From the “yes, but does it clog your carburetor?” department comes this claim, which might work in theory, but may or may not be practical on a large scale.
Researchers at KU Leuven’s Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis have successfully converted sawdust into building blocks for gasoline. Using a new chemical process, they were able to convert the cellulose in sawdust into hydrocarbon chains. These hydrocarbons can be used as an additive in gasoline, or as a component in plastics. The researchers reported their findings in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Cellulose is the main substance in plant matter and is present in all non-edible plant parts of wood, straw, grass, cotton and old paper. “At the molecular level, cellulose contains strong carbon chains. We sought to conserve these chains, but drop the oxygen bonded to them, which is undesirable in high-grade gasoline. Our researcher Beau Op de Beeck developed a new method to derive these hydrocarbon chains from cellulose,” explains Professor Bert Sels.
“This is a new type of bio-refining, and we currently have a patent pending for it. We have also built a chemical reactor in our lab: we feed sawdust collected from a sawmill into the reactor and add a catalyst – a substance that sets off and speeds the chemical reaction. With the right temperature and pressure, it takes about half a day to convert the cellulose in the wood shavings into saturated hydrocarbon chains, or alkanes,” says Dr. Bert Lagrain.
“Essentially, the method allows us to make a ‘petrochemical’ product using biomass – thus bridging the worlds of bio-economics and petro chemistry,” he adds.
The result is an intermediary product that requires one last simple step to become fully-distilled gasoline, explains Sels. “Our product offers an intermediate solution for as long as our automobiles run on liquid gasoline. It can be used as a green additive – a replacement for a portion of traditionally-refined gasoline.”
But the possible applications go beyond gasoline: “The green hydrocarbon can also be used in the production of ethylene, propylene and benzene – the building blocks for plastic, rubber, insulation foam, nylon, coatings and so forth.”
“From an economic standpoint, cellulose has much potential,” says Sels. “Cellulose is available everywhere; it is essentially plant waste, meaning it does not compete with food crops in the way that first generation energy crops – crops grown for bioethanol, for example – do. It also produces chains of 5 to 6 hydrocarbon atoms – ‘light nafta’ in the technical jargon. We are currently facing shortages in this because it is becoming quite difficult and more expensive to distil these specific hydrocarbon chains from crude oil or shale gas. In time, hydrocarbon derived from cellulose may provide an alternative,” says Sels.
“Our method could be especially useful in Europe, where we have little crude oil and cannot easily produce shale gas,” concluded Sels.
AW The South Americans have coped onto the scam unfortunately its in Spanish (Chilean TV)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1abhBYIFTn0 Finally!!! For you latinos LOL
If it can be made to work as an upscaled industrial process, it could be a significant step forward, and if the process could be used worldwide. I shan’t be holding my breath waiting for it to work, however.
They didn’t talk about cost.
Greens are willing to pay the price – no price is too high when You pay it – but they would not give up the trees, let alone make sawdust from them.
No, they did not mention cost. We can turn coal into diesel fuel but not at costs competitive with petroleum stocks. I will wager that gasoline from cellulose is a big loser in an economic sense.
Sadly, that is always the case. Many of the processes touted by the greens require more energy input than can be obtained from the final product.
… or more importantly how much energy has to be added via heat and pressure in the reaction vessel and how much energy is required to create the catalyst. Then add all the energy required for the catalytic reforming to take light naphtha to gasoline. I’m gonna guess that the amount of sawdust we would have to burn to get all that energy shoved into some more of that sawdust is going to be fairly massive. That’s the problem with trying to reproduce a process driven by the planet’s tectonic heat and pressure… you need a LOT of energy.
This is not “new” technology, it’s just a way to distract from the failure of “cellulosic ethanol.”
One more perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind. Human beings do seem to have a serious weakness for these things.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Perpetual_Motion_by_Norman_Rockwell.jpg
Exothermic? Or endothermic?
Cost of equipment. Amount produced. Rate produced. Life/maintenance of equipment. Potential/limitations of/to improvement.
Lot of die rolls in there. But you never know.
They never do. if they did, the useful idiots would catch on. They’re gullible, but not that gullible.
@Hugh They will give up the trees – just look at the green’s advocay of biofuels which has resulted in massive deforestaation in the Amazon. Look at their support for wind turbines despite being lethal to birds and exploding( imploding ) bats by the thousand.
or the energy required to produce it?
sawdust is best used for horse stables etc then to feed worms and/or produce compost surely?
Actually, the technology’s been around for at least a dozen years. The problem has always been cost. I can’t see how this “new” process solves that very real problem.
Weren’t they desperately making fuel for kamakaze aircraft from pine trees in Japan in 1945? My dad said when one buzzed his ship at Okinawa it smelled like Pine-Sol. 😉
Germany made “synthetic fuel” in WW-II, see the film “The Formula”. Was that gasoline?
Yes; they made it from coal. It was not cheap to make but in wartime the end product is more important. I believe that the South Africans were also dabbling with coal based fuel fairly recently; however the price of oil ultimately determines how cost-effective the process is.
RSA has had a very successful ‘synthetic fuel’ industry for decades … Google SASOL.
The Japanese did make a motor fuel out of pine resin. The very first engine that Honda ever marketed was made to run on the stuff.
A fellow up here in New Hampshire has a pickup truck that runs on firewood. Basically it has a wood stove in the back, and creates hot, un-burned smoke which is fed in to the pistons and lit by the spark plugs. It seems to run fine, and I’ve driven behind it and seen it accelerate up hill, and it doesn’t belch large amounts of smoke. It is the fellow’s toy, and likely illegal in some way, but no one bothers him because he never takes it out on the major highways.
Since they do not mention cost, I’m going to go ahead and assume the cost is entirely impractical.
Why not just burn it directly?
I agree. It could be fed with coal into coal fired boilers!!
Ian,
It is hard to drive my car very far on the output of that coal/sawdust powered electrical generation station.
However, I could see burning the sawdust to create the temperature and pressure required in the reaction vessel. As long as there was a greater surplus of sawdust than could be economically turned into presswood and other glued wood products, this could work. I just have my doubts and will need to see it in economic production to be impressed.
Boilers can be modified to run on sawdust. Home furnaces can run on compressed sawdust pellets.
Robert says:
Why not just burn it directly?
Don’t be silly. Where is the grant money in that?
Robert of Ottawa November 25, 2014 at 3:29 pm
Why not just burn it directly?
______________________________
We are.
Drax is a UK 4 gw power station that will soon be burning wood. And all the wood is coming from America. So if you are wondering where your local forest has gone – sorry, mate, we have just burned it all.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2581887/The-bonfire-insanity-Woodland-shipped-3-800-miles-burned-Drax-power-station-It-belches-CO2-coal-huge-cost-YOU-pay-cleaner-greener-Britain.html
So Drax the power station:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_power_station
Has become Drax the destroyer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_the_Destroyer
Ralph
How many times does this scam have to be put down.
I don’t care if they have found a way to do what they say. The economic collection area for wood waste is at best a 50 mile radius per unit of energy produced, significantly limiting any scale of operation and hence product cost. They also make no mention of the energy required to dry the wood before processing, it is no small part of the energy cycle at up to 25% of the mass of the wood, whatever form it is in.
Rick:
Sorry, but no, The process reported in the above article cannot be “a significant step forward”.
Synthetic crude oil (syncrude) from biomass is not new. For decades pyrolysis has been used to do it. The above article reports a new catalyst for syncrude from biomass but says nothing about efficiency and economics. And, importantly, there is no need for syncrude from biomass.
Syncrude has been made from coal whenever the supply of crude has been constrained. The Germans did it during WW2 (which is why we bombed the Ruhr valley) and apartheid South Africa used Sasol which was a development of that German process.
However, prior to the Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) it was always more costly to mine, transport and convert coal to syncrude than to drill and transport crude. LSE reversed those relative costs.
The Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process has been capable of producing synthetic crude oil (i.e. syncrude) from coal at competitive cost (n.b. cost and not price) with crude oil since 1994. And there is sufficient coal to meet world needs for at least 300 years (some estimates say more than 1000 years),.
We proved the technical and economic abilities of the LSE process with a demonstration plant at Point Of Ayr in North Wales.
The surprising economics of LSE derive from two facts.
1.
LSE consumes sulphur-rich bottoms which have disposal cost for oil refineries.
2.
LSE can be ‘tuned’ to provide hydrocarbons which reduce need for blending.
An oil refinery separates the components of crude oil by distilling the crude. The separated components are products which must match market demand; e.g. producing the required amount of benzene must not result in producing too much or too little petroleum. This match of products to market demand is obtained by blending (i.e. mixing) different crude oils for distillation: crudes from different places contain different proportions of hydrocarbons.
Blending is expensive. It requires a variety of crudes to be transported and stored then mixed in controlled ratios.
This need for blending is why Brent Crude is so valuable. Saudi crude is the cheapest crude, and blending Saudi and Brent crudes in a ratio of about 2:1 provides a blend that nearly matches market demand for its distillates.
The LSE process can be ‘tuned’ such that it outputs a syncrude which can provide distillates which match market demand and, thus, removes the need for expensive blending. This is achieved as follows.
(a)
An LSE plant dissolves coal in a solvent in an ebulating bed at controlled temperature and pressure.
(b)
The resulting solution is converted to hydrocarbons by exposure to hydrogen gas (produced by coal using a water-gas shift) in the presence of catalysts and at variable temperature and pressure. Adjusting the temperature and pressure determines the resulting proportions of hydrocarbons.
(c)
Changing the temperature and pressure causes the hydrocarbons to come out of solution and the solvent is separated then reused in the process.
(d)
The remaining solids (mostly ash minerals) are removed by filtration as a cake.
Conversion efficiency is greater than 98%. And the not-converted residue can be burned as a fuel.
The UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE) invented, developed and demonstrated the LSE process. CRE was owned by British Coal which was owned by UK government. Ownership of the LSE Process remained with the government when British Coal was closed in 1995.
The LSE Process is owned by UK Government. Patents on the process were taken out but details of the process are a UK State Secret. Adoption of the LSE Process would collapse the value of Brent Crude, and the sale of Brent Crude is important income for the UK.
But, the existence of the LSE Process constrains the true price of crude oil. If that price were to rise sufficiently then it would pay the UK to adopt the LSE Process or to license it to other countries for production of syncrude. Hence, the existence of the LSE process has a strategic value as a result of its constraint on the true oil price.
And the UK may adopt the LSE Process when Brent Crude is exhausted.
However, frack-gas may remove need to adopt the LSE Process for use although its strategic constraint on oil price will remain.
Richard
Richard,
Great to see you back! I was getting concerned. Your comments are always extremely knowledgeable; a real asset to this site. Hope to see more of them.
dbstealey
Thankyou for your comment.
Unfortunately, my health has failed (lungs, heart and liver all failed) and my time is mostly consumed with medical treatments. Also, and importantly, my heart failure requires that I don’t get too emotionally disturbed so I need to avoid interactions with trolls who e.g. accuse me of being a naz1 and/or a communist.
Hence, I now prefer to lurk, but I will make contributions as and when issues may benefit from my provision of information and comment which are based on my past works so today I have contributed to this thread and the Mann thread.
Richard
MODS: Is it possible to request special moderation on medical grounds?
Not saying that he shouldn’t be confronted on political issues if that is what is being talked about but… special moderation for out of the blue slams over political differences – is that possible?
I know it is a lot to ask for a commenter who has himself been banned occasionally but then again, haven’t we all?
This has not been discussed with richardscourtney but I have a personal interest in his not having another heart failure in the immediate future.
[Reply: Yes, of course. We have a no-censorship policy, but in this case any attacks will be deleted. ~ mod.]
If memeory serves, it’s still being made in New Zealand.
Richard, I hope you are as well as possible. Reading your post, if you don’t mind, with your rather broad system wide failures, do you suffer from hemochromatosis? Very common in Anglo-Saxons due to having to evolved on iron poor diets.
I have always looked forward to your contributions and comments. It takes awhile to learn who to trust/rely on in an open forum but over all these years you have earned my respect.
I wish you the best.
BTW, thanks for the interesting comment / knowledge. It led me on a hour long search and learn on water-gas shift and related processes.
I second, or third or fourth etc, the appreciation of your comments.
Thinking of you Richard – I am very sorry to hear of your health problems.
I have always had the highest regard for your intellect and your ethics, and can only hope and pray that your health improves.
Best wishes, your friend Allan
It has been a process used years ago, heat wood to just above ignition point and burn cool and the vapour can be used in a diesel engine. But it is a poor substitute for the real thing, very inefficient. To produce useful fuel direct from wood would literally ”cost the earth”. So a green dream to be left on the shelf.
Naphtha, maybe instead of nafta?
Nafta in Dutch and many European languages besides English (but with different meanings: diesel or even crude oil in some Slavic languages)…
possibly due to the inability(?) to pronounce the TH sound in naptha.
Indeed, the English “th” doesn’t exist in many languages (maybe except in Icelandic?). Tong breaker in the first English lessons (and still difficult for non-natives)…
Yes, my daughter’s “English” teacher here in Belgium cant even say “th”.
They use “z” or “t” instead.
Nobody tell the brilliant social planners who have pushed ethanol in automotive fuel for years.
Well I thought it was carbon that was the bad molecule in CO2 , not oxygen.
You forgot your /sarc.
The fewer oxygen atoms in the chain, the greater the number of reaction points to cause all those exothermic oxygen bonds we all depend on so much.
“Our method could be especially useful in Europe, where we have little crude oil and cannot easily produce shale gas,”
last time I checked you don’t have alot of excess biomass either … can’t use people, they are only good for green food, Soylent green that is …
Raises the question of whether this method can also use unicorn farts and good intentions as feedstock.
Assuming you have centaur tail hair and dragon scales for the catalytic screen and vessel linings it should work fine.
You don’t want to burn this stuff in a carbureted engine without adding plenty eye of newt!
Spot on, JeffC, Europe is already destroying American forests in order to get enough “carbon neutral” wood supply to coal power plants…
That´s an old hat. Several other companies are offering similar technology on commercial scale, i.e. CRI ( a Shell company) and Proton, both from US.
Article is presented as a “Claim”, but it’s quite well known. In general, it’s just replicating how the earth creates oil, but speeding it up by quite a lot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/business/energy-environment/alternative-fuels-long-delayed-promise-might-be-near-fruition.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/09/140911-project-liberty-cellulosic-ethanol-us-test/
In the UK they can’t make biomass work without massive subsidies, so I don’t suppose this’ll be any better.
OK, I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, but isn’t it possible to turn almost anything organic into a fuel if you torture it enough?
or apply enough grant money. “enough” is defined as a bit more than what you already have.
Yes. Most basic is just burn it in an O2 deprived environment to make “Synthesis Gas”, then proceed to make any chemical you want, including gasoline or Diesel…
It was how the Nazis fueld their war machine without any petroleum. Mostly converted coal to everything they needed.
(paper) money is mostly organic.
The last car with a carburetor was built like 40 years ago, so that’s a ‘no’ on that one 😉
Um, my old ’86 Honda Civic had a carb. I make that 28 years… and I’m not sure it was the last… I think you are off a decade or two…
Not to mention that many cars from the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s 60’s 70’s 80’s & 90’s that were designed with carburation are still on the road today with fully functional carburetors. Can’t force modification through obsolescence where a persons’ classic automobile is concerned.
My 1976 Porsche is fuel injected.
My 1988 Honda Accord had a carburetor.
My 76 Jeep Cherokee has a four barrel 🙂
I have a twenty years old original Leyland Mini Cooper with a carb. And I’m sure that in development countries still the carb is used – they have special editions for that purpose. I have been in Africa 8-15 years ago and never saw an injection engine…
As usual, the main problems are:
1. The fuel efficiency: how much energy does it cost to transform the cellulose into fuel
2. the availability of cellulose: although much better, as it is in general wasted, than for corn or palm oil, the question is how much area one need for one liter of gas or diesel…
Ferdinand is right. Is this process endothermic or exothermic? If it requires more energy to produce than Eout, it makes no sense. Same as windmills and other such eco-nonsense.
This is not new. It’s just hydrolysis followed by hydrogenation.
Let’s see – you start with wood, subject it to high temperature and pressure, add hydrogen, a ruthenium catalyst, and after HALF A DAY in a lab pot, you get alkanes and some char! Sounds complicated, expensive, and probably net energy consuming.
Or you could just burn the wood and use the energy produced to: heat water, make steam, convert to electricity, etc. Oh, I forget, scrub the exhaust to eliminate the sulfur.
You also forgot about capturing and sequestering the CO2.
“…capturing and sequestering the CO2.”
Or you could harvest the CO2 and release it into the place where the wood grows, increasing the growth rate of the trees. Sounds like a sawmill with co-gen, no?
Paul I love it… “Sawmill with co-gen” +10
That would get my comment of the week vote if it hadn’t been for yesterday’s William R comment naming NOAA’s new hurricane predicting model “Blind Squirrel.”
Just what I thought. Here in Germany we have a big market for saw dust products – wood pellets for example or wood brickets; they are sold at a price higher than lignite brickets – and turning most of their energy into building heating. Process energy is very little (some pressure) and the economy is high. Better to use sawdust this way and save the energy for valuable petrol products – as gasoline. Except you have excess atomic power – or solar….?
I don’t remember writing this. 🙂
You are not the only Bill W in the world.
But then how do I drive my car from Atlanta to St.Louis? Unless I have a steam powered car with a very large trailer to carry all this biomass to burn, I need gasoline or something with a similar energy density and portability to get me around. Batteries only work on short daily commutes.
I still doubt the practicality of this and will continue to doubt until I see the refinery making this stuff at a non-subsidized profit. ( I am not holding my breath!)
“…it is becoming quite difficult and more expensive to distil these specific hydrocarbon chains from crude oil or shale gas.”
Since Naphtha is obtained in petroleum refineries as one of the intermediate products from the distillation of crude oil, this is a curious statement. Why is it “becoming quite difficult” to distill these hydrocarbon chains from crude oil? What has changed? Does the process use some kind of rare-earth catalyst that is becoming more difficult to obtain? Or is there another reason why the distillation process is “becoming” more difficult?
Ummm… I’m going with several thousand destructive new EPA and DoE regulations… n’est-ce pas?
Likely due to the increasing scarcity of “light” crude which already contains a high proportion of short chain “low boilers”. With long chain “heavy” crude, you have to crack it first to get the short chains. More capital + more labor = higher cost.
Maybe they think the world wide crude mix is getting heavier? If we exclude all the condensates and the light oils from fracked wells….
Reviewing the abstract, the process (patented) requires H2 gas as a second input into the feedstock (which comes from where?). The catalyst is tungstosilicic acid, (dissolved in the aqueous phase), which is not cheap. Commercial sources look to be around $500USD/Kg. Of course then the reactor vessel has to heated with some available energy source.
Don’t look to be driving cellulosic petrol from this method until nearly all the world’s oil reserves are consumed.
Here are the Mexicanos (Physicist) debunking AGW
This is important because nornally developing world countries are real believers in AGW. I hope your latinos viewers can see this LOL
Most original material on CAGW is in English. The papers here in Latin America subscribe to syndicated news sources with sources translated from English. That is all that people see (read). The other side of the story (Denialist, science-based) is never seen nor heard. But mostly, people are more concerned with cost, and are not terribly interested in Warmista ideology when they realize the costs involved.
No sub-titles?
As pointed out cost and supply are the factors. Why bother when a catalyst procedure can be used with natural gas at about $1 per gallon claimed:
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Natural-gas-to-1-gasoline-5701521.php
Alternatively of course they could just use the trees that grew during the Carboniferous period and have already been subject to heat and pressure. They call the product ‘ coal ‘and prices at the moment in the USA are at a low.
Oh Great!… now the price of sawdust for my horses will go through the roof!
It’s bad enough that hay is $6 a bale.
Lucky you. It is around $17 a bale in my area.
Ouch! for 50# squares or big squares?
In rural Bavaria/Germany, living in the neighborhood of a sawmill, a 1000 liter bag of sawdust is 3€.
Why go through the patent process for something that is never going to fly.
Because the Democrats will force people to use the damned stuff, and their green friends will get rich. Richer.
Another horrible idea. If one wants to manufacture fuels, build lots of thorium reactors and use the electricity generated during non-peak hours. The Chinese are, as you read this, have plants to manufacture fuels plus prototyping thorium reactors. Sawdust and wood products are best used as they are now.
Anyone can claim “patent pending” by just filing an application.
[Snip. Sorry, it’s OTT – Mod]
That`s the end of Ikea then.
Good one, Robuk!!
Why not just feed the sawdust to termites and collect the methane?
Or smash the sawdust into pellets for fuel.
😀
How about putting any of the remainder of the sawdust into the transmission.
Folks, we have some very promising green tech here – no need to grope around any further.
Wow! A good use for that sawdust instead of dumping it in landfills. Oh… wait! They dont do that, do they.
No matter what, NO ONE dumps sawdust in a landfill or in the ocean. they make other stuff with it.
>> There is NO SUCH thing as ‘wood processing waste’ just as the bottom level use for ‘Agricultural Waste’ is ‘Soil Conditioner’
Its why the whole Hemp idea never took off. There is so much waste already from the industry
Shall we use the coal to mulch the roses then?
http://media.tumblr.com/bebede16455c47809f62148f4880b32e/tumblr_inline_mkdtcrTOTU1qz4rgp.jpg
Shall we skip the chickens and eggs and just eat the bugs?
Shall we use 10,000 acres for one worthless wind turbine project, and campaign against farms with more than 1,000 acres and 1,000 head of cattle?