New butanol research centre opens in Scotland

Officially launched in December, the catchily-titled Biofuels Research Centre (BfRC) was established to “find sustainable alternatives to fossil fuel-based energy.” (Now there’s an idea…)

It’s not quite as vague as it sounds, though. In an exclusive interview with MindsinMotion.net, the director of the centre, Dr. Martin Tangney, explained that one of the key research areas for the BfRC is butanol. More specifically, bio-butanol produced from the clostridium bacteria, which grows on biological waste.

Far superior
Said Dr. Tangney: “until the middle of the 20th century, butanol was widely produced across Europe and America, but over the past fifty years production has largely ceased because it couldn’t compete with the petro-chemical industry.”

“But butanol is, in fact, a far superior biofuel to ethanol. In 2005, a chap drove his car right across the United States, fuelled by nothing but commercial butanol, in an unconverted engine. You can blend it as well. You can blend it with diesel, which you can’t do with ethanol. It’s an alcohol like ethanol, but it’s a higher carbon alcohol – it has four carbons rather than two – so it has inherently more energy, and it’s more stable. It is also easier to store than ethanol, you can pipe it, you can blend it with existing fuels and you can use it at 100%.”

From local waste to national supply
Tangney and his team will be researching how to produce butanol from biological waste, using a clostridium-based fermentation process. The types of waste he has in mind are industrial biological waste, such as whey from cheese production or molasses from sugar refineries, as well as agricultural waste.

He also sees butanol as an ideal biofuel for producing locally, varying the production process according to the type of waste that is available in a particular locality.

“You could compare it to the brewing industry,” he says. “You have everything from people brewing their own beer in their shed, local breweries serving a particular community, to huge industrial breweries producing millions of litres. And you’ve got everything in between. So butanol production might operate at a local level, using local waste sources, but on the other hand, it could reach the scale where a single operation might provide a national supply of bio-fuel. We don’t know until we continue all the research.”