If you talk to winemakers, they will tell you that it is good practice to blend different types of grapes to get that balance in terms of flavors. Maybe a few years from now, this will also be true for biofuels that we will be using for our cars.
A study conducted by Joint BioEnergy Institute in collaboration with the Department Energy of the United States established that ionic liquids can be used to pre-treat individual or blend of feedstocks of biofuels.
The experiment yielded promising results, showing the ionic liquids can effectively handle milled feedstocks that have been turned into pellets. After treatment, the biofuel feedstocks can still yield a good amount of fermentable sugars. This only shows that blending and even densifying a variety of feedstocks has a good potential to make a biofuel technology for the transportation sector cost-competitive.
The proponents used a good variety of plants that can serve as fuel crops. The materials were mixed and then milled to pellets or floor then pretreated with an ionic liquid. The experiment aimed at determining the effect of mixing the feedstocks and densification of the blend on the biomass that yields fermentable sugars for production of biofuels.
The team is investigating methodsto up the energy densities of the biomass feedstocks in order to make delivery to transportation biofuel refineries more economical. The results of the experiment proves that biofuel feedstocks can be densified into pellets or flours without significant effects on their sugar yield.
The proponents used blends of lodgepole pine, eucalyptus, corn stover, and switchgrass to make pellets and flour then processed it within a day. The material still yielded about 90% in either forms upon saccharification.
The next step of the study will be to determine the most cost efficient blend of feedstock in pellet form in the United States and then determine the most efficient process to convert them to biofuels.
Turn straw into gold. Such stuff can only be see in fairy tales. Today, a group of scientist is trying to turn straw into consumable energy.
A group of experts at the Michigan State University has designed a new biofuel process that can produce about twenty times the energy of the processes that we know today. The study makes use of microbes to make hydrogen and biofuel from agricultural wastes.
When you look at a bigger production scale, a recent study points out, liquid fuels like diesel derived from crop residue may actually be competitive against the petroleum based fuels at the current levels of prices.
Scientists from the Technische Universitat Munchen headed by Dr. Johannes Lercher introduce a new catalytic process which paves for the effective conversion of microalgae oils to renewable diesel. Plant oils are viable raw materials for making biofuels. Microalgae in particular is an excellent feedstock resource as it has about 60 wt percent of high tryglycerides , grows up to two hundred times faster than other oil crops like rapeseed or soybean, and does not pose a food versus oil production conflict.
Pushed by the need to address concerns with regard to climate change, economics, and energy security, more than 30 governments across the globe have enacted laws to facilitate the faster production of biofuels and expansion of their infrastructure. The better production of biofuel will somehow lessen the use of fossil fuels especially by the transportation industry.
Researchers in Shanghai’s Fudan University were able to convert marine macroalgae that is among the main reasons for green tide to bio-oil.