able to more than double the liquid product yields achieving numbers of more than 80%. They were also able to significantly lower the cost and lower metal concentrations.
The scientists at Argonne National Laboratory have created a computer analysis tool that measures Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation (GREET). One of the co-authors of the study, Michael Wang is the GREET team at Argonne, “GREET is one of the only tools out there that can provide a complete picture of the energy and environmental impacts of an entire vehicle and fuel system.”
The program has been used more than 40,000 times by researchers from around the world. It simulates environmental outputs and energy use of various vehicles and fuel systems and takes into account where raw materials are mined or extracted to when they are emitted or disposed of. GREET analyzes and calculates energy use and emissions levels throughout the process.
For this research, GREET was used to calculate the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions produced by hydrocarbon fuels made from different conversion methods along with the raw materials. They analyzed corn, sugarcane, sugarcane straw, and corn stover with the last two normally considered to be waste materials.
Depending on what they tested, each yielded different levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrocarbon blends made using the CADO conversion process reduced greenhouse gas emissions up to 96%. Corn grain reduced emissions by 40%, sugar cane 70%, and cellulosic biomass of sugar can and corn stover reduced it anywhere from 70-96%.
Argonne energy systems analyst Pahola Thathiana Benavides speaks of this exciting research:
In order to move towards more sustainable development, we will need fuels that can generate fewer emissions and that are economically feasible. This work is an exciting indicator that building such a future is possible.
The estimated cost of converting over to these biofuels would not be that high at all. Most engines would have to have little to no changes done to them. The same filling methods can be used, with no new pipelines, meaning no extra time would be needed. The cost at the pumps they say would average around $3.00 per gallon. Taking into account that it can help reduce emissions by up to 96% for all vehicles including airplanes, $3.00 is well worth the cost to help reduce emissions.
