Plant Scraps Can Be Turned into Biofuel

In a groundbreaking achievement, experts at the Colorado-based company Gevo managed to develop a new technique of transforming plant scraps and waste into butanol. This compound is heralded as an alternative to conventional, fossil fuel-derived products such as gasoline, and the new achievement is therefore extremely important for the field of alternative energy production. The most important thing is that the compound, which has around 30 percent more energy than similar biofuels such as ethanol, can be produced from plants alone, an achievement that eliminates the need for oil extraction.

With only slight tweaks, experts at Gevo are capable of modifying the the butanol into a fairly efficient jet fuel. But the method they use to obtain the chemical is what's really interesting. The team managed to genetically engineer a yeast capable of breaking down cellulose, while producing butanol. Wood chips and plant stalks all contain cellulose, and so future factories relying on the new production method will not need to cut down trees in order to produce the chemical compound. Instead, such facilities could work using paper headed for recycling, or old furniture pieces.

“Cellulose is the biggest source of sugars on the planet. The difficulty is, it's harder to get at that cellulose and get at those sugars than it is to get the sugars from corn kernels,” says the director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's National Bioenergy Center (NBC), Mike Cleary. Even the human body, with all of its adaptations to the environment, and to an omnivorous diet, cannot break down cellulose without assistance from bacteria in the gut. But, despite all this, cellulose is a lot more abundant than other starch-based sugar sources, which is why the Gevo crew turned to plant residues.

“We wanted to fundamentally change the way biofuels were made and the sort of biofuels we could make. We wanted to develop a drop-in biofuel – something that you could use directly without having to change the gasoline supply and the gasoline infrastructure,” says the co-founder and director of research at Gevo, Peter Meinhold, quoted by Technology Review. But the company is not alone in the race for developing new fuel sources. Corporations such as DuPont, LS9 and BP are also involved in similar research.