Alternative car fuel mixtures have been talked about for years. Many gas stations in the US incorporate ethanol into their blends, all the way to fuel made from human and animal “poop”. More recently, there’s been biofuel made from recycled McDonald’s fast food cooking oils which flew their UAE fleet vehicles more than 800,000 miles!

Now methanol biofuels, made from natural gas and mixed with unleaded gasoline, are the subject of a test project being conducted in Israel by Dor Chemicals and Ten Petroleum at one of their gas stations in Haifa.

The fuel mixture contains 15% methanol, a simple form of alcohol and derived from liquified natural gas. According to Dor Chemical chemical engineers, methanol burns cleaner than ordinary gasoline and is also cheaper to produce.

In the cooperative agreement, with Ten Petroleum 10, ordinary cars of various types are being given the fuel mixture in order to determine how the engines will perform on the mixture, as opposed to gasoline. As part of the project, no adjustments or modifications have been made to the car engines. Another 3 cars will act as control vehicles and will run on ordinary gasoline.

Dani Ben-Ner, CEO of Ten Petroleum, says that if this initial test project is successful he will be happy to participate in a large test of 500 or more cars. “In the second stage of the pilot project, we will introduce methanol at all our gas stations. First in relatively low levels of 15 percent; but I believe that in the future also at  higher levels,” he told the local Haaretz newspaper.

He believes that including 15 percent methanol in a mix with gasoline could save Israel $3.95 billion USD in imported oil and refined petroleum products, and save some $1.85 Billion in spending on gasoline. Cost savings to consumers are estimated to be from 5 to 7 percent over ordinary fuels. Now that Israel has a glut of natural gas, this could be a welcome move in the energy industry.

The only drawback is whether the methanol, which does not burn as efficiently as gasoline, will cause any form of long term damage to car engines. Scientists involved in the project estimate it will take several months to determine if burning this new fuel mixture will not cause undue engine wear due to having a lower energy output.

Biofuel mixtures known as “flex fuel” which contain ethanol and made from grain and sugars are already being used in countries like Brazil and the US. These fuels, which come from plants that derive energy from the sun via photosynthesis have been criticized by scientists like Hartmut Michel, who won a Nobel Prize in 1988 for his work on energy derived from photosynthesis in plants.

Despite this issue and due to the large amounts of natural gas reserves discovered in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel’s use of natural gas, either as methanol or liquified natural gas appears to be an excellent way to help provide that country’s energy needs with enough natural gas to burn for up to 150 years.

::Haaretz.com

More articles on biofuels and natural gas:
McDonald’s Fleet Traveled 800,000 Miles on Recycled Biofuel
Israel’s Natural Gas Good to Burn for 150 Years if Handled Wisely
Biofuel From Plastic for This Young Egyptian Scientist from Alexandria
5 Brilliant Projects that Turn Poop into Power

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Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad was the winner of the 2011 European Union Contest for Young Scientists for finding a new way of turning plastic into biofuel.

A sixteen-year-old Egyptian student, Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad from the Zahran Language School in Alexandria has identified a new low-cost catalyst which can generate biofuel by breaking down plastic waste.

The idea of breaking down plastic polymers into fuel feedstocks, the bulk raw material used for producing biofuel , is not a new idea. But Faiad has found a high yield catalyst, aluminosilicate catalyst, that breaks down plastic waste producing gaseous products like methane, propane and ethane, which are then converted into ethanol to use as biofuel.

Faiad and her mentors propose using this discovery to exploit Egypt’s high plastic consumption, which is estimated to amount to one million tons per year, and make money from recycled plastic! She calculates that this technology “can provide an economically efficient method for production of hydrocarbon fuel namely: cracked naphtha of about 40,000 tons per year and hydrocarbon gases of about 138,000 tons per year equivalent to $78 million.”

As we know plastic waste is a huge problem in the Middle East and for our oceans, but hopefully this idea will help convert the problem into a solution.

For her findings, Faiad was presented with the European Fusion Development Agreement award at the 23rd European Union Contest for Young Scientists — involving 130 competitors from 37 countries — held in Finland last year from 23t o 28 September.

Faiad  is now looking to get her findings patented this year through the Egyptian Patent Office and scaling up the idea so that it can become a tangible project on the ground.

She has already garnered interests from the Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute.

Out of the six projects in the environmental section of the contest, three came from Egypt.

Digesting paper with termites?

Aside from Faiad, two other young Egyptian scientists Hassan Ahmed and Yomna Yasser Mohamed, proposed interesting solutions to environmental issues. Hassan Ahmed  looked at managing  paper product waste through termite digestion; the paper is digested by the termites which then enrich the soil with potassium, phosphor and nitrogen  and can be used as fertilizers, the termites also  produce  hydrogen which can be used as a renewable source of energy.

Jatropha plants for biofuel

Yasser Mohamed’s project instead looked at producing a clean and green source of energy that could be manufactured locally in poor rural areas in Egypt. The project selected a plant which is not linked to the food chain , the jatropha plant, to investigate whether it’s oil, methanol, and KOH, which are blended to make bio-diesel, could be produced using different parts of the plant.

Will young Egyptian scientists continue to be at the forefront of environmental solutions? Let’s hope so.

Image via European Commission Research; Image of jatropha plant from Shutterstock

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Processors have made ethanol from cornstarch and sugar for decades, but using food products to make biofuel raises demand for staple commodities like corn and seed oils with disastrous impact to the food chain.

So let’s try again, back things up a step. Start with cellulose, not sugar. Add some enzymes that convert the cellulose into sugar. Next ferment the sugar into alcohol. Then distill the alcohol into fuel. Four simple steps and we’re juicing our cars with sawdust and coconut shells instead of Middle East oil.  Scientists know how to turn plants into fuel, but doing it profitably is another thing: Cellulose is the problem.

Found in the walls of plant cells, cellulose is the most abundant naturally occurring organic molecule on the planet. These tough fibers, indigestible to humans,  protect plants from predators.  And they’re hard to break down.

Some animals have evolved elegant ways to do the chemistry. Cow, camel and goat guts host microbes which produce cellulose-chomping enzymes to get the job done.  Called cellulase, these enzymes can be lab-produced, but they aren’t cheap: processors often rely on government subsidies to offset costs. For an academic researcher, trying to convert cellulose into fuel, in a lab, on a budget, hasn’t been easy.

It’s all happening at the zoo.

Maybe professor of microbiology, Dr. David A. Mullin is a Simon & Garfunkel fan, or it’s simply serendipitous that his Tulane University lab is near New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo.

His exploration to discover a microbe that could produce a biofuel straight from cellulose began inside the animal cages.  Braving odors and muck, he and his grad students collected manure from all sorts of exotic vegetarians. Then the  team cultured 40 different bacteria colonies from the Audubon droppings.  When fed cellulose, over a dozen of these strains made butanol. Holy cow!

Butanol, with four carbon atoms, has twice the kick of ethanol and only slightly less energy-potential than gasoline. It can be used straight-up (needs no blending with traditional fossil fuels), and can be transported via existing oil/gas infrastructure (tanker trucks, ships and pipelines).

Due to these commercially-friendly characteristics, this class of biofuel holds potential to lead the pack of alternative fuels.

Mullin’s team experimented to find butanol-producing strains that could work in open air (not in vacuum-sealed animal bellies) and at temperatures easily replicated in a lab.

Bacteria from African Zebra droppings earned their stripes by hitting all the targets. His tests now focus on TU-103, the name of the magical zebra-poop microbe.  Experiments combine TU-103 with a variety of high-fiber meals, and measure chemical output.  Mullin has demonstrated that, in addition to butanol, TU-103 converts cellulose into acetone and hydrogen (both with commercial value) and carbon dioxide.

OK, so not completely net-zero, but very close. The team is now working to minimize the time for fermentation and demonstrate that the enzyme can consistently convert an array of biomass waste feedstock.

Environmental push-back against biofuel targets competition with food sources; stresses on water supply; and negative impact to biodiversity since it encourages farmers to dedicate large tracts of  arable land to single-crop production.

“We don’t want to create new monocultures,” said Sheila Karpf,  policy analyst for the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington.

Biofuels created from industrial and agricultural bio-waste neatly sidesteps these issues: this Green Prophet advises.

Image via loveisnotabvictorymarch

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It’s not every day that an Israeli company based on the science of a Nazi collaborator wins a huge US contract. But HCL Clean Tech, which offers a process to turn wood chips into biofuel, just received a $100 million bond package from the Mississippi state legislature to build plants in Grenada, Booneville, Hattiesburg and Natchez for products in the cosmetics, pet food, and lubricants industries.

The plants will take wood chips from region, where there is a surplus of pine trees, and begin processing them in 2012 in Grenada. Three bigger plants will be opened in 2015, 2017 and 2019, according to the deal. Most of the funding will go toward building the facilities, while $5 million is earmarked for infrastructure and training.

The new project is expected to create about 800 new jobs, with the average salary not too shabby at $67,500 plus benefits. Backers of the bill, which was approved almost unanimously, believe these jobs — some 200 new positions in Natchez alone — will be readily filled by locals.

Behind all of this is the father-son team of 93-year-old chemist Prof. Avraham Baniel and businessman Eran Baniel. The father arrived in Israel with his family before World War II. HCL Clean Tech was founded in 2007, basing its technology on experiments by accused Nazi collaborator Friedrich Bergius, who shared the 1931 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Carl Bosch for innovating a process for producing synthetic fuel from coal. The goal was to make biofuel from wood chips for military vehicles, but the process had several flaws.

This was the starting point for Avraham, who’d heard about the problems of using food sugars as a feedstock for biofuel. Sources like corn and sugarcane are highly volatile in the market, and they also compete for food sources.

When age is an advantage

Having more than a few decades up on other entrepreneurs has its advantages, Eran tells ISRAEL21c.

“The idea came from a ‘young’ startup guy now aged 93, who happens to be my father,” says Eran. “He is one of the forefathers of Israel’s industrial chemical research. And he remembered that there was a German process [for] taking wood chips and hydrolyzing them to sugars and making ethanol from them.”

Thinking he could solve the problems of the earlier attempt, he asked his son to rent a lab so new trials could be carried out. But first he had to find a source of low-cost cellulosic sugars, the most common basis for biofuels and bio-products, says Eran. The answer was wood chips and wood waste.

Using unique extraction and separation methods aided by the powerful chemical hydrochloric acid, Avraham was indeed successful in coaxing sugars from the tough cellulose material made by trees, without breaking the chemical bonds of the sugar.

It’s pure chemistry

Eran explains that the process of extracting valuables from the wood is “pure chemistry.” The separated sugar “comes out clean from the [concentrated hydrochloric] acid. It is usable for customers at the lowest possible cost and best quality.”

The company’s leaders aim to build production facilities around the world, and while they have started with wood, they can use the same process for extracting sugar from any kind of cellulose material — even bagasse, a waste material from sugarcane stalks.

The company now has a staff of 27, with research and development mostly concentrated in Herzliya, and a pilot site demonstrating the technology in Durham, North Carolina. About to announce a fourth major investment round, bigger than the total sum of the $15.5 million raised to date, HCL has support from Khosla Ventures and a $9 million grant from the US Department of Energy on top of the Mississippi deal.

Eran explains that the Department of Energy grant is focused on the “wood basket” in the southern United States, where wood used to be processed for paper. “Paper is not so popular anymore, and so the wood and forestry industry in the States is struggling. The paper guys extracted value from wood and that’s what we are doing in another way,” Eran concludes.

This story was first printed on ISRAEL21c – www.israel21c.org

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