The New York Times recently reported on work at the University of Wisconsin in which a new method was developed to break down lignocellulose into sugars. A recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ronald T. Raines and Joseph B. Binder outlines a process which uses an ionic liquid combined with water and acid to decompose cellulose to sugars.
For a long time, cellulosic ethanol has been the holy grail of renewable fuel technology (recall former President Bush’s call for fuel from switchgrass in his 2006 State of the Union Address). Humans do not have the proper digestive equipment to consume cellulose (cows, on the other hand, have four stomachs and various other features that allow them to eat grass and other cellulosic foods). Thus, producing cellulosic ethanol could potentially bypass the food vs. fuel conflict that other biofuels (think corn ethanol and biodiesel from palm oil) have run into.
Current methods of breaking cellulose down to sugars requires the action of costly enzymes and as yet hasn’t been economically viable at large scales. Raines and Binder hope that their process, which produces sugar yields approaching those of enzymatic methods (nearly a 90% yield of glucose from cellulose), can be scaled up to convert non-food crops into ethanol. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to read Raines and Binder’s full article, but the one detail that caught my attention in the NYTimes article is the importance of water in the sugar producing process. Apparently, without water the ionic liquid can continue to react with sugars produced and further degrade them. I am curious how water intensive this process is and whether this will pose constraints when scaling the process up. I guess I’ll have to read the full article to find out!
Bottom Line: Cellulosic ethanol has promise as a sustainable energy source if only we can find an economic way to produce it. It looks like researchers at the University of Wisconsin have found a good contender.
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A Cellulosic Ethanol story to follow
The New York Times recently reported on work at the University of Wisconsin in which a new method was developed to break down lignocellulose into sugars. A recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ronald T. Raines and Joseph B. Binder outlines a process which uses an ionic liquid combined with water and acid to decompose cellulose to sugars.
For a long time, cellulosic ethanol has been the holy grail of renewable fuel technology (recall former President Bush’s call for fuel from switchgrass in his 2006 State of the Union Address). Humans do not have the proper digestive equipment to consume cellulose (cows, on the other hand, have four stomachs and various other features that allow them to eat grass and other cellulosic foods). Thus, producing cellulosic ethanol could potentially bypass the food vs. fuel conflict that other biofuels (think corn ethanol and biodiesel from palm oil) have run into.
Current methods of breaking cellulose down to sugars requires the action of costly enzymes and as yet hasn’t been economically viable at large scales. Raines and Binder hope that their process, which produces sugar yields approaching those of enzymatic methods (nearly a 90% yield of glucose from cellulose), can be scaled up to convert non-food crops into ethanol. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to read Raines and Binder’s full article, but the one detail that caught my attention in the NYTimes article is the importance of water in the sugar producing process. Apparently, without water the ionic liquid can continue to react with sugars produced and further degrade them. I am curious how water intensive this process is and whether this will pose constraints when scaling the process up. I guess I’ll have to read the full article to find out!
Bottom Line: Cellulosic ethanol has promise as a sustainable energy source if only we can find an economic way to produce it. It looks like researchers at the University of Wisconsin have found a good contender.