Cost-Saving Measure to Upgrade Ethanol to Butanol -- A Better Alternative to Gasoline

Scientists today reported a discovery that could speed an emerging effort to replace ethanol in gasoline with a substantially better fuel additive called butanol, which some experts regard as "the gasoline of the future." Their report on this discovery, which holds potential to reduce the costs of converting ethanol factories to production of butanol, came at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

Duncan Wass explained that ethanol has become a leading biofuel -- millions of gallons added to gasoline around the country each year -- despite several disadvantages. Ethanol, for instance, has a lower energy content per gallon than gasoline, which can reduce fuel mileage. Ethanol also has a corrosive effect on car engines and can't easily be used in amounts higher than 10-15 percent.
"Ethanol actually is a poor alternative fuel," Wass said. "Butanol is much better. It contains about 30 percent more energy per gallon than ethanol, is easier to handle and more of it can be blended into each gallon of gasoline. In fact, you could fuel a car on pure butanol and it would run absolutely fine. That's the basis for butanol's emerging reputation as 'the gasoline of the future.'"
Efforts already have begun to convert some ethanol factories in the Corn Belt to production of butanol, Wass explained. Those factories currently process corn into alcohol with the same fermentation technology used to make beer and beverage alcohol. Converting those factories to ferment corn into butanol would require costly modifications, estimated at $10 million-$15 million for a typical plant.
Wass and his group at the University of Bristol in the U.K. are reporting the discovery of a new family of catalysts that could enable those factories to continue