Biofuel breakthroughs at the University of Georgia and Iowa State
By Susan Wilson
Biofuels, generally ethanol, are becoming more and more popular as an alternative to fossil fuel. The emissions are cleaner and the fuel is essentially “home grown” so little to no reliance on foreign oil interests. Unfortunately, the processes used to make ethanol from corn or other plant materials has been costly and inefficient. Developments at the University of Georgia and Iowa State should make ethanol production more efficient and cost effective.
Dr. Joy Peterson, professor of microbiology and chair of UGA’s Bioenergy Task Force, announced a new technology for breaking down inexpensive waste products including corn stover or bagasse, the waste from corn and sugar cane harvests, fast-growing weeds and non-food crops grown for biofuel, such as switchgrass, Napiergrass and Bermudagrass.
This is good news since all of these are non food crops and won’t add to the growing threat of food shortages. Corn has now become more valuable as an ethanol source than a food source. Since corn is in just about everything we eat or drink, food costs have gone up.
What exactly this new technology is, has not been divulged since Dr. Patterson, and her co-developers, former UGA microbiology student Sarah Kate Brandon, and Mark Eiteman, professor of biological and agricultural engineering, are applying for a patent. However, the following is known about this new process.
The new technology features a fast, mild, acid-free pretreatment process that increases by at least 10 times the amount of simple sugars released from inexpensive biomass for conversion to ethanol. The technology effectively eliminates the use of expensive and environmentally unsafe chemicals currently used to pretreat biomass.
Meanwhile, Iowa State has found that utilizing certain fungi during the dry grind process of ethanol production, improves and cleans up the process. Ethanol is actually made by grinding corn kernels(or other biomass). Then water and enzymes are added to break the starches into sugars, which are then fermented with yeast to make ethanol.
The ethanol actually has to be distilled to separate the usable biofuel from leftover solids and fluids. For every one gallon of ethanol, there are about 6 gallons of of these leftovers called stillage. Thin stillage is the unusable fluid that is left.
By adding Rhizopus microsporus, to thin stillage the fungus removes about 80 percent of the organic material and all of the solids in the stillage, allowing the water and enzymes to be recycled back into production. The fungus actually thrives during the process and can then be mixed in with the left over solids and sold for livestock feed.
Researchers Hans van Leeuwen, an Iowa State professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering and the leader of the research project; Anthony L PomettoIII, a professor of food science and human nutrition; Mary Rasmussen, a graduate student in environmental engineering and biorenewable resources and technology; and Samir Khanal, a former Iowa State research assistant professor who’s now an assistant professor of molecular biosciences and bioengineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa believe that the addition of fungi could reduce energy costs by one-third.
Reducing the energy needed to create ethanol, also lowers the final cost. Since more money can also be made from selling larger amounts of solid leftovers and fungi, the overall costs should be lowered, yet again.
These two developments together will go a long way toward making ethanol a more cost effective fuel to produce as well as reducing our dependency on foreign oil sources.
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